All 12 Uses of
gender
in
Do You Speak American?
- Think, for example, of how you guys has now become a generic form of address: it is gender-, age-, and class-neutral, and decidedly informal.†
Chpt Intr. *gender = male, female, or any of many trans categories
- Besides these important ethnic influences, California's leading-edge culture entails a tolerance for gender diversity that has been well ahead of most of America for at least two generations.†
Chpt 7
- Don't ask, don't tell is at the other end of the cultural spectrum from San Francisco, where nobody has needed to ask for a long time because everybody has been telling—everything, embracing in the process a far wider range of gender definition and terminology than when we filmed the gay community in the 1980s.†
Chpt 7
- Today, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Parade committee told us, they could think of still other kinds of queens, but the word was too narrow a focus for the community [queens being only gay men), because many other people now had a voice, and because the idea of gender had increasingly become "malleable and fluid."†
Chpt 7
- Out of this new diversity has sprung a lexicon of new terms: Transgender—An umbrella term to encompass many forms of behavior, including transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, drag kings, cross-dressers, female illusionists, gender benders, gender queens—although not limited to those definitions, and not all of those people want to be called transgender.†
Chpt 7
- Out of this new diversity has sprung a lexicon of new terms: Transgender—An umbrella term to encompass many forms of behavior, including transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, drag kings, cross-dressers, female illusionists, gender benders, gender queens—although not limited to those definitions, and not all of those people want to be called transgender.†
Chpt 7
- Transsexual—Originally denned as people who had undergone hormonal or surgical intervention to make a physical transition from one gender to another, but now applied more vaguely.†
Chpt 7
- Intersexual—A term adopted for people born with genitalia neither male nor female, as part of a movement to prevent surgical alteration to a gender arbitrarily decided by a doctor.†
Chpt 7
- Linguist Dennis Baron has studied the gender issue in language and says that feminism has also had its impact on which words women choose to use or not to use.†
Chpt 7
- So they'll bring to bear not only understanding the words, but looking for what we call paralin-guistic cues, things like, What is the gender of the voice?†
Chpt 8
- They thought to solve it by substituting synthetic voices so clearly nonhuman that people would not succumb to gender stereotypes, but people still did.†
Chpt 8
- "Even obvious synthetic speech, like Baldi's," Nass said, "will be assigned a gender, will be assigned an emotion, an accent, a location in the country, a personality—the entire range of things that we do when we hear a human voice.†
Chpt 8
Definitions:
-
(1)
(gender as in: gender discrimination) male or female
or (especially regarding self-identification): the state of being male, female, or in any of many trans categoriesWhile the word sex can almost always be substituted for this meaning of gender, gender is typically used in reference to cultural or social differences, while sex is typically used for biological differences. -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Less commonly, gender can refer to a grammatical categories. In some languages (not modern English), nouns that are not distinguishable by biological sex, can still have a feminine or masculine gender.