In dialogue with social conservatives, I find many are uncomfortable using the term gender, because of the baggage associated with it. Some will even insist that the word should be restricted to grammatical categories. Here is what one friend (himself a well-known author and speaker) wrote to me after some work I did about gender in the Ancient Near East (ANE):
Applying the idea of “human gender” to anyone before the 20th century is anachronistic. Before that, gender was a linguistic category. I’m aware that Gender Studies says all kinds of things about ancient cultures, but they’re working from a fundamentally different hermeneutical that disregards ancient peoples’ self-understanding. I think their self-understanding, by contrast, is all that is important. There is piles of literature about homosexuality in Ancient Greece. But there was no concept “homosexuality” in Ancient Greece. That’s not me being unaware with the output of Queer Studies. That’s me pointing out a problem with their methodology that to my mind invalidates all their results.
Elsewhere I have discussed gender in the ANE, so in the present post I will limit myself to explaining why I disagree that gender should only reference linguistic categories.
Today, gender essentially means what “sex” used to mean – the genus category that
- includes masculinity and femininity (as when a female character in Charles Dudley Warner 1872 says, “I am ready to defend my sex, but I won’t attempt to defend both sexes in one,” in Back-log Studies and My Summer in a Garden);
- functions as an appellation broader than mere sex differences (as when Mrs Ellis wrote “Louisa possessed a masculine understanding, and indomitable energy” in The Mothers of Great Men).
This second sense approximates, or is at least adjacent to, what C.S. Lewis and others in the sacramental and/or Neoplatonist traditions refer to as the archetypal conception of gender. Lewis reflected this tradition in Perelandra where Ransom notes that “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic love of a fundamental polarity that divides all created beings.” (For more about Lewis’s discussion of gender archetypes, see some of the exiting work Annie Crawford has been doing on gender in Lewis’s corpus.)
If one dislikes the term “gender archetypes” because of the baggage the term accumulated in the 20th century, then one could say “sex archetypes” instead, but given that “sex” also underwent a metamorphosis in the 20th century, referring to “sex archetypes” would be misleading. For my part, I am happy to stand with C.S. Lewis’s use of gender in 1943.
Lewis was not alone in using “gender” to denote the masculine-feminine binary. In 1860, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, includes this passage:
If Miss Tulliver, after a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as Mrs. Stephen Guest, with a post-marital trousseau, and all the advantages possessed even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St. Ogg’s, as else where, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results. Public opinion, in these cases, is always of the feminine gender, — not the world, but the world’s wife; and she would have seen that two handsome young people — the gentleman of quite the first family in St. Ogg’s — having found themselves in a false position, had been led into a course which, to say the least of it, was highly injudicious, and productive of sad pain and disappointment, especially to that sweet young thing, Miss Deane.
It remains true that non-grammatical uses of gender were rare until the 1970s. But to insist that we use the term in the grammatical sense would be like insisting that we still use the term “intercourse” to refer to conversation. Of course, that would create some very awkward situations.