language: a feminist guide

M E N U

A brief history of gender

D E C E M B E R
~D E 1 B5 U, K 2 0 1 6

In New York City in 1999, I heard a talk in which Riki Anne Wilchins (self-styled transexual menace, and described in the
Gender Variance Whos Who as one of the iconic transgender persons of the 1990s) declared that feminists had no theory
of gender. I thought: what is she talking about? Surely feminists invented the concept of gender!

Fast forward ten years to 2009, when I went to a bookfair in Edinburgh to speak about The Trouble & Strife Reader , a
collection of writing from a feminist magazine Id been involved with since the 1980s. Afterwards, two young women came
up to chat. Interesting book, they said, but why is there nothing in it about gender?

From my perspective the book was all about genderby which I meant, to use Gayle Rubins 1975 formulation , the socially-
imposed division of the sexes. Feminists of my generation understood gender as part of the apparatus of patriarchy: a
social system, built on the biological foundation of human sexual dimorphism, which allocated different roles, rights and
responsibilities to male and female humans. But by 2009 I knew this was no longer what gender meant to everyone. To the
young women at the bookfair, gender meant a form of identity, located in and asserted by individuals rather than imposed
on them from outside. It wasnt just distinct from sex, it had no necessary connection to sex. And it wasnt a binary
division: there were many genders, not just two.

Fast forward again to October 2016, when Pope Francis, during a pastoral visit to Georgia, denounced gender theory as a
threat to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The correspondent who reported his comments explained:

Gender theory is broadly the concept that while a person may be biologically male or female, they have the right to
identify themselves as male, female, both or neither.

I thought: I remember when gender theory threatened the teachings of the Church by suggesting that womens traditional
roles were not ordained by God and nature. I also thought: OK, this is the tipping point.

Im not going to lament the fact that gender means different things to different people (though clearly it does, and one
consequence is a lot of arguing and talking at cross-purposes). Like everything else in language, word-meaning varies and
changes: always has, always will. The question Im interested in is how we got to where we are. Where did the two
competing senses of gender come from? When did they start to be used, by whom and in what contexts?

Ive had many conversations about this, and Ive often felt as if the world is divided between people who think gender as a
theoretical concept was basically invented by Judith Butler in 1990, and people who hold Butler (or queer theorists)
responsible for undermining the feminist analysis of gender and distorting the real meaning of the word. Ive never been
satisfied with either of these views, and I wanted to see what light I could shed on them, using various sources of
information about the history and usage of English words.

One key source I used is the Oxford English Dictionary: fortunately for me, its entry for gender has been revised very
recently, so its as close to fully up to date as historical dictionaries get. I also made use of large text corporain this case,
collections of American English texts, because the usages Im interested in were first recorded in the US. I used COHA, a
historical corpus which covers the period from 1810 to 2010, and COCA, a contemporary corpus which covers 1990-2015.
Dictionaries and corpora typically aim to represent general usage, and their coverage of non-mainstream sources can be
sparse. So, I also used some 20th century feminist texts to provide supplementary evidence about the way feminists used
gender.

I discovered some things I was expecting, and others that surprised me. For instance: it wasnt feminists who first made
the sex/gender distinction (actually it took a while for them to adopt the term gender consistently), and it wasnt queer
theorists who first defined the concept of gender identity. The identity meaning of gender has only recently become
mainstream, but it isnt new: its been around for approximately the same amount of time as the one it now competes with,
and both of them were in use well before the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s.

Ill come back to these points, but first lets take a very quick look at the earlier history of the English word gender. You
may have heard that it started out as a grammatical term, used in the description of languages where nouns are classified
as masculine, feminine and neuter. The usual story is that this grammatical sense got extended later to talk about the
distinction between male and female persons. Later, however, is a relative term: in Norman French, which was where
English got the word from, gendre was already being used to mean the quality of being male or female by the second half
of the 12th century. The first record in the OED of the English form gender being used with the male or female meaning is
dated 1474a reference to his heirs of the masculine gender. In short: the male or female meaning of gender goes back a
long way. People have been using it in a way feminists often complain aboutthat is, as just a fancy word for sexfor more
than 500 years.

When did the sex/gender distinction first get made in English, and who made it? You might imagine its first appearance
would be in some feminist text from the late 1960s or the 1970s. But in fact the OEDs earliest illustrative quotation for the
relevant sense (the state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather
than biological ones) comes from an article published in 1945 in an academic psychology journal:

in the grade school years, too, gender (which is the socialised obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarcation, the
qualifying terms being feminine and masculine.

The same journal is the source of the next quotation [1], dated 1950:

it informs the reader upon gender as well as sex, upon masculine and feminine roles as well as upon male and
female and their reproductive functions.

As these examples illustrate, the meaning of gender which depends on an explicit or implicit contrast with biological sex
was first used by academics in social science disciplines like anthropology, sociology and psychology. The quotations Ive
reproduced suggest that this usage was initially confined to a fairly narrow group of specialists: even when writing for their
fellow-academics, the authors evidently didnt expect all readers to be familiar with it (hence the parenthesis in the first
example and the inverted commas in the second).

The earliest quotation in the OED which doesnt come from an academic source, or treat gender as a piece of obscure
jargon, is from a 1968 issue of Time magazine. That might imply that by the late 1960s the social scientific concept of
gender was beginning to move into the mainstream. But the historical corpus data show that even in the 1960s gender
(used in any sense) was still an uncommon word. In COHA it is recorded from the 1830s, but until the end of the 1950s its
frequency remains lowunder one occurrence per million words of text. In the 1960s the frequency rises to (just) over one
use per million words, and theres a further very slight increase in the 1970s. It isnt until the 1980s that theres a larger
jump to more than five uses per million words.

Does this mean that the story about feminists before 1990 having no theoretical concept of gender might be true after all?
That question raises the somewhat tricky issue of what the relationship is between theory and terminology. My reading of
early second-wave feminist texts suggests that gender during this period (that is, the late 1960s and 1970s) was still largely
an academic term: its common in feminist academic writing (Gayle Rubins 1975 article The traffic in women, which I
quoted earlier, is one example), but it seldom appears in writing by feminists who were politically active outside the
academy [2]. However, that doesnt mean the activists made no distinction between biology and culture: often its clear they
had the concept of gender, they just expressed it using other terms.

Heres an example taken from Shulamith Firestones The Dialectic of Sex (1970):

Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the
economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be not just the elimination of male
privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter
culturally.

Firestone doesnt use the term gender, but she does differentiate between the biological markers of sex and what she calls
the sex distinction, by which she evidently means something like Rubins socially-imposed division of the sexes. Its this,
she argues, that feminism aims to eliminate. After the revolution there will still be genital differences between human
beings, but they will no longer matter culturally.

Shulamith Firestone acknowledged a debt to Simone de Beauvoir, whose observation that one is not born a woman, one
becomes one has often been hailed as the founding statement of modern anti-essentialist feminism. Beauvoir didnt use
the word gender either. In 1949 when The Second Sex first appeared, and indeed for some decades afterwards, French-
speakers did not make a linguistic distinction equivalent to the English one between sex and gender (though some have
recently adopted the term genre to fill the gap). But that obviously didnt stop French feminists (or feminist speakers of
other languages that lacked the distinction) from rejecting biological determinism and developing an analysis of womens
subordination as the product of social forces.

What about the identity sense of gender? When does that start to turn up in the texts sampled for dictionaries and
corpora, and what kinds of texts do you find it in? The answer is that it first appears in the 1950s, in texts dealing with the
clinical treatment of what were then called hermaphrodites (i.e., people with intersex conditions) and transsexuals. It
isnt entirely clear whether this medical usage developed in parallel with the social science usage or directly from it, but in
any case the clinicians soon began to produce a distinctive body of knowledge, which included proposals about the
definition of gender.

There are two names which turn up repeatedly on quotations illustrating the medical usage of gender in the mid-20 th
century. One is that of Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist who was associated from the mid-1950s with the Gender Identity Clinic
at UCLA. He was the author of a 1968 book called Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity , and
he is often credited with introducing the term gender identity, meaning more or less what it means in current usage.

I say more or less because Stollers ideas about gender identity werent exactly the ones were most familiar with today. He
believed there was a biological basis for what he called core gender identitydefined as an innate sense of being male or
female which is normally fixed by the second year of lifebut he also wrote extensively about the influence of nurture. As
well as having a medical degree, he was trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, and he was interested in the idea that an
individuals sexual desires and behaviours, particularly those defined at the time as perversions (including homosexuality,
sadomasochism and transvestism), develop in response to childhood events which threaten the individuals core gender
identity.

The other name is that of John Money, the psychologist who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore. Money was an influential proponent of the view that gender is learned rather than innate: his clinical
observations showed, he claimed, that children acquire the gender theyre raised in, even when its incongruent with their
natal sex. The case study he relied on most heavily to support this claim was later discredited , damaging Moneys
reputation and the credibility of his theories. But the work done at Johns Hopkins made a significant contribution to the
history of genderboth the concept and the word.

In a 1955 research report, Money and two of his colleagues explained their concept of gender role, which they defined as

all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or
woman, respectively. Gender role is appraised in relation to: general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; play
preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment;
content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; replies to oblique inquiries and projective tests; evidence of erotic
practices, and, finally, the persons own replies to direct inquiry.

Gender role is conceptualised here in a similar way to gender identity todayas an internal characteristic of individuals,
disclosed in their behaviour and what they say about themselves. The missing element of the current meaning is the idea
that gender isnt a binary division: this early definition acknowledges only two categories (boy or man, girl or woman).
Stoller, too, assumed that a persons core gender identity must be either male or female. The more recent emergence of
alternative categories (including nonbinary and genderfluid identities) may reflect the influence of queer theory; but in all
other respects, arguably, todays understanding of gender as a form of identity owes more to the medical model elaborated
by people like Money and Stoller.

I cant claim to have produced an exhaustive account of the history of gender, but Ive still found the exercise revealing.
Knowing that the two competing senses have developed from different intellectual traditions (one sense has its roots in the
social scientific study of human culture and behaviour, while the other is rooted in the theory and practice of clinicians
working with gender-variant individuals) makes it easier to understand why they conflict in the ways they do. And the
conflict is profound: if I use gender to mean a social status imposed on people by virtue of their sex, and you use it to
mean an innate sense of identity linked to the sex of a persons brain (a now-common understanding which derives from
the medical tradition), we may be using the same word, but our conceptual frameworks have almost nothing in common
(for instance, your gender has a biological basis, whereas the defining feature of my gender is that it doesnt).

This situation particularly annoys those feminists who feel theyve lost their word. But it might be asked how much we
really need that word. It didnt originate in feminist political analysis or grassroots activism: it belonged to an academic
register (and is still, according to the corpus evidence, used predominantly in academic contexts). Many classic feminist
analyses of the social condition of women (like Beauvoirs The Second Sex, Firestones Dialectic of Sex and Angela Daviss
Women, Race and Class ) do not use it at all.

In recent years Ive become more careful about when and how I use gender, since in some contexts and for some audiences
I know it might not be clear which sense Im using it in. Now Im asking myself if there are any contexts where I really
couldnt manage without it. As Ive said, plenty of feminists in the past did manage without it. Maybe what was good
enough for Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Davis should be good enough for me.

_____________________

NOTES

[1] The it referred to in this quotation is the work of the US cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead herself did not
use the term gender, but in her books Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(1935) and Male and Female (1949) she gave an account of the variability of mens and womens qualities and social roles
across cultures which prefigured, and in some cases directly influenced, later discussions of gender among social scientists
and feminists. (If you read French, theres a good short account of Meads contribution to this history here).

[2] One academic book which examined both the concepts of sex and gender and the associated terminology in some detail
was the sociologist Ann Oakleys Sex, Gender and Society , first published in 1972 and now considered a feminist classic
(this year it was reissued in a new edition with a retrospective introduction by the author). The book discusses Margaret
Meads work, as well as the work of Robert Stoller and John Money. Oakleys new introduction also briefly alludes to
Mathilde Vaerting, a German near-contemporary of Mead who was writing about the way societies constructed men and
women as both different and unequal as early as 1921. (Theres some information on Vaerting here.)

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