“Sex” and “Gender” Need a 3rd Word

 English needs a 3rd word to resolve the ambiguity between “sex” and “gender”.

“Sex” is a BIOLOGICAL concept, hard-coded into our genes, involving exactly two alternatives: male (XY chromosomes, wired to produce large numbers of small gametes: sperm cells) and female (XX chromosomes, with small numbers of large gametes: egg cells). This hard coding is not affected by castration, hysterectomy, or any amount of plastic surgery or artificial hormones.

“Gender” is a LINGUISTIC method of distinguishing between certain classes of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, usually involving 3 alternatives: masculine, feminine, and neuter (in some languages, only 2: animate and inanimate). Gender is only loosely associated with sex. For example, in Latin the words for the traditionally male-dominated occupations of sailor and farmer are the feminine nouns nauta and agricola. And, of course, for the gargantuan majority of things we can name, there’s no biological sex at all available to be associated with inanimate objects such as table (tabula) or coin (nummus). Estimates are that about half the world’s languages are gendered.

However, in English the last vestige of gender is in the 3rd-person singular pronoun, 8 words (out of the 700,000 available) that all by themselves occupy about 2% of English-speakers’ mental space. There have been about a dozen proposed gender-neutral pronouns (you could look them up on Wikipedia), any of which would be an improvement. All we’d have to do is just pick one, even if we used the dartboard method. But no, that would deprive us Americans of all the fun we’re having wasting ink, time, angst, indignation, and backbiting over the issue.

But there’s a third related condition as well. Neither “sex” nor “gender” adequately describes the SOCIAL concept of how a given person “identifies”. That involves all sorts of differences in how a person presents to others in terms of physique, hair, clothing, affect, speech, gestures, assertiveness, etc. And there are many more than merely 2 or 3 combinations of those, so we’ve got a spectrum of categories used to describe them. What we lack is an overall noun that distinguishes this social meaning from both the biological and linguistic ones. The closest we’ve come are the phrases “sex role” or “gender identity”, but they’re not really getting the job done. All too many people refer to them just by the shorthand “sex” or “gender”, thereby conflating the social and linguistic meanings (akin to 1984’s “war is peace, ignorance is strength”), thereby making it difficult to talk meaningfully about either without having to throw in verbal asterisks.

So, rather than prolong the ongoing pissing contest over the issue, why doesn’t somebody just come up with that 3rd word so we can all get on with our lives?