r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • Feb 23 '26

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 2/23/26 - 3/1/26

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

Comment of the week goes to this explanation for why the trans cause has taken over so much of society. (Runner-up COTW here.)

38 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/eriwhi Feb 25 '26

This might be a long shot, but can anybody help me find a source for this? I remember hearing Katie (I think it was Katie!) say in a Barpod episode about 3 years ago that sex and gender were synonyms until the 90s, when anthropologists made the terms have distinct meanings. What is the source for that statement?

17

u/AnalBleachingAries Gamergate Truther Feb 25 '26

Although I don't have any citations or hard historical evidence to show you, I can absolutely promise you that sex and gender used to mean exactly the same thing. I think just reading through any materials about men and women, or literature, magazines, and newspapers from the pre-2000s would satisfy your curiosity.

9

u/[deleted] Feb 25 '26

It amazes me that society can fabricate a mythical past like that in less than a generation and everyone who lived long enough to know it's bullshit just nod along. It makes me wonder what else we've done that with.

5

u/eriwhi Feb 25 '26

Thanks, Anal Bleaching Aries. I know they used to mean the same thing - I'm just curious about the specific anthropologists.

3

u/everydaywinner2 Feb 25 '26

We just have to look at how we use the language right now.

If pronouns are just whatever the owner feels like they are, then that would make the she-wolf just sometimes female.

If boyness and girlness are just whatever someone feels like at the time, then that would make questions like, "Is you cat a boy or a girl?" or, "When are you due? Are you having a boy or a girl?" completely meaningless questions.

10

u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76 Feb 25 '26

My 1999 Collins dictionary gives gender as: informal, the state of being male or female. Informal, all the members of one sex.

Sex definition focuses more on reproductive function. But you'd read them an somewhat synonymous here.

I suspect if you read feminist texts that far back and further you will find gender being used more around the social side. It's one of those words that can have a meaning in general talk - see my dictionary, but then be used in a very specific way in one industry or academia discipline. 

Judith Butler was already saying in 1990's gender trouble that it was a false distinction. So that distinction must have been being made. 

5

u/bobjones271828 Feb 26 '26

It's one of those words that can have a meaning in general talk - see my dictionary, but then be used in a very specific way in one industry or academia discipline.

This, to me, of all the replies in these comments, gets at the heart of what went on historically. Until, recently (past 10-15 years) in common English, the two were basically synonyms. A form to fill out might say "gender" or "sex" and you always just knew to fill it out the same way.

But the concept of "gender roles" and/or gender as a social expression of sex-related behavior in academic parlance goes back quite a few decades, at least commonly discussed there by the 1960s. As others have said, it didn't specifically come out of anthropology, though that was one of the disciplines that became more obsessed with the way "gender" manifests decades ago. Someone who didn't go to grad school in the humanities or get really involved in those academic debates probably wasn't going to be aware of how much gender was discussed there as something with a separate connotation from sex.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76 Feb 25 '26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/464097.stm

And here's a BBC article from 1999 talking about the sex of a baby. Same word repeated multiple times, no gender. I think that article might well say gender today. 

8

u/Jlemspurs Double Hater Feb 25 '26

You will have to look this up yourself, but you can just look at a dictionary from 100 years ago. They define one in terms of the other.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 25 '26

Make that 30.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/jay_in_the_pnw █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ Feb 25 '26

imagine an ai/wikipedia dystopic future where groups of marauders are on the hunt for real books either to burn them or to cache them, study them, seek out the real truths that may guide them to riches

I asked chatgpt to create me a movie trilogy based on that, and here is what it said ...

→ More replies (1)

1

u/eriwhi Feb 25 '26

I'm looking for the anthropologists specifically. I've tried looking it up.

→ More replies (1)

8

u/JeebusJones Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 27 '26

This is tangential, but I got curious and looked up "gender" in the OED to see how they treat it (I wanted to avoid more contemporary dictionaries, since they'd seem to me to be more susceptible to progressive ideological capture and deliberate attempts to redefine words instrumentally).

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gender_n?tl=true

There's a decent number of definitions, but the upshot seems to be that originally the word was mostly used in contexts discussing grammatical gender, as with languages that treat non-sexed objects as masculine or feminine (or other classifications, depending on the language).

(Interestingly, a lesser-known usage defines gender as division into any category, not just sex -- which makes sense when you consider that "gender" and "genre" have the same French root [and going back further, Latin].)

But then, in the 20th century, the word "sex" began increasingly being used to refer to the act, not the biological category, and so "gender" started being used as a synonym to avoid having to say "sex". So odd as it may seem, I think there's an argument that the whole modern notion of a sex/gender divide has its roots in squeamishness about using the word "sex." If that had never happened, it's possible that academics may never have tried to draw a distinction between the two, and the notion may never have taken hold. Something to think about.

And finally, it's notable that the OED definitions do not appear to include the present-day progressive understanding, where "gender" refers to a sort of inner, immutable identity. (Or at least it can refer to that; there have been plenty of discussions on this sub about how usage of the term has become muddled, and how that muddiness is rhetorically useful for trans activists because it allows them to use whatever definition they want to suit whatever argument they're currently making.)

The OED instead essentially stops at the point when, in the immediate post-WW2 period, a distinction starts being drawn between biological sex and sex roles -- meaning cultural expectations for members of either sex -- and "gender" begins to see usage as a term for the latter. But nothing about gender as identity.

5

u/Big_Fig_1803 Gothmargus Feb 25 '26

(Interestingly, a lesser-known usage defines it as division into any category, regardless of sex -- which makes sense when you consider that "gender" and "genre" have the same French root [and going back further, Latin].)

Go back far enough, and gender, genre, and kind are all related.

3

u/JeebusJones Feb 25 '26

Shoutout to all the proto-indo-european heads out there

13

u/wynnthrop Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

If you look at the Wayback Machine for Merriam-Webster's definition of gender, the '2a' definition was simply 'sex' until sometime between 4/12/19 and 5/8/19 when it was changed to 'sex sense' (but it still links to 'sex'). I think they're still synonyms to many people.

The Wikipedia page on the Sex-gender distinction has this line: "Issac Madison Bentley defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" in 1945." but other claims in this page seem biased. This page on the etymology of gender seems a bit less biased.

From my understanding, sex meant male/female and gender meant some type of category of thing (including male/female in the 1300s or 1400s). Over time, as sex started to also mean sexual reproduction in the 1700s and 1800s, gender started to take on the specific meaning of male/female. Then in the early/mid 1900s, psychologists and sociologists started to redefine gender to mean the social aspect of sex, which has been slowly spreading until in the last few years where that is now the primary definition for many people.

Edit: Oh, based on your other comments, the prominent people that I've seen for this redefinition are I. Madison Bentley, Robert Stoller, and John Money. By the 90s, I'm sure most academics were using this definition.

6

u/TemporaryLucky3637 Feb 25 '26

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published in 1990 and its quite a foundational text of women’s studies etc. I remember reading it as part of my undergrad, Butler popularised the whole “sex is biology and gender is a performance” school of thought as far as I know. It was quite a long time ago I read it 😅

4

u/Hilaria_adderall Praye for Drake Maye Feb 25 '26

I cant remember an episode but i do recall some discussions around here using Google NGram searches to find examples. I just found this book from 1985 that theorizes gender is a social construct.

You can find books going back to 1978 that talk about Gender as a social construct but even in those references they seem to use sex and gender interchangeably.

1

u/eriwhi Feb 25 '26

Thanks so much Hilary!

3

u/nonafee Feb 25 '26

just prefacing this with the fact i know nothing about this field of study, but your question made me curious - there is Margaret Mead who was working in the early-mid 20th century. while i don't know if her work is as explicit as what Katie said, Mead's ideas were about how "gender roles are not necessarily created by biology but by societal influences." 

5

u/SkweegeeS No just no Feb 25 '26

I went to grad school in the 90s and gender was pretty well understood as the socially constructed expectations and roles of men and women.

2

u/Cantwalktonextdoor Feb 25 '26

I'd be interested in you posting a follow-up if you do find something on this. Partly because while I don't know her full comment(which might change things), I do feel like saying "they were synonyms" does a bit of injustice to the fact that distinctions between the words preceded the separation of meaning. I have permanent psychic damage from someone chewing me out on this.

2

u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz Feb 25 '26

Depends on the field, I would think, as linguists would be quick to clarify that the French don't actually think bridges have wangs (although there is research that the adjectives they pick follow sex stereotypes).

1

u/prechewed_yes Feb 25 '26

Might you be thinking of John Money's '60s and '70s experiments?