[lbo-talk] please select a gender

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Apr 30 18:26:20 PDT 2010


At 08:46 PM 4/30/2010, Doug Henwood wrote:


>On Apr 30, 2010, at 7:55 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>>I think it's that are just using a term that was always used.
>>Feminists introduced gender to talk about gendered social
>>expectations, identities, and so forth to show how there was no one-
>>to-one pointer reader relationship between physical sex and the
>>habits, identities, etc. we exhibited. Gayle Rubin's seminal essay,
>>"The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex,"
>>argued that the sex/gender systems was a "set of arrangements by
>>which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of
>>human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are
>>satisfied".
>
>I doubt the airline industry has been reading Gayle Rubin, as
>wonderful as she is.
>
>Doug

it was the government, TSA. I notice that, at least in the written reports produced by the government, they use "gender".

I was saying the term "gender" has been integrated into society. At work, I was going through old files from the 1990s. The question always asked about Sex, not gender. That's because it was a widely used term. Gender was introduced by feminism. We do surveys for this training program I'm running. Someone who'd done up a survey used sex and was corrected, asked to use gender as it was the more appropriate term. His argument had zero to do with politeness and everything to do with using gender to reference what used to be called sex. Since the term sex was used for decades in all kinds of surveys, I'd be curious why, all of a sudden, people are tip toeing around the word when they didn't in, oh, say 1943 when Talcott Parsons wrote, "Sex Roles in the American Kinship System" and people filled out surveys that asked them to identify their "sex".



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