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[–]Horror-SwordfishI don't get how flairs work 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Most people point to John Money for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

Although that was a ways back that he differentiated between sex and "gender identity." I'm not really sure what caused it to become the current zeitgeist. It's only in the last few years that many people seriously consider "sex" and "gender" to be different things. Before that, most rational people considered "gender" to be a euphemism for "sex" because the word "sex" brings to mind "sexual intercourse."

You can see that in action when people start talking about "sexuality" as being "who you have sex with" as opposed to "what sex you are attracted to." Case in point: asexuals who consider a lack of sex drive a sexuality rather than a lack of attraction which would make more sense.

[–]Q-Continuum-kin 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

People didn't used to use the word gender interchangeably with sex before the 50s or 60s.

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Gender was mostly used to describe grammar and it had a meaning of "type / category / kind" so sometimes people would use it to describe the 2 sex categories while using literary creativity. John Money was a weirdo so people sometimes don't want to credit him with coining the term to be used in the social construct category sense but he did and then it was adopted by second wave feminism.

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At some point in the 70s or 80s people started correctly using the term "gender bending" to refer to men and women breaking out of their socially constructed gender but people started to misunderstand the meaning of that and gender started to be interpreted as a polite way to say sex so colloquially it became incorrectly used interchangeably to literally refer to sex but that was never really the correct use of the term.

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TRAs also misappropriated the term to try and pretend there was some magical "brain sex identity". As far as I can tell by observing how the word evolved since the 80s the plebs took this arcane feminist term and spun it through pop culture and it became so ubiquitous as a synonym for sex that it's basically annoyingly irreversible. TRAs took their undeserved confidence to "educate" the public based on what the feminist definition was originally and spun the word back out of the mainstream to an entirely new 3rd definition and this seems to be what you are referring to. I started to see that use online in about the early 00's. That's when i remember transgender people trying to make a real effort to define a reason to have gender dysphoria make sense in such a way that the reason to transition is validated. After that it was just a constant creep of postmodernism.

[–]Porphyria 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Agreed. I can remember people in the 1970s getting angry when forms asked for their "Gender" instead of Sex, because they knew using gender to mean sex was incorrect : It was a grammar term not applicable to English, but to Romance and other languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter words.

The Victorians were a lot more forthright in their speech than their idiotic pop culture image suggests, and they had no problems using the word "sex" to mean male/man or female/woman.

[–]dilsencySame-sex community 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You can see that in action when people start talking about "sexuality" as being "who you have sex with" as opposed to "what sex you are attracted to."

I can't tell you how much I hate the former. Really messed with my head back when I was coming to terms with being gay.