Gender is an Anglicism, originally borrowed from the Latin language, in which genere natus ("birth sex") is the grammatical ablative of genus, which means "genus". Gender was originally used in German for origin or membership of a particular group, for example in the context of the order of estates (compare genealogical gender). The change in the meaning of the word to that of the Latin sexus for biological sex occurred only later (compare Sexus in der Sprache).
In English, the terms gender and sex have historically been used interchangeably. The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 gives the meaning alternatively as kind, breed, sex (kind, sort, sex) and refers to the Latin genere natus. Thereafter, the term fell into temporary oblivion and was used almost exclusively for grammatical gender (genus), which is rudimentary in English, until the 1950s. With the onset of the sexual revolution in the USA since the Kinsey Report, a need arose to separate social gender issues linguistically from the word sex (sex gap vs. gender gap), and the term gender came back into use.
Today, in the social sciences, gender also refers to the social gender role or the social gender characteristics. It thus refers to everything that is considered typical of a particular sex in a culture (such as clothing and occupation); gender does not refer directly to physical sex characteristics (sex).
Attempt at scientific justification
The term was initially used in this sense for persons who, as intersex or transsexual persons, could not easily be classified as male or female. In this context, the US psychologist John Money (1921-2006) introduced the terms gender role and gender identity in 1955 in order to be able to discuss the discrepancy between the expected and actual behaviour of such persons. Previously, the terms sex role and sex identity were used, but the physical-biological sex of such persons was not clearly defined. John Money used the following definition in 1955:
"The term gender role is used to describe all those things a person says or does to identify himself or herself as having the status of man or boy, woman or girl."
Doing Gender was established in its contemporary, social constructionist connotation by Harold Garfinkel, who applied it to the case of nineteen-year-old Agnes, a patient of Robert Stoller's at the University of California. Agnes's story was traced by Garfinkel in the late 1950s through interviews with her and the doctors responsible, and formed an important part of his 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. While the sociological use of the concept of gender was initially dominated by a focus on deviations from gender norms, in the 1970s girls and women who conformed to gender norms also became the focus of research. The gender concept was discovered and further developed as a concept in this process, especially by feminist research. The distinction between sex as a natural, unchangeable gender on the one hand and gender as a socially negotiated, changeable concept on the other formed the basis for criticism of the relationships between men and women. For example, the psychological and physical attributions on which the exclusion of women from certain professions was based were questioned by highlighting the differences between individual countries in gender and occupational profiles.
The conceptual separation between biological sex and social gender has appeared - and still appears - to be central in social science-feminist discourse since the 1980s. Judith Butler, however, rejects the separation between sex and gender because it is purely artificial and goes back to Cartesian dualism, namely the philosophical view founded by Descartes that body and mind exist independently of each other, side by side. The separation between sex and gender implies that the human being consists, just as Descartes sets up the dichotomy between body and mind, first of all of his biological sex, that is, his sex, his biological, unquestionable, naturally given body, and secondly of his social sex, that is, his gender, his sex, which is quasi freely selectable independently of the body. According to Butler, however, not only social gender appears as a construction, but also biological gender as a questionable truth or as a cultural interpretation of the physical. What one can live as gender is ultimately dependent on what bodily possibilities one has. And these bodily possibilities are in turn already culturally interpreted.
It is also controversially discussed whether the determination of gender as a cultural condition has practical consequences or is merely a renaming, since this determination of individuals cannot be manipulated at will and cannot be overcome by self-reflection alone, but is at best accessible to long-term changes.
Joan Wallach Scott defines gender as a constitutive element of social relations based on perceived differences between the sexes, in which power relations take on an essential meaning. According to Scott, it comprises four elements:
- Symbolic representations (such as "Eve" and "Mary", myths of purity and pollution)
- Normative concepts that limit the interpretation of symbols and the choice of alternatives (such as the Victorian conception of "domesticity").
- references to social institutions (marriage, family, education, labour market, politics, etc.)
- Subjective identity formation - the reproduction of social gender takes place in this area.
David Reimer
John Money attempted to prove his theory that a person's identity gender does not develop until about three years of age and can be changed at will before then, in 1966 with the then 22-month-old Bruce Reimer, who lost his penis after a failed genital circumcision by doctors. Money recommended that the parents perform surgical gender reassignment on the child and, combined with estrogen treatment, raise him as a girl named Brenda. Despite this upbringing, Brenda acted and felt like a boy and was teased at school because of her masculine gait, preferences, and behavior. When Brenda learned of her history at age 14, she took the name David and had the assimilation reversed. He married and adopted his wife's three children. David Reimer took his own life in 2004 at the age of 38. The experiment is considered a failure, although John Money interpreted it as a resounding success in terms of his theory of gender-neutral birth followed by educational imprinting in the male/female direction. The sex researcher Gunther Schmidt points to a comparable case where a boy was brought up as a girl after losing his penis and today works as a bisexual woman in a profession that is considered rather masculine.
