ravi wrote:
>
> At around 2/12/05 1:01 am, Travis Fast wrote:
> >>
> >> Then we have C. bodi repeatedly using the word gender in a way only he
> >> does. Yoshie explained to him how gender has come to be used:
> >> simplistically, to indicate man and woman, not male/female.
> >>
>
> I think I suffer from the same usage tendency as C. bodi. I like the
> word "gender" to indicate, well, gender, and not the word "sex", and
> that's hopefully not just because I am a prude.
>
Your preference simply won't work in practice -- it cuts you off from reading a huge body of feminist literature, where the distinction is simply taken for granted. Your preference tends towards the Humpty-Dumpty theory of language. (A word means what I want to mean.) There is a good discussion of this, if I'm remembering correctly, in Donald Davies, _Articulate Energy_.
Carrol