The History of "Gender" as a Euphemism for "Sex"
The English language is a profound and often contradictory record of human thought, and few words tell a more curious tale than ‘gender’. For centuries, its meaning was steadfast and purely grammatical, a term of art for linguists and classicists. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records its first use in this context in the 14th century, deriving from the Old French ‘gendre,’ meaning ‘kind, sort, species,’ and ultimately from the Latin ‘genus.’ To describe a person’s biological reality, a more straightforward term was sufficient, sex. This was the established order for over 600 years.
This linguistic stasis began to shift in the mid-20th century. The seminal moment is often attributed to the American sexologist John Money, who, in his 1955 paper Hermaphroditism, Gender and Precocity in Hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic Findings, first coined the term ‘gender role.’ He needed a precise clinical term to distinguish the social behaviours, clothing, and mannerisms expected of a person from their biological sex. Money's work was intended for a narrow, academic audience, not for mass public consumption, but this act set in motion a profound semantic shift.
The concept proved illuminating. As the second-wave feminist movement gained momentum in the 1970s, activists and scholars seized upon ‘gender’ as a powerful conceptual tool. It was a negative term used to highlight how society enforced oppressive stereotypes, ‘gender roles,’ on everyone. Germaine Greer, the celebrated Australian academic and feminist, author of the seminal 1970 text The Female Eunuch, often used the word with great analytical clarity in her work. She and other feminists used the term not as a positive replacement for sex, but as a critical tool to expose and challenge the rigid expectations placed on women, girls, same-sex attracted gay men, and lesbians. This was not a subtle shift, it was a deliberate act to remove stereotyping.
The popularisation of ‘gender’ as a polite synonym for ‘sex’ led to a series of misleading applications, particularly in academic and medical contexts. For instance, textbooks and public health campaigns began using ‘gender’ in phrases like ‘gender differences in heart disease’ or ‘gender-based medicine,’ even when the subject was clearly, unequivocally biological. As the philosopher Mary Midgley famously argued, this linguistic equivocation has real-world consequences, creating confusion where precision is vital. In epidemiology, for example, the failure to distinguish between a social construct and a biological reality can actively impede research and medical progress.
Greer, ever sharp, famously warned against this very trend. While she used ‘gender’ for its analytical precision, she was wary of its potential for obfuscation. In her view, the inability to use the word ‘sex’ directly, without seeking a euphemism, signified a deeper societal discomfort, a retreat from honest, direct communication. This insight, coming from a scholar of Shakespeare’s first folios and a formidable literary critic, highlights the importance of language as a tool for truth, not deception.
The final, most dramatic phase of this linguistic journey began with the rise of postmodern theory in the late 20th century. The work of thinkers like Judith Butler, who in her 1990 book Gender Trouble proposed that gender was a performative act, took the word to an entirely new plane. In this framework, ‘gender’ was not just a social role or a euphemism for sex, it became an individual’s internal sense of self, a feeling. This disconnects the term entirely from any shared, objective reality, transforming a centuries-old grammatical term into a subjective, and often contradictory, personal feeling. The term, once used to expose societal impositions, was weaponised in a way that further obscured biological reality and, in effect, enforced a new, even more rigid form of identity.
The history of ‘gender’ is a cautionary tale for anyone who values clarity and intellectual honesty. What began as a useful linguistic tool for a specific academic purpose has, through a process of semantic drift and ideological capture, been transformed. It has become a euphemism, a term of deliberate confusion, and finally, a subjective concept that serves to obscure, rather than clarify, the material reality of human sex. The journey from grammar to feeling is a journey from fact to ideology. Gender has now been so corrupted that the only place it can be trusted is in the pure study of language, in the masculine, feminine, and neuter forms of nouns. It is time we unabashedly reclaim and use the word sex, because only immature men and children giggle or misconstrue its meaning when it is used in its various forms.
Right, now we've cleared that up, who's for sex?