Feminists have long been ridiculed for their efforts to purge sexism from language by using words like chairperson and avoiding the use of male pronouns as universal signifiers of both sexes. The results have not always been pretty: "He knows what's good for him" is a far more felicitous phrase than "He/she knows what's good for him/her." And we can probably achieve equality without ever using the word herstory. Still, I'm grateful that common usage no longer completely ignores the existence of women with words like mankind.
Besides, I grew up in a predigital age, when concern about grammar and usagewas not dismissed as pedantry. So in my view, while feminist language police aresometimes hypervigilant, sometimes they're not vigilant enough. Why do theytolerate, and even promote, use of the word woman (or the plural women) as an adjective? It's a noun. We have "women doctors" and "women senators" but no "men doctors" or "men senators." We do, however, have "manservants." It's not hard to figure out why. Servants are presumptively female, just as senators are presumptively male. When we incorrectly describe a female politician as a "woman politician," we confirm that, like a "manchild," she's an oddity, an oxymoron.
Equally irritating is our conflation of sex and gender. In a society that vacillates between Puritanism and permissiveness, there are obvious reasons to avoid using the word sex. People fear that it arouses prurient interest by recalling what teenagers do in the backseats of cars or what hookers do in the front. But in addition to various acts, sex refers to the biological categories male and female; gender refers (or used to refer) to cultural norms of masculinity and femininity. To say that you're a member of the female sex is simply to say that you're a woman. To say that you're a member of the female gender is to say that you behave the way a woman is supposed to behave. Sexual differences can only be accommodated; gender differences can and do change. Men can't get pregnant, but they can learn to type, as the computer age has shown.
So I don't think my complaint is mere pedantry. When we use these termsinterchangeably, we lose important distinctions between biology and culture andrisk confusing our standards of law. We shouldn't use the term genderdiscrimination to describe discrimination against a person because she's a female. Instead, it means (or should mean) discrimination against a woman who dresses like a man, for example, or has adopted a masculine style. A sign that says "No men need apply" constitutes sex discrimination. Gender discrimination is a sign that says "No men in skirts need apply."
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has managed, barely, to outlawdiscrimination based on gender, without ever recognizing how it differs fromdiscrimination based on sex. In the 1989 case Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, a plurality of the Court ruled in favor of a woman who had been passed over for partnership at the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse because she was deemed insufficiently ladylike. One partner advised her to "walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry."
Or consider the 1998 case of Joseph Oncale, a former oil rig worker whoclaimed to have been subjected to highly sexualized, physical assaults andthreatened with rape by his male colleagues. In Oncale v. Sundowner OffshoreServices, the Supreme Court allowed Oncale to pursue his "same-sex" harassment case under federal equal-employment law. The Court stressed that federal law prohibits sex discrimination, even when practiced by members of the same sex against one another. The trouble is that Oncale suffered gender discrimination, not sex discrimination. He was reportedly singled out for abuse not because he is a man but because he is a relatively slight man whose masculinity was questioned. There was no general hostility toward men in Oncale's all-male workplace; there was, it seems, hostility toward men deemed to possess insufficient machismo.
Misuse of sex and gender is steadily worsening: As if "single-sex schools" weren't bad enough, we now have "single-gender schools," which I imagine as places in which men learn to walk like women and women learn to whistle. Instead of "transsexuals," we have "transgendered people"--a term that might apply to any woman who exercises authority in what is labeled a masculine style or to any man who carries a purse. We even have surveys asking us to specify our "sex or gender." "Male gender," I replied once, when I was wearing a mannish suit; "female sex."
How did we get so confused? Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issometimes blamed or credited for introducing the term gender discrimination in the early 1970s, when she was arguing landmark sexual-equality cases before the Supreme Court. According to my favorite rumor, she did not want to use the word sex before the Court and so offered up the word gender. I've always been quite grateful to Justice Ginsburg for the rights she helped secure, and I understand that every revolution has its casualties. But why must language always be among them?
