Guest post: Words may have a gender
Originally a comment by Green Eagle on Capture.
“Gender” is a linguistic term, not a biological one. Words may have a gender; something which is far more understandable to people who speak languages like French, German or Italian, where many words have genders unrelated to the sex of the creatures they refer to. “Equus,” or “Alumnus, for example are words of the male gender, regardless of whether they refer to male or female horses or graduates. There is no such thing as an equua, and the term alumna is a construct.
Whether a person is male or female is a biological question, not a linguistic one, and is capable of being answered correctly by any minimally qualified geneticist. People who promote trans ideology do so by deliberately confusing biology with linguistics. This sort of thing seems to be much stronger in England and the US than other places, because, I believe, native English speakers do not understand the linguistic nature of gender.
In the end, this attitude has given birth to a frightening toleration for bullying as a way to determine which “facts” will be accepted. We have had a five year lesson here in the US about what happens when we allow right wingers to behave this way; if the left licenses this sort of thing too, both democracy and truth will become things of the past.
Maybe once upon a time “gender” was strictly a linguistic term, but not anymore. Words are adaptable and always evolving. Not that I think the current usage is wise or accurate. But live with “gender” as a cultural term for “sex,” we must.
Just think: “Organic” once meant “compounds that contain carbon”!
I spent many years studying a gendered language and to be honest thought it was goofy and arbitrary. “Horse” is a male word…why? “Cat” is a female word and “dog” is a male word…um, OK. Oh, and “rabbit” is neuter? Well, I’ll be. Is there any point to this?
And it’s just a linguistic thing, except when it’s not: “Mother” is female and “father” is male, and so on.
Don’t get me wrong — English is in many ways a horrible, inconsistent, difficult language. But at least it doesn’t have this “feature”.
I do think the point about people who are used to gendered languages perhaps being less prone to confusing gender stereotypes with sex is interesting. If true, perhaps some good came of that awful language feature.
I guess we’ll see if countries that speak gendered languages don’t try to put transwomen in women’s sports, etc.
I often wonder when this meme about the word’s being a purely linguistic term took hold, but for the eleventy-first time: for as long as it’s been an English word, “gender” has always referred to the male/female dichotomy. Its use as such is attested at least five decades prior to records of “sex” in the same capacity. For centuries, the two words have alternated in their popularity, as English speakers tend to avoid “overusing” one word for any particular thing. Just as we do this from the sentence, to the paragraph, to the book, we do it in general speech.