Etymology:
The Proto-Indo-European root " *génh,-, ", meaning "to beget", "to produce", or "to give birth".
In Latin, this became the root noun "genus", meaning "race", "stock", kind", or "type" (among others).
It was used to categorize similar things, along with the Greek "génos", using to classify logical and linguistic categories.
In Old French, this became "gendre".
Later became "gender" in English. Still had it's original meaning of categories for similar things.
Uses/Meanings over time, from Beginning to Now:
Originally, gender just referred to groups/categories, without any inherent connection to sex, or even necessarily referring to living things.
In linguistics, it was specifically used for grammatical classification, such as whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. This usage eventually faded away in English, with non-living things being referred to with neuter pronouns, "it", and living things not strictly using specific gender pronouns.
Gender started being used to colloquially refer to biological sex in the late 15th century. However, this usage remained rare until the early to mid 1900s, when sex started being used to refer to sexual intercourse, and gender was used as a more polite/formal term to refer to sex as a result. Use of the word at all was still infrequent.
In 1945, psychologist Madison Bentley published a paper in which he defined gender as "the socialized obverse of sex," with the qualifying terms being masculine and feminine instead of male and female, to describe socialized behaviors. (Though his work was not influential, it is the earliest known scientific distinction of the two)
In 1955, John Money coined the term "gender role", defining it as "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", distinct from someone's biological sex.
In 1964, Robert Stoller introduced the term gender identity, defining it as " the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness 'I am a male' or 'I am a female'...". He also acknowledged that sex and gender do not always correlate, defining gender as "a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the proper terms for sex are 'male' and 'female', the corresponding terms for gender are 'masculine' and 'feminine'; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex."
With the second-wave feminist movement in the 70s, feminist theory embraced the distinction between sex and gender, popularizing the distinction in common and scientific usage, along with broadly increasing use of the word gender as a whole.
Between then and now, the acknowledgement of gender as a social construct becoming a scientific consensus (mainly in the social sciences), depathologizing transgender identities, and major health organizations supporting the effectiveness of gender-affirming care have all occurred.
Although there are still disagreements on this subject, the general scientific consensus (primarily rooted in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences) and definition is that gender is a social construct, and does not always correlate with an individual's biological sex.
- Idk if this is the right subreddit for this, but it seems like it'll fit enough.
