http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/jennder_and_other_confusions.htmlJune 7, 2015
Jenn[d]er and Other Confusions
By Clarice Feldman
Bruce Jenner’s decision to take hormone treatment, wear a wig, call himself Caitlyn, get tarted up and pose in a corset for the cover of Vanity Fair has created a media avalanche, despite the fact that transgendered folk make up a truly small percentage of Americans. It’s been estimated that 700,000 or 0.03 percent of Americans are transgendered and most but not all of these are what’s called transitioning to another sex.
If this confuses you, it’s because the terms “gender” and “sex” have themselves been undergoing transition, as Grammarist explains:
Gender was traditionally used mainly in grammar, language, and linguistics contexts to refer to the sex assigned to nouns (especially in non-English languages). For example, the gender of the French noun maison (house) is feminine, while the gender of livre (book) is masculine. Words of the same gender tend to have similar endings, and they affect the forms of some of the surrounding words. Sex, meanwhile, was traditionally the term for males or females viewed as a group.
In recent decades, the meaning of sex has narrowed, and the word is now mainly confined to uses having to do with sexual intercourse and sexual organs. Gender, meanwhile, is increasingly used to refer to a person’s maleness or femaleness. For instance, we tend to say that a boy’s gender is male and a girl’s gender is female. Of course, the term is more complicated than that, and gender identity is not always tied to one’s sex organs. This at least partially explains why gender is now preferred in this extended use; gender denotes identity, which can be fluid and complicated, whereas what sex organs one has is pretty straightforward.
Sex is still sometimes used in its traditional senses. No one considers it wrong, but it tends to give way to gender for the reasons mentioned above and also because gender is considered more appropriate in contexts where sex and sexuality are not to be brought up.
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/jennder_and_other_confusions.html#ixzz3cNcNHFa7
