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Interesting fact of the day: Webster's Dictionary in 1828 defined gender in much the same way as modern liberals define it, that being, ones expression of pronouns and does not strictly adhere to any sense of sex. In fact the dictionary definition at the time goes into some detail on that point.
So strictly speaking assigning ones gender based on preferred pronouns or expression of femininity/masculinity is in fact the traditional and historic usage of the word.
Here is a word-for-word copy of the text of the definition for gender in Webster's 1828 dictionary:
In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender
@freemo I think they are talking about words, not sex of humans or any other animals.
@CCoinTradingIdeas Gender is still about words, The words we use called adjectives. No one wants it to be about anything other than that. Thats why sex is a different word.
There are only two **sexes** (and more rarely intersex). But as the definition has **always** been, sex is **not** the same as gender.
I think it's pretty obvious this definition is referring to conventions for gendering inanimate objects, such as in the Latin languages where their neuter pronoun is a recent development and conventions in English like referring to sea ships or nations with feminine pronouns.
No, if that were the case then the definition would say so. Definitions are wordy and precise specifically so you cant pull that sort of nonsense.
What I will say is this. At the time cross-dressers/trans were a lot less common in public. For that reason most of the time it wasnt even a question which one had to think about when talking about people. That only happened behind closed doors.
Which is exactly why that definition does say so. Dictionaries have contemporary context. Regardless of how much they attempt to define the context, they cannot always do so due to in-system biases. The in-system bias in this case is the assumption that gender for non neuter objects is their sex.
Its actually well proven by the sentence, "But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom." It has the in-system bias of gender being a sex specific trait.
@Meachamus_Prime
That's how I read it too, that gender became assigned to sexless objects, such as calling one's ship "her" or "him".
@freemo @CCoinTradingIdeas
