ignorant, yeah. totally agree with that.
your contention is supported by the fact that the TSA uses 'sex' elsewhere on its site, and not because they are referring to the activity you engage in in order to join the mile high club. and obviously, if they use the word sex elsewhere, then they aren't avoiding it to be polite!
in the past, it's not that they didn't know the difference, it's that they congealed the meaning of sex (m/f), fucking (orientation), and gender into sex (colloquially) and sex roles (academically). but that doesn't mean that it was one indistinct glob. rather, they were seen as three different modalities where there was a pointer-reader relationship between sex-->fucking-->gender. if you were male, you wanted to and did fuck females and acted like a man. any slippage between them was understood as deviance.
the claim that we are squeamish about the word, today, makes no sense. the popular joke about filling out a form that asked, "Sex?", and saying: "not often enough!" or "just this morning, thank you" wouldn't have existed if people didn't think both "fucking" and "m/f:M/F" when they read or heard the word sex. so, we're polite now, when we weren't 30 years ago when I first heard the joke?!
the term gender has come into popular usage because, goshes, the people who write surveys and collect data in corporations and government bureaucracies took, like, sociology courses in kollidge and stuph. they've become accustomed to the word, though it doesn't follow that they understand what it means, any more than people don't understand other words the learned in college and now use incorrectly - a fact that Dilbert's Scott Adams has made beaucoup bux off of.
shag
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