Gender

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity in addition to masculinity as well as differentiating between them. Depending on a context, this may include sex-based social structures i.e. gender roles and gender identity. near cultures usage a gender binary, in which gender is divided up into two categories, and people are considered factor of one or the other boys/men and girls/women; those who equal outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term non-binary. Some societies cause specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such(a) as the hijras of South Asia; these are often subject to as third genders and fourth genders, etc.. most scholars agree that gender is a central characteristic for social organization.

Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the number one to introduce a terminological distinction between biological sex and "gender role" which, as originally defined, includes the abstraction of both gender role and what would later become known as gender identity in 1955 although Madison Bentley had already in 1945 defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex", and Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book TheSex has been interpreted as the beginning of the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory.

Before Money's work, it was uncommon to usage the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did non become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social pull in of gender. Most modern social scientists, behavioral scientists and biologists, numerous legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such(a) as the WHO, hold a distinction between gender and sex.

In other contexts, the term gender is used to replace sex without representing a clear conceptual difference. For instance, in non-human animal research, gender is usually used to refer to the biological sex of the animals. This change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s. In 1993, the US Food and Drug Administration FDA started to use gender instead of sex. Later, in 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological bracket and gender as "a person's self-representation as male or female, or how that adult is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation."

The social sciences have a branch devoted to gender studies. Other sciences, such as sexology and neuroscience, are also interested in the subject. The social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies especially do, while research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in females and males influence the development of gender in humans; both inform the debate approximately how far biological differences influence the order of gender identity and gendered behavior. In some English literature, there is also a trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social gender role. This framework first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978.

Etymology and usage

The modern English word gender comes from the genus. Both words mean "kind", "type", or "sort". They derive ultimately from a genre sexuel and is related to the genesis, and oxygen. The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 defined gender as kind, breed, sex, derived from the Latin ablative effect of genus, like genere natus, which remanded to birth. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary OED1, Volume 4, 1900 notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.

The concept of gender, in the modern sense, is a recent invention in human history. The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades. The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to remain towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.

Before Sexologist John Money and colleagues made the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. For example, in a bibliography of 12,000 references on marriage and sort from 1900 to 1964, the term gender does not even emerge once. Analysis of more than 30 million academic article titles from 1945 to 2001 showed that the uses of the term "gender", were much rarer than uses of "sex", was often used as a grammatical category early in this period. By the end of this period, uses of "gender" outnumbered uses of "sex" in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It was in the 1970s that feminist scholars adopted the term gender as way of distinguishing "socially constructed" aspects of male–female differences gender from "biologically determined" aspects sex.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia has increased greatly, outnumbering uses of sex in the social sciences. While the spread of the word in science publications can be attributed to the influence of feminism, its use as a synonym for sex is attributed to the failure to grasp the distinction submitted in feminist theory, and the distinction has sometimes become blurred with the abstraction itself; David Haig stated, "Among the reasons that workings scientists have precondition me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires tosympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation."

In legal cases alleging discrimination, sex is usually preferred as the determining factor rather than gender as it specified to biology rather than socially constructed norms which are more open to interpretation and dispute. Julie Greenberg writes that although gender and sex are separate concepts, they are interlinked in that gender discrimination often results from stereotypes based on what is expected of members of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things sex. In J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:

The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics as opposed to physical characteristics distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.

The word was still widely used, however, in the particular sense of ]

In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler stated that the definition of the word pertained to this grammar-related meaning:

"Gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity permissible or not according to context or a blunder."

Sexologist John Money coined the term gender role, and was the first to use it in print in a scientific trade journal. In a seminal 1955 paper he defined it as "all those matters that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."

The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates at least back to 1945, and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards see § Feminism theory and gender studies below, which theorizes that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. In this context, matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.

The popular use of gender simply as an alternative to sex as a biological category is also widespread, although attempts are still made to preserve the distinction. The American Heritage Dictionary 2000 uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference, noting that the distinction "is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at any levels."

The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex not gender of the patient.In peasant societies, gender not sex roles are likely to be more clearly defined.