Mind your language
OH DEAR, I think we are in the mid- dle of a semantic shift.
Let me explain what I mean. Sex used to mean whether you were a man or a woman: the fair sex, the stronger sex, and all that. What they did together was denominated in various ways, including sexual intercourse (which pace Philip Larkin began before 1963). In this cen- tury that began to be called sex.
So strongly did sex come to mean sex- ual intercourse that another word had to be found for the differentiation between men and women. So gender jumped in from the neighbouring field. Historically, gender is a grammatical term and has nothing to do with physi- cal differences (indeed the words for the most intimate parts of the body often have the gender of the opposite sex in Latinate languages). Its use in the old sense of sex annoys a lot of people, but it is hard to see how to stop it now.
Dot Wordsworth
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