[Info-vax] The Gender Fluid IT Crisis

[Dirk Munk]

MG wrote:
> Gender technically only refers to the grammatical gender,
> e.g. noun gender.
>
>      << British Dictionary definitions for gen-der
>
>         gender
>         /ˈdʒɛndə/
>
>         noun
>
>         1.
>         a set of two or more grammatical categories into which the
>         nouns of certain languages are divided, sometimes but not
>         necessarily corresponding to the sex of the referent when
>         animate See also natural gender
>
>         2.
>         any of the categories, such as masculine, feminine, neuter,
>         or common, within such a set >>
>
>     <http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gender>
>
>
>  - MG

Of course, we should use the Oxford dictionary:



Home British & World English gender
Definition of gender in English:

gender
noun

1  Either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered 
with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological 
ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities 
that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.
    ‘a condition that affects people of both genders’
    ‘someone of the opposite gender’
    ‘everyone always asks which gender I identify as’

    1.1 Members of a particular gender considered as a group.
        ‘social interaction between the genders’
        ‘encouraging women and girls to join fields traditionally 
dominated by the male gender’

    1.2 [mass noun] The fact or condition of belonging to or identifying 
with a particular gender.
        ‘video ads will target users based only on age and gender’
        ‘traditional concepts of gender’
        ‘I'm a strong believer that gender is fluid’

2  Grammar
    (in languages such as Latin, French, and German) each of the classes 
(typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns 
distinguished by the different inflections which they have and which 
they require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical 
gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex.

    2.1  mass noun The property (in nouns and related words) of 
belonging to a grammatical gender.
         ‘determiners and adjectives usually agree with the noun in 
gender and number’

Usage

The word gender has been used since the 14th century as a grammatical 
term, referring to classes of noun designated as masculine, feminine, or 
neuter in some languages. The sense denoting biological sex has also 
been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until 
the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex are often used 
interchangeably, they have slightly different connotations; sex tends to 
refer to biological differences, while gender more often refers to 
cultural and social differences and sometimes encompasses a broader 
range of identities than the binary of male and female

Origin

Late Middle English: from Old French gendre (modern genre), based on 
Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation’. The earliest meanings were ‘kind, 
sort, genus’ and ‘type or class of noun, etc.’ (which was also a sense 
of Latin genus).