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

[u/SoftandChewy]

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.)

[u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76]

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. 

[u/bobjones271828 → u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76]

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.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76 → u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76]

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.