9 ms·

I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid c

I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid confusion given the alternate meaning.

dymk 4y ago
Sex is a set of physical characteristics, gender is a set of social norms. Indeed scientific articles will distinguish between the two. A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.
- umvi 4y ago
  It should be noted this is a very recent development though. I'm pretty sure if you looked in dictionaries made pre-2000, gender is synonymous with sex and was often the preferred term for biological sex since as GP points out, "sex" also means intercourse. Only in the last 10 years or so has the definition of gender been usurped to have a new distinct meaning to accommodate new social developments.
  - dymk 4y ago
    Biologists and sociologists have distinguished between sex and gender for far longer than a decade.
    - wahern 4y ago
      Not just biologists and sociologists, but pretty much all of academia. As a college student in the 1990s it was my understanding this distinction came about from 2nd wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, but since then I've come to learn that they goes back even further, into the 19th century at least. Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.
  - cwingrav 4y ago
    This is a scientific article and the terms are used with precise definitions. If translated to a more vernacular venue, the language would either be different, or the terms defined in the article.
  - js2 4y ago
    This letter to the editor appeared in the NYT over thirty years ago: To the Editor: The term "gender" is increasingly misused as a substitute for "sex." Does "gender" appear to reflect a greater sophistication, or reluctance to use a term with a possible indecent connotation? "The Gender Gulf" by Louis Harris (Op-Ed, Dec. 7) misuses the term three times (not counting the headline), including this: "the generation gap is less evident and the gender gap more acute." Among the same day's letters, one ("Sexism on Sesame St.") misuses gender five times including "gender imbalance." "The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage" by Theodore M. Bernstein (New York, 1965) states, "gender is a grammatical term, denoting (in English) whether words pertaining to a noun or pronoun are classed as masculine, feminine or neuter. It is not a substitute for 'sex' (but then, what is?). Indeed, in some foreign languages 'gender' often disregards sex. In German, for example, 'Weib,' The word for woman, is neuter; in French 'plume,' the word for pen, a sexless article, is feminine. To use 'gender' as if it were synonymous with 'sex' is an error, and a particularly unpardonable one in scientific writing." From Fowler's "Modern English Usage" edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, second edition, 1965): "Gender, n., is a grammatical term only. To talk of 'persons' or 'creatures of the masculine or feminine gender,' meaning 'of the male or female sex,' is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder." I can only assume you have elected to permit this misuse, despite a valid and useful distinction between the terms. SIDNEY WEINSTEIN Danbury, Conn., Dec. 10, 1990 The writer is editor in chief, International Journal of Neuroscience. https://archive.ph/2020.06.11-213210/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/27/opinion/l-gender-can-t-replace-sex-but-what-can-667090.html https://archive.ph/2020.06.11-213210/https://www.nytimes.com... Here's William Safire talking about it in 1984 ("On Language; Goodbye Sex, Hello Gender"): https://archive.ph/2022.07.07-142246/https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/05/magazine/on-language-goodbye-sex-hello-gender.html https://archive.ph/2022.07.07-142246/https://www.nytimes.com...
    - jcheng 4y ago
      I've never heard that "gender" is a grammatical term only, it got me interested enough to search up the word in some older dictionaries. Webster's 1828: https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/gender https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/gender Webster's 1913: https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender Both include "sex, male or female" as a definition; the 1913 marks it as "[Obs. or Colloq.]" while the 1828 does not.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    I remember being shocked in the 90s when I heard people applying a grammatical term, gender, to people's social/sexual expression. What's next, I thought, call infectious people "dative?" Anyway, I got used to it because it's a useful distinction when applied to people. I'm pretty sure in a 20th century dictionary you'll find gender was a purely grammatical term. And it was an uncommon word in English because all of our nouns are not gendered like so many other languages.
    - ksaj 4y ago
      And what to think of languages like Swedish that have Masculine and Neuter, but not Feminine, and the fact that some languages don't even agree on what is a Masculine word and what is a Feminine word?
      - orwin 4y ago
        That linguistics and language evolution is really interesting. Old french/vulgar latin had a neuter gender, which pronoun sounded a lot like the male pronoun, and with nominative ending who were the same. Hence male pronouns are the default pronouns.
  - hhho 4y ago
    It's longer than that. As far as I am aware, sexologist John Money was the first to use the term in a sociological sense, in his 1955 paper Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism, where he wrote: "The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism." Some decades on, he noted that the rationale for introducing the term was to "make it possible to write about people who came into one's office as either male or female, but of whom it could not be said that their sex role in the specific genital sense was either male or female insofar as they had a history of birth defect of the sex organs. The majority of people who contributed to this new meaning of gender were hermaphrodites or intersexes. To them, social science and social history overall owe a debt of gratitude."
userbinator 4y ago
It would be interesting if they had some trans experimenters to compare with.
nateb2022 4y ago
Sex is a biological property of an organism, whereas gender is a social construct.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Problem is "sex" is an ambiguous word with multiple meanings and "gender" has been redefined to be useless. We probably need a new word that specifically refers to this one usage of "sex"
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    It's not remotely ambiguous? It has two meanings, the biological sex of an organism and the biological reproduction of that organism.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      You just provided the example of how its ambiguous. It makes titles confusing when you don't know exactly which meaning is meant. While using "gender" in the title would have been clearer, especially as mice don't have social constructs that we associate with the term.
      - ghidle 4y ago
        In this context, "experimenters' sex" can only reasonably mean whether the experimenter was female or male. The other alternative would have been them doing some experimental fucking next to the mice to see what happens. Such a paper would undoubtedly have been titled differently.
        irrational 4y ago
        So… what does happen? Surely someone has already done that experiment.
      - oldstrangers 4y ago
smegsicle 4y ago
- dymk 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boxmonster 4y ago
An interesting question. Do transwomen have a male scent or a female scent and do mice respond to transwomen like a male or female? How about transmen? A fascinating area of research.
- Latty 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- delecti 4y ago
  Hormones influence your scent. So a trans woman would have male scent before starting hormones, and then would (over the course of weeks to months) gradually develop a female scent, and vice versa with trans men.
  - ghidle 4y ago
    In the context of how rodents respond to such scents, I think it is currently unknown whether a male on a long-term feminising hormone treatment would still produce a sufficiently male-type scent, or a female-type scent.
    - delecti 4y ago
      Based on personal and anecdotal experience, I would be very confident in my assumption. There are plenty of things that hormones only change very gradually (body hair takes years), or which they can't "undo" (bones are pretty static after age 20-25), but body scent is one of the first and strongest changes when starting cross-sex hormones.
      - ghidle 4y ago
        Yes but this has not yet been experimentally tested, so it's currently unknown.
groby_b 4y ago
This distinction is made at least since 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ - distinguishing between sex as physical/physiological characteristics and gender as psychological ones. I'd assume it's quite unlikely mice care about psychological characteristics of researchers, but it'd be an interesting piece of research to read :)
ksaj 4y ago
In Botany for example, I've never heard reference to a plant's gender. It is always sex. Even for plants that can change sex, either on their own accord, or induced by human processes. Even in animal husbandry, determining one from the other is called sexing and not gendering. Some fish and other aquatic animals change sex over the course of their lives - never a mention of gender. Gender is a human social construct, albeit closely connected to sex. Loosely you could perhaps say that gender is the cultural and societal presentation of one's sex.
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  The word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”). If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.
  - basicplus2 4y ago
    But gender never means sexual union.. hense the misreading
    - ksaj 4y ago
      Agreed. Nobody would confuse sex play with gender play. Both terms exist, and are well understood.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Sex is biological and social. Gender is about grammar and pronouns. It is a lot more important in other languages than English, and often has nothing to do with sex. There are languages where the genders are "alive" and "dead", or "adult" and "child or animal".
basicplus2 4y ago
I could not understand the heading even after multiple reads! Only until I started to read the article
robwwilliams 4y ago
No, it is a weird usage of “sex” in this context, but at least they are explicit. It should read “gender”. May have been an IRB issue. Had they used the word “gender” then this MAY have made the research design approval process twice as complicated. I wonder if this study was exempt from IRB human subjects research oversight and approval?
worthless-trash 4y ago
Both terms are loaded these days, no matter what is written, some group will cry offense with crippling emotional damage.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  I'm just glad you and I found a way to feel superior - by complaining about the complainers.
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    K.
the_third_wave 4y ago
Yes, it is correct to use a biological term - sex - in an article related to biology instead of a linguistical one - gender. Organisms have sexes, words have genders.
raffraffraff 4y ago
Surely sex is the only one with a clear meaning? There is no alternate meaning. Gender, on the other hand, isn't very well defined.

I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid confusion given the alternate meaning.

dymk 4y ago

Sex is a set of physical characteristics, gender is a set of social norms. Indeed scientific articles will distinguish between the two. A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.

umvi 4y ago
It should be noted this is a very recent development though. I'm pretty sure if you looked in dictionaries made pre-2000, gender is synonymous with sex and was often the preferred term for biological sex since as GP points out, "sex" also means intercourse. Only in the last 10 years or so has the definition of gender been usurped to have a new distinct meaning to accommodate new social developments.
- dymk 4y ago
  Biologists and sociologists have distinguished between sex and gender for far longer than a decade.
  - wahern 4y ago
    Not just biologists and sociologists, but pretty much all of academia. As a college student in the 1990s it was my understanding this distinction came about from 2nd wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, but since then I've come to learn that they goes back even further, into the 19th century at least. Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.
- cwingrav 4y ago
  This is a scientific article and the terms are used with precise definitions. If translated to a more vernacular venue, the language would either be different, or the terms defined in the article.
- js2 4y ago
  This letter to the editor appeared in the NYT over thirty years ago: To the Editor: The term "gender" is increasingly misused as a substitute for "sex." Does "gender" appear to reflect a greater sophistication, or reluctance to use a term with a possible indecent connotation? "The Gender Gulf" by Louis Harris (Op-Ed, Dec. 7) misuses the term three times (not counting the headline), including this: "the generation gap is less evident and the gender gap more acute." Among the same day's letters, one ("Sexism on Sesame St.") misuses gender five times including "gender imbalance." "The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage" by Theodore M. Bernstein (New York, 1965) states, "gender is a grammatical term, denoting (in English) whether words pertaining to a noun or pronoun are classed as masculine, feminine or neuter. It is not a substitute for 'sex' (but then, what is?). Indeed, in some foreign languages 'gender' often disregards sex. In German, for example, 'Weib,' The word for woman, is neuter; in French 'plume,' the word for pen, a sexless article, is feminine. To use 'gender' as if it were synonymous with 'sex' is an error, and a particularly unpardonable one in scientific writing." From Fowler's "Modern English Usage" edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, second edition, 1965): "Gender, n., is a grammatical term only. To talk of 'persons' or 'creatures of the masculine or feminine gender,' meaning 'of the male or female sex,' is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder." I can only assume you have elected to permit this misuse, despite a valid and useful distinction between the terms. SIDNEY WEINSTEIN Danbury, Conn., Dec. 10, 1990 The writer is editor in chief, International Journal of Neuroscience. https://archive.ph/2020.06.11-213210/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/27/opinion/l-gender-can-t-replace-sex-but-what-can-667090.html https://archive.ph/2020.06.11-213210/https://www.nytimes.com... Here's William Safire talking about it in 1984 ("On Language; Goodbye Sex, Hello Gender"): https://archive.ph/2022.07.07-142246/https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/05/magazine/on-language-goodbye-sex-hello-gender.html https://archive.ph/2022.07.07-142246/https://www.nytimes.com...
  - jcheng 4y ago
    I've never heard that "gender" is a grammatical term only, it got me interested enough to search up the word in some older dictionaries. Webster's 1828: https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/gender https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/gender Webster's 1913: https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender Both include "sex, male or female" as a definition; the 1913 marks it as "[Obs. or Colloq.]" while the 1828 does not.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I remember being shocked in the 90s when I heard people applying a grammatical term, gender, to people's social/sexual expression. What's next, I thought, call infectious people "dative?" Anyway, I got used to it because it's a useful distinction when applied to people. I'm pretty sure in a 20th century dictionary you'll find gender was a purely grammatical term. And it was an uncommon word in English because all of our nouns are not gendered like so many other languages.
  - ksaj 4y ago
    And what to think of languages like Swedish that have Masculine and Neuter, but not Feminine, and the fact that some languages don't even agree on what is a Masculine word and what is a Feminine word?
    - orwin 4y ago
      That linguistics and language evolution is really interesting. Old french/vulgar latin had a neuter gender, which pronoun sounded a lot like the male pronoun, and with nominative ending who were the same. Hence male pronouns are the default pronouns.
- hhho 4y ago
  It's longer than that. As far as I am aware, sexologist John Money was the first to use the term in a sociological sense, in his 1955 paper Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism, where he wrote: "The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism." Some decades on, he noted that the rationale for introducing the term was to "make it possible to write about people who came into one's office as either male or female, but of whom it could not be said that their sex role in the specific genital sense was either male or female insofar as they had a history of birth defect of the sex organs. The majority of people who contributed to this new meaning of gender were hermaphrodites or intersexes. To them, social science and social history overall owe a debt of gratitude."

userbinator 4y ago

It would be interesting if they had some trans experimenters to compare with.

nateb2022 4y ago

Sex is a biological property of an organism, whereas gender is a social construct.

Gigachad 4y ago
Problem is "sex" is an ambiguous word with multiple meanings and "gender" has been redefined to be useless. We probably need a new word that specifically refers to this one usage of "sex"
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  It's not remotely ambiguous? It has two meanings, the biological sex of an organism and the biological reproduction of that organism.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    You just provided the example of how its ambiguous. It makes titles confusing when you don't know exactly which meaning is meant. While using "gender" in the title would have been clearer, especially as mice don't have social constructs that we associate with the term.
    - ghidle 4y ago
      In this context, "experimenters' sex" can only reasonably mean whether the experimenter was female or male. The other alternative would have been them doing some experimental fucking next to the mice to see what happens. Such a paper would undoubtedly have been titled differently.
      - irrational 4y ago
        So… what does happen? Surely someone has already done that experiment.
    - oldstrangers 4y ago

smegsicle 4y ago

dymk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

boxmonster 4y ago

An interesting question. Do transwomen have a male scent or a female scent and do mice respond to transwomen like a male or female? How about transmen? A fascinating area of research.

Latty 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
delecti 4y ago
Hormones influence your scent. So a trans woman would have male scent before starting hormones, and then would (over the course of weeks to months) gradually develop a female scent, and vice versa with trans men.
- ghidle 4y ago
  In the context of how rodents respond to such scents, I think it is currently unknown whether a male on a long-term feminising hormone treatment would still produce a sufficiently male-type scent, or a female-type scent.
  - delecti 4y ago
    Based on personal and anecdotal experience, I would be very confident in my assumption. There are plenty of things that hormones only change very gradually (body hair takes years), or which they can't "undo" (bones are pretty static after age 20-25), but body scent is one of the first and strongest changes when starting cross-sex hormones.
    - ghidle 4y ago
      Yes but this has not yet been experimentally tested, so it's currently unknown.

groby_b 4y ago

This distinction is made at least since 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ - distinguishing between sex as physical/physiological characteristics and gender as psychological ones. I'd assume it's quite unlikely mice care about psychological characteristics of researchers, but it'd be an interesting piece of research to read :)

ksaj 4y ago

In Botany for example, I've never heard reference to a plant's gender. It is always sex. Even for plants that can change sex, either on their own accord, or induced by human processes. Even in animal husbandry, determining one from the other is called sexing and not gendering. Some fish and other aquatic animals change sex over the course of their lives - never a mention of gender. Gender is a human social construct, albeit closely connected to sex. Loosely you could perhaps say that gender is the cultural and societal presentation of one's sex.

fennecfoxen 4y ago
The word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”). If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.
- basicplus2 4y ago
  But gender never means sexual union.. hense the misreading
  - ksaj 4y ago
    Agreed. Nobody would confuse sex play with gender play. Both terms exist, and are well understood.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
ncmncm 4y ago
Sex is biological and social. Gender is about grammar and pronouns. It is a lot more important in other languages than English, and often has nothing to do with sex. There are languages where the genders are "alive" and "dead", or "adult" and "child or animal".

basicplus2 4y ago

I could not understand the heading even after multiple reads! Only until I started to read the article

robwwilliams 4y ago

No, it is a weird usage of “sex” in this context, but at least they are explicit. It should read “gender”. May have been an IRB issue. Had they used the word “gender” then this MAY have made the research design approval process twice as complicated. I wonder if this study was exempt from IRB human subjects research oversight and approval?

worthless-trash 4y ago

Both terms are loaded these days, no matter what is written, some group will cry offense with crippling emotional damage.

bobkazamakis 4y ago
I'm just glad you and I found a way to feel superior - by complaining about the complainers.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  K.

the_third_wave 4y ago

Yes, it is correct to use a biological term - sex - in an article related to biology instead of a linguistical one - gender. Organisms have sexes, words have genders.

raffraffraff 4y ago

Surely sex is the only one with a clear meaning? There is no alternate meaning. Gender, on the other hand, isn't very well defined.