It is a grammatical term applying to Romance (as in languages that derived from the language used by ancient Romans, aka la lingua Franca: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, & a couple others). If there are other gendered languages, I am ignorant of them, not being a linguistic. Reject all attempts to use the term in the modern or post modern senses: they are an imperialism of the modern day leftists and sane people everywhere should fight them tooth and nail whenever they try to misuse it. If you see it on a company or government form, scratch it off or black it out and write sex in its place, and put down man or woman, male or female as applicable (if you don’t know which applies, look or feel between your legs, depending on whether you are in a private space or if you can recall if you sat or stood the last time you urinated—if you don’t recognize that word, then you don’t belong in this conversation and go ask your mommy)
STANDING OVATION. I've had discussions about this with people, that in this particular era someone "feeling" trans seems to be them relating to the STEREOTYPES of gender. "I don't feel like what I think my sex's stereotype is supposed to feel like, and more relate to the other sex's stereotype, therefore I am the other sex." I haven't been able to eloquently articulate it, but I REALLY appreciate the way you broke it down here.
"I think we’re beyond usefulness on the idea of “gender.” It is used as a weapon now and furthers harmful stereotypes."
Yes. Transgenderism only exists if one claims that outdated and oftentimes harmful gender stereotypes and norms are wholly real and good, that anyone who falls outside of those norms is somehow wrong or should be fixed. Without digging in the heals on "correct" gender norms, when one posits that there is no right way to be a boy or a girl, then the entirety of gender ideology falls apart.
Sex is immutable. Gender is fantasy at best and subject to socio-cultural changes and fashions.
I cannot stand "CIS." I argue with my kid about it -being "cisgender" is just - THE NORM. There shouldn't be a prefix that essentially means "non-trans" or "non-gender-conforming" to describe the vast majority of the population.
There are men and there are women. They like to be together. They like to talk to each other. Get to know each other. Some have sex. Some marry. Some have children. It all started in that garden, Jen, and that damn fruit!
I am considerably senior to you and matured in a different time zone. Kennedy assassinations and Vietnam. Marine Corps.
We loved women. They loved us. It was a good time. Men and women. It's all good.
The rest is Pavlovian lap dog legacy media refuse.
I remember learning from my high-school English teacher than words have gender, but people have sex.
I also remember noticing at some point in the '90s that that the term "gender" was starting to replace "sex" in written publications. And I thought "hmmm....I guess they are wanting us to think that sex is kind of an arbitrary distinction, kind of like the way the word for "table" is feminine in Spanish." It kind of made sense, especially from a second-wave feminist kind of view - in which men and women should be viewed as fairly interchangeable for most things, aside from some differences in reproductive organs and upper-body strength; and in modern society many "gender roles" seemed silly and arbitrary. Men could certainly change a baby's diaper; and women could certainly change the oil in a car.
By the early 2010s I had noticed that now "gender" seemed to be taking on a weird new meaning - not only were "gender differences" viewed as arbitrary, but things like sex organs also seemed to be viewed as rather arbitrary and changeable by some (i.e., we started hearing some odd stories "transgender lesbians" who were annoyed that the female sort of lesbians were not enthusiastic about the trans-lesbians' female penises). At the time, this seemed like a rather humorous conflict that happened to the sort of people who went to Womyn's Festivals and the like - not the sort of thing one would ever encounter in normal life in, say, one's local YMCA women's locker room.
What made it seem even sillier was that surely by now everyone knew that gender *roles* didn't have to have anything to do with one's sex. A boy who liked makeup, or making floral arrangements, or watching rom-coms wasn't a woman any more than a girl who liked football, muscle cars or carpentry was a man. Weren't we all free to be you and me, like we learned back in the '70's?
And now here we are - suddenly, gender roles and stereotypes are apparently the MAIN thing that determines whether someone is a man or a woman. And somehow "feminists" are intent on allowing men to invade women's sports and women's spaces, because it turns out putting on a dress and eyeliner makes you female.
I too learned "gender" as a term in linguistics, not psychology or sociology, and certainly not biology. And I also grew up on "Free to Be - You and Me" in elementary school. Nobody in the 1970's was saying that William must actually be a "she" because he had a doll! And the babies figured out what's what as soon as they looked in their diapers.
And now we are subjected to the outright cringe of well-educated (over-educated?) people regressing back to these outdated gender (or, should I say, sex?) stereotypes. I'm looking at you, Neil deGrasse Tyson (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/neil-degrasse-tyson-should-stick), among many others. "Suppose no matter my chromosomes, today I feel 80% female, 20% male. I’m gonna put on makeup. Tomorrow I might feel 80% male; I’ll remove the makeup and I’ll wear a muscle shirt." Because, yeah, that's exactly how that works.
I am so with you on this. You stated everything I have been feeling and saying for a long time. Young people constantly "try on" attitudes, beliefs, and personalities in the process of discovering themselves. This is not because their gender is in flux but their desire to fit into the culture around them. It takes a lifetime to know ourselves, truly know ourselves. Imagine having that decided for you at your most vulnerable age!
And as for sex and feminism, I wholeheartedly concur that embracing and promoting porn, sex work, using men, and casually disposing of others are false gages of sexual freedom and empowerment. I bet donuts to dollars the whole Ony Fans industry woman would evaporate in a week if women weren't allowed to make a dime from it (unless they have an insatiable desire for attention which is a whole other problem). A woman's power lies in the sacred, the divine feminine, our ability to give and nurture life, to love and lift others. This 4th wave does nothing but undermine the best of womanhood.
I've always perceived gender as the preferred word to sex (on things like forms and applications) from a more puritan time. Did Money invent it or just hijack it?
He didn't invent it but he was first (as i understand it) to use it in a way to describe personality traits/characteristics. I'm no Money expert though!
I guess what I'm asking is what is the etymology of gender? According to Brave AI:
Based on the provided search results, here’s a summary of the etymology and history of the word “gender”:
The word “gender” comes from Middle English “gendre”, borrowed from Old French “gendre”, which in turn was borrowed from Latin “genere” meaning “type”, “kind”, or “genus”.
The Latin root “gen-” is also the source of English words such as “genus”, “genre”, and “kin”.
The verb “to gender” developed after the noun “gender”, with the first recorded use of the verb in the 15th century.
Initially, “gender” referred to grammatical classification, specifically the classification of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Over time, the meaning of “gender” expanded to include sociocultural and biological characteristics associated with males and females.
The modern sense of “gender” as a social construct, distinct from biological sex, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the context of feminist theory and queer theory.
As for the question of when the word “gender” was “invented”, it’s important to note that the concept of gender as we understand it today is a relatively recent development. The word “gender” itself has been in use since the Middle English period, but its meaning and connotations have evolved significantly over time.
It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact year when the modern concept of gender was “invented”, as it’s a complex and multifaceted idea that has developed through various intellectual and cultural currents. However, some key milestones include:
1955: John Money, a sexologist, introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a social construct.
1960s: Feminist theorists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, began to explore the social and cultural construction of gender.
1970s-1980s: Queer theorists, such as Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, further developed the concept of gender as a performative and social construct.
These developments, among others, have contributed to the modern understanding of gender as a complex and multifaceted concept, distinct from biological sex.
Great question! I notice this so much more than I did before all this trans nonsense blew up. Now I'm so happy when I see forms that (a) ask for "sex" rather than "gender" and (b) only give two options.
This new way of thinking is beyond insulting. I was a girl who didn't like dresses or dolls. It didn't make me less of a girl. It made me a girl who didn't like dresses or dolls. Second wave feminism was about freedom. It was about being who you want to be without being bound by stereotypes based on genitalia. The current way of thinking is so much more rigid. It leans into those stereotypes. A girl who doesn't like dresses or dolls??? Clutch your pearls, this person isn't a real girl. Real girls like dresses and dolls. There is something wrong with this person. Get this person therapy and medicalize "her" so "she" properly conforms to sex based stereotypes. I can't believe how fast this nonsense was accepted.
I am going to state something that might indict my ignorance: I patently reject the sociological presumptions that race and gender are social constructs. As a philosophy major in college (same time frame as the author) I revert back to some basic logical analysis. Race and gender are biological facts. It could be that gender is the language identifiers for biologically assigned sex, I can see that argument. Regardless, gender is not immutable. It is (perhaps descriptively) what you are just as the color of your skin and the make up of your ancestry. What are social constructs-stereotypes, cultural norms, assumptions that lead to biases. Somehow the narrative lost its way in post modernism. It came off the rails. I am a military veteran of the early 90s and literally a helicopter mom (pilot who flew pregnant). I fully support Women and Men to be the best version of themselves by being brilliantly women and men. We are not intrinsically the same. Masculine energy is so very different from feminine. But we are all capable of being our best and we all have unlimited potential. The hard truth is that it has always been up to each of us. To shake off the shackles of our past-to let go of who we are so we can become who we are went to be. That is how I have always led. That is how I lead now. Your future is always up to You! Victimhood only imprisons and is used for that very purpose. Those that try to wield it should be ignored. It is long past time to empower our youth and move the “f” on!
I cannot even begin to express how much I love this Substack post and all the comments I've read so far. I was also in college 1988-1992 and I well remember the "Take Back the Night" events, though I didn't take any "Women's Studies" (as it was then called, at my school, back when even people in academia still knew what "women" were) classes myself. But I do remember watching some documentary about the objectification of women through pornography, which at that age I had also never seen myself, though I had read erotica. (Can't remember the name of the movie, but some of the images have been seared into my brain ever since.)
The teeny, tiny glimmer of hope I'm seeing on the "gender" front is that there are some Gen Zs and Gen Alphas who just aren't buying it, despite the schools' best efforts at indoctrination.
I'm hopeful, too, that people are noticing that if you take "intersectionality" to its logical extreme, you get to the realization that each human is unique, and we can't and shouldn't make assumptions about each other based on any particular identity grouping. The more the gender identity alphabet soup fragments into finer and finer distinctions (see https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Category:Exclusive_Genders for a fun sampler pack), the closer we get, perhaps, to a realization that trying to categorize people by subtle nuances of how "masculine" or "feminine" or both or neither they feel at any given instant is, frankly, ridiculous. All this energy, all this navel-gazing to try to come up with labels that virtually no one else will care about or even understand. As you say, "There are 2 sexes and endless personalities. Period." Yes.
And I too have taken to trying to use the word "sex" in lieu of gender wherever possible. I agree with Chris Wojda's comment that "gender" has been routinely used (though I also don't know for how long) as a "puritan" euphemism for "sex" on forms, applications, and the like. When possible, if asked for my "gender," I respond that my SEX is female. Unfortunately, that's not always an option (e.g., online forms).
Thank you for clarifying these waves of feminism. The second wave of feminism that ushered in women’s rights to be treated equally and receive equal pay was a good thing. Seems to me that wave three and four there was a loss of respect for the human body (male or female). The idea that someone can have 100 (or 1000) sexual partners just sounds like a superspreader event. Wave four transgender surgery is chopping up of an intact body. Major surgery is no joke and leaves lasting physical trauma and wounds.
The 'idea' of gender was appropriated by the social justice front as a Foucault-ian weapon to address 'identity' as a form of subjugation and a way of exercising power over people. For a time, this was useful and allowed us to look objectively at and unlock our collective thinking about the roles people inhabit, the impact of marginalization on demographics, and the system we all live within. Like all good ideologies, it has outlived its day, but remains active, deconstructed in its own right, destabilizing and undermining social order as an agent of chaos... We now live in the Orwellian dystopia where men are woman who have more rights than... woman. When theory and ideology question or outright deny the fabric of our reality, in this case biology, we have hit an existential end point.
Perhaps of interest to you: One of the things I recall in the essay is how it was OK for boys to do somersaults, but cartwheels were only for girls. And recently I stumbled across an HRC video with a mom talking about her 'trans daughter' (i.e., her son)--and included in the video as part of the carefully curated 'evidence' of the child's girlhood, the boy is doing cartwheels. https://youtu.be/HPXcrLogTBs?si=VgNkeOQe1OeR3wm9
YES!
I wrote about this because the mere use of the word "gender" is the precise source of confusion itself.
If you mean sex, say sex (there are two). If you mean stereotypes, say it. If you mean clothing or personalities or hobbies, say it.
Delete the word, delete the confusion. Everyone should do it.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/top-10-stupidest-definitions-for
It is a grammatical term applying to Romance (as in languages that derived from the language used by ancient Romans, aka la lingua Franca: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, & a couple others). If there are other gendered languages, I am ignorant of them, not being a linguistic. Reject all attempts to use the term in the modern or post modern senses: they are an imperialism of the modern day leftists and sane people everywhere should fight them tooth and nail whenever they try to misuse it. If you see it on a company or government form, scratch it off or black it out and write sex in its place, and put down man or woman, male or female as applicable (if you don’t know which applies, look or feel between your legs, depending on whether you are in a private space or if you can recall if you sat or stood the last time you urinated—if you don’t recognize that word, then you don’t belong in this conversation and go ask your mommy)
STANDING OVATION. I've had discussions about this with people, that in this particular era someone "feeling" trans seems to be them relating to the STEREOTYPES of gender. "I don't feel like what I think my sex's stereotype is supposed to feel like, and more relate to the other sex's stereotype, therefore I am the other sex." I haven't been able to eloquently articulate it, but I REALLY appreciate the way you broke it down here.
(Edited for clarity, not content)
"I think we’re beyond usefulness on the idea of “gender.” It is used as a weapon now and furthers harmful stereotypes."
Yes. Transgenderism only exists if one claims that outdated and oftentimes harmful gender stereotypes and norms are wholly real and good, that anyone who falls outside of those norms is somehow wrong or should be fixed. Without digging in the heals on "correct" gender norms, when one posits that there is no right way to be a boy or a girl, then the entirety of gender ideology falls apart.
Sex is immutable. Gender is fantasy at best and subject to socio-cultural changes and fashions.
YES! Add"CIS"... the reality is "SEX" based rights pertaining to born girls and WOMEN
I cannot stand "CIS." I argue with my kid about it -being "cisgender" is just - THE NORM. There shouldn't be a prefix that essentially means "non-trans" or "non-gender-conforming" to describe the vast majority of the population.
Yep.
There are men and there are women. They like to be together. They like to talk to each other. Get to know each other. Some have sex. Some marry. Some have children. It all started in that garden, Jen, and that damn fruit!
I am considerably senior to you and matured in a different time zone. Kennedy assassinations and Vietnam. Marine Corps.
We loved women. They loved us. It was a good time. Men and women. It's all good.
The rest is Pavlovian lap dog legacy media refuse.
I remember learning from my high-school English teacher than words have gender, but people have sex.
I also remember noticing at some point in the '90s that that the term "gender" was starting to replace "sex" in written publications. And I thought "hmmm....I guess they are wanting us to think that sex is kind of an arbitrary distinction, kind of like the way the word for "table" is feminine in Spanish." It kind of made sense, especially from a second-wave feminist kind of view - in which men and women should be viewed as fairly interchangeable for most things, aside from some differences in reproductive organs and upper-body strength; and in modern society many "gender roles" seemed silly and arbitrary. Men could certainly change a baby's diaper; and women could certainly change the oil in a car.
By the early 2010s I had noticed that now "gender" seemed to be taking on a weird new meaning - not only were "gender differences" viewed as arbitrary, but things like sex organs also seemed to be viewed as rather arbitrary and changeable by some (i.e., we started hearing some odd stories "transgender lesbians" who were annoyed that the female sort of lesbians were not enthusiastic about the trans-lesbians' female penises). At the time, this seemed like a rather humorous conflict that happened to the sort of people who went to Womyn's Festivals and the like - not the sort of thing one would ever encounter in normal life in, say, one's local YMCA women's locker room.
What made it seem even sillier was that surely by now everyone knew that gender *roles* didn't have to have anything to do with one's sex. A boy who liked makeup, or making floral arrangements, or watching rom-coms wasn't a woman any more than a girl who liked football, muscle cars or carpentry was a man. Weren't we all free to be you and me, like we learned back in the '70's?
And now here we are - suddenly, gender roles and stereotypes are apparently the MAIN thing that determines whether someone is a man or a woman. And somehow "feminists" are intent on allowing men to invade women's sports and women's spaces, because it turns out putting on a dress and eyeliner makes you female.
I too learned "gender" as a term in linguistics, not psychology or sociology, and certainly not biology. And I also grew up on "Free to Be - You and Me" in elementary school. Nobody in the 1970's was saying that William must actually be a "she" because he had a doll! And the babies figured out what's what as soon as they looked in their diapers.
And now we are subjected to the outright cringe of well-educated (over-educated?) people regressing back to these outdated gender (or, should I say, sex?) stereotypes. I'm looking at you, Neil deGrasse Tyson (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/neil-degrasse-tyson-should-stick), among many others. "Suppose no matter my chromosomes, today I feel 80% female, 20% male. I’m gonna put on makeup. Tomorrow I might feel 80% male; I’ll remove the makeup and I’ll wear a muscle shirt." Because, yeah, that's exactly how that works.
I am so with you on this. You stated everything I have been feeling and saying for a long time. Young people constantly "try on" attitudes, beliefs, and personalities in the process of discovering themselves. This is not because their gender is in flux but their desire to fit into the culture around them. It takes a lifetime to know ourselves, truly know ourselves. Imagine having that decided for you at your most vulnerable age!
And as for sex and feminism, I wholeheartedly concur that embracing and promoting porn, sex work, using men, and casually disposing of others are false gages of sexual freedom and empowerment. I bet donuts to dollars the whole Ony Fans industry woman would evaporate in a week if women weren't allowed to make a dime from it (unless they have an insatiable desire for attention which is a whole other problem). A woman's power lies in the sacred, the divine feminine, our ability to give and nurture life, to love and lift others. This 4th wave does nothing but undermine the best of womanhood.
I've always perceived gender as the preferred word to sex (on things like forms and applications) from a more puritan time. Did Money invent it or just hijack it?
He didn't invent it but he was first (as i understand it) to use it in a way to describe personality traits/characteristics. I'm no Money expert though!
I guess what I'm asking is what is the etymology of gender? According to Brave AI:
Based on the provided search results, here’s a summary of the etymology and history of the word “gender”:
The word “gender” comes from Middle English “gendre”, borrowed from Old French “gendre”, which in turn was borrowed from Latin “genere” meaning “type”, “kind”, or “genus”.
The Latin root “gen-” is also the source of English words such as “genus”, “genre”, and “kin”.
The verb “to gender” developed after the noun “gender”, with the first recorded use of the verb in the 15th century.
Initially, “gender” referred to grammatical classification, specifically the classification of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Over time, the meaning of “gender” expanded to include sociocultural and biological characteristics associated with males and females.
The modern sense of “gender” as a social construct, distinct from biological sex, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the context of feminist theory and queer theory.
As for the question of when the word “gender” was “invented”, it’s important to note that the concept of gender as we understand it today is a relatively recent development. The word “gender” itself has been in use since the Middle English period, but its meaning and connotations have evolved significantly over time.
It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact year when the modern concept of gender was “invented”, as it’s a complex and multifaceted idea that has developed through various intellectual and cultural currents. However, some key milestones include:
1955: John Money, a sexologist, introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a social construct.
1960s: Feminist theorists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, began to explore the social and cultural construction of gender.
1970s-1980s: Queer theorists, such as Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, further developed the concept of gender as a performative and social construct.
These developments, among others, have contributed to the modern understanding of gender as a complex and multifaceted concept, distinct from biological sex.
Great question! I notice this so much more than I did before all this trans nonsense blew up. Now I'm so happy when I see forms that (a) ask for "sex" rather than "gender" and (b) only give two options.
This new way of thinking is beyond insulting. I was a girl who didn't like dresses or dolls. It didn't make me less of a girl. It made me a girl who didn't like dresses or dolls. Second wave feminism was about freedom. It was about being who you want to be without being bound by stereotypes based on genitalia. The current way of thinking is so much more rigid. It leans into those stereotypes. A girl who doesn't like dresses or dolls??? Clutch your pearls, this person isn't a real girl. Real girls like dresses and dolls. There is something wrong with this person. Get this person therapy and medicalize "her" so "she" properly conforms to sex based stereotypes. I can't believe how fast this nonsense was accepted.
I am going to state something that might indict my ignorance: I patently reject the sociological presumptions that race and gender are social constructs. As a philosophy major in college (same time frame as the author) I revert back to some basic logical analysis. Race and gender are biological facts. It could be that gender is the language identifiers for biologically assigned sex, I can see that argument. Regardless, gender is not immutable. It is (perhaps descriptively) what you are just as the color of your skin and the make up of your ancestry. What are social constructs-stereotypes, cultural norms, assumptions that lead to biases. Somehow the narrative lost its way in post modernism. It came off the rails. I am a military veteran of the early 90s and literally a helicopter mom (pilot who flew pregnant). I fully support Women and Men to be the best version of themselves by being brilliantly women and men. We are not intrinsically the same. Masculine energy is so very different from feminine. But we are all capable of being our best and we all have unlimited potential. The hard truth is that it has always been up to each of us. To shake off the shackles of our past-to let go of who we are so we can become who we are went to be. That is how I have always led. That is how I lead now. Your future is always up to You! Victimhood only imprisons and is used for that very purpose. Those that try to wield it should be ignored. It is long past time to empower our youth and move the “f” on!
I cannot even begin to express how much I love this Substack post and all the comments I've read so far. I was also in college 1988-1992 and I well remember the "Take Back the Night" events, though I didn't take any "Women's Studies" (as it was then called, at my school, back when even people in academia still knew what "women" were) classes myself. But I do remember watching some documentary about the objectification of women through pornography, which at that age I had also never seen myself, though I had read erotica. (Can't remember the name of the movie, but some of the images have been seared into my brain ever since.)
The teeny, tiny glimmer of hope I'm seeing on the "gender" front is that there are some Gen Zs and Gen Alphas who just aren't buying it, despite the schools' best efforts at indoctrination.
I'm hopeful, too, that people are noticing that if you take "intersectionality" to its logical extreme, you get to the realization that each human is unique, and we can't and shouldn't make assumptions about each other based on any particular identity grouping. The more the gender identity alphabet soup fragments into finer and finer distinctions (see https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Category:Exclusive_Genders for a fun sampler pack), the closer we get, perhaps, to a realization that trying to categorize people by subtle nuances of how "masculine" or "feminine" or both or neither they feel at any given instant is, frankly, ridiculous. All this energy, all this navel-gazing to try to come up with labels that virtually no one else will care about or even understand. As you say, "There are 2 sexes and endless personalities. Period." Yes.
And I too have taken to trying to use the word "sex" in lieu of gender wherever possible. I agree with Chris Wojda's comment that "gender" has been routinely used (though I also don't know for how long) as a "puritan" euphemism for "sex" on forms, applications, and the like. When possible, if asked for my "gender," I respond that my SEX is female. Unfortunately, that's not always an option (e.g., online forms).
Thank you for clarifying these waves of feminism. The second wave of feminism that ushered in women’s rights to be treated equally and receive equal pay was a good thing. Seems to me that wave three and four there was a loss of respect for the human body (male or female). The idea that someone can have 100 (or 1000) sexual partners just sounds like a superspreader event. Wave four transgender surgery is chopping up of an intact body. Major surgery is no joke and leaves lasting physical trauma and wounds.
The 'idea' of gender was appropriated by the social justice front as a Foucault-ian weapon to address 'identity' as a form of subjugation and a way of exercising power over people. For a time, this was useful and allowed us to look objectively at and unlock our collective thinking about the roles people inhabit, the impact of marginalization on demographics, and the system we all live within. Like all good ideologies, it has outlived its day, but remains active, deconstructed in its own right, destabilizing and undermining social order as an agent of chaos... We now live in the Orwellian dystopia where men are woman who have more rights than... woman. When theory and ideology question or outright deny the fabric of our reality, in this case biology, we have hit an existential end point.
100% correct. It was Watergate conspirator and then talk show host G. Gordon LIddy who taught me this back in the 1990s.
Thank you for this--I'm going to stop using it too. I think I'm about the same age as you, and I have written about how 'gender roles' (aka sex stereotypes) shaped my life growing up in the 70's & 80's. https://open.substack.com/pub/flashinggreen/p/born-at-the-right-time?r=2261q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Perhaps of interest to you: One of the things I recall in the essay is how it was OK for boys to do somersaults, but cartwheels were only for girls. And recently I stumbled across an HRC video with a mom talking about her 'trans daughter' (i.e., her son)--and included in the video as part of the carefully curated 'evidence' of the child's girlhood, the boy is doing cartwheels. https://youtu.be/HPXcrLogTBs?si=VgNkeOQe1OeR3wm9
There is no such thing as “gender” outside of the masculine, feminine, or neuter attribute of nouns in certain languages. Period.