Gender is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, "n mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.", with the earliest example cited being from 1963. It was defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (3d ed.) as "exual identity, especially in relation to society or culture", with a Usage Note saying that " practice . . . many anthropologists . . . reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories."
A working definition in use by the World Health Organization for its work is that "'ender' refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women" and that "'masculine' and 'feminine' are gender categories."
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation makes a distinction between sex and gender in their most recent Media Reference Guide. Sex is "the classification of people as male or female" at birth, based on bodily characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, and genitalia. Gender identity is "one's internal, personal sense of being a man or woman (or a boy or a girl).
Some feminist philosophers maintain that gender is totally undetermined by sex. See for example The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, an important and widely influential feminist text.
The case of David Reimer who was, according to studies published by John Money, raised as a girl after a botched circumcision was described in the book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Reimer was in fact not comfortable as a girl and later changed sexual identity back to male when discovered the truth of his surgery. He eventually committed suicide.
Read more about this topic: Sex And Gender Distinction
Famous quotes containing the word gender:
“... lynching was ... a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.”
—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)