On Apr 30, 2010, at 9:26 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> 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".
Well yeah, feminists introduced the term into the broader discourse, but the reason it's now used is because the word "sex" makes officialdom uncomfy. They have no idea of the social history of the word.
Doug