Sex sex sex!

Here's an article from The Guardian (UK) about the Olympic committee testing athletes to make sure that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall compete in the same events. Reminds me of one of my pet peeves. No, not men masquerading as women. That's weird, but what are you gonna do? No, the pet peeve is the use of the word "gender" when the correct word would be "sex".

If this is news to you - and it's news to a lot of people who actually finished grammar school - gender is a grammatical term whose options are masculine, feminine and neuter, while sex is a biological term and its options are male and female.

Take the classic example of das Fraulein. Sex: female. Gender: neuter. If you wonder how a word that means "young lady" can be neuter, you don't understand grammatical gender at all. It often has nothing to do with sex. Why is the German word for cigar ("Zigarre") feminine? Don't ask a Freudian.

I don't remember noticing this confusion until after I started teaching in the 1980s. At that time, "gender studies" was a big fad in universities and the word "gender" got thrown around a lot. The word "gender" was used because the folks studying "gender" weren't interested in sexual realities. It's hard to maintain, for example, that men and women are in all important respects identical if you're thinking about sex. So "gender" was picked up to suggest that biology is unimportant and that what matters are the roles that we play in life. Reminds me of a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian:

Judith: [on Stan's desire to be a mother] Here! I've got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb - which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans' - but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... sister, sorry.
Reg: What's the point?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

And a noble struggle it is. Anyway, we can thank the gender studies folks - who are still going strong, as far as I can tell - for hijacking the grammatical term gender and pushing it into wider use.

The gender studies types were helped, no doubt, by the fact that "sex" has always struck some genteel American city-dwellers as a dirty word. Sex is a word that makes grade school girls blush, makes high school boys giggle, and makes elderly ladies nervous. On forms, the word "sex" prompted teenage boys to want to scratch out "M" and "F" and write in "Yes". Or perhaps, "Yes, please."

So now we get news stories about the Olympic Committee testing athletes to make sure they are the right gender. What will they do when they discover that all the unmarried women on the German team are actually neuter?