I have heard this story before. Frankly, I don't give it much credence.

To accept that this story is true, we have to believe several things:

a) That in arguing a landmark civil rights case in court, the highly trained attorney RBG, her attorney husband and all the rest of the legal eagles they consulted and who read their briefs decided to let the supposed recommendation of the secretary who typed up their briefs be the last word on the topic.

This strikes me as a most peculiar thing for all these brilliant legal minds to do, given that using "gender" instead of "sex" would not only have made their arguments less clear, it would have been in direct contradiction to the USA's 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex - not on the basis of gender.

b) That in in 1970, female typists and secretaries were held in such high esteem that a secretary typist working at Columbia University - at the time long known to be a bastion of snobbery, racial and socioeconomic/class prejudice, sexism and extreme educational and professional credentialism - would have held sway over a bunch of extremely ambitious attorneys and law faculty who'd trained at Harvard University, another bastion of snobbery, racial and socioeconomic/class prejudice, sexism and extreme educational and professional credentialism.

Sorry, this smells like bullshit.

Academia - even academia populated by supposedly "progressive" and egalitarian people - is incredibly hierarchal. At Ivy League institutions, secretary typists have never been held in particularly high esteem, including in 1970. If a secretary typist back then had been permitted to throw in her two cents about a legal brief she was typing, whatever she might've said most likely would have been entirely ignored.

c) That at ultra-liberal Columbia University in the heart of ultra-liberal New York City in 1970, it was routinely the case that adults - be they secretaries, typists, law school faculty, attorneys - were all squeamish about using the word sex to mean both sexual acts and reproductive categories.

More bullshit. In 1970, the sexual revolution had long been underway, second-wave feminism was thriving, and sex and sexual politics were constantly in the news and openly discussed by everyone. Hence, Kate Millett's 1970 book was called Sexual Politics, not Gender Politics; Shulamith Firestone's book, also published in 1970, was called The Dialectic of Sex, not The Dialectic of Gender. Back then, everyone talked about sexism, sex stereotypes, sex discrimination, sex roles and so on. No one talked about gender!

Similarly, Norman Mailer's 1971 book was called The Prisoner of Sex and Alex Comfort's 1972 book that would become one of the best-selling books of all time was called The Joy of Sex.

Maybe in some religiously conservative parts of the USA far from NYC and LA, some people in the 1970s were squeamish about using the word sex to mean sex. But that certainly wasn't the case in places like Manhattan, especially amongst intellectual circles and industries like the press and publishing and professions like law, particularly amongst the segment of law professionals focused on fighting sex discrimination.

The July 11, 1969 issue of TIME Magazine, one of the leading news outlets in the USA at the time, bore the headline "The Sex Explosion." I was 14 year-old-girl growing up in a strict Roman Catholic household at the time. In my house, parish and convent school, no one fainted or clutched their pearls or rosary beads at that TIME headline, just as no one blinked an eye about all the other material - much of it sanctioned by the RCC - that spoke of sex not gender to mean sex in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

FFS, "Deep Throat" was a mainstream movie and media sensation in 1972. You really think that in 1970, the intelligentsia generally and Ivy League law school faculty in particular in New York City were squeamish about speaking of sex to mean either a series of acts/behaviors or the reproductive class/category?

d) That in mounting a landmark sex discrimination case, high-powered and highly educated attorneys on the law school faculty would have deferred to a secretary-typist's recommendation to use "gender" as an anodyne substitute for "sex" even though those highly educated attorneys would have known that doing so would fly smack in the face of the history of the women's suffrage movement and first-wave feminism - all of which spoke of sex, not gender, as can been seen from looking at the language used by tons of women ranging from but not confined to Susan B Anthony, Alice Paul and Simone de Beauvoir.

In 1872 and again in 1894 Susan B. Anthony said: "No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex."

The wording of the USA's proposed federal Equal Rights Amendment that Alice Paul began campaigning for in the 1920s reads as follows in language that was put into place in 1943: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

This act was passed by the US Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972.

Simone de Beauvoir's landmark book first published in 1949 and a perennial bestseller around the world from then was called The Second Sex.