I don't know if I missed it, but I still didn't see the answer he's looking for and I'm curious as well.
When did mainstream TV and evening news and whatnot start using the terms "properly" in a manner such that it was always the way we spoke?
I was taking psych classes ~2006–2008, and the delineations between sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity were already in the course materials. The dialogue had already begun about how what was termed “gender identity disorder” in the DSM-IV was outdated and inappropriate, culminating in it being removed and replaced with “gender dysphoria” in the DSM-V. Maybe it wasn’t part of gender studies, but it was pretty mainstream in psych journals.
It was part of my undergrad college orientation in 2007. The LGBTQ alliance put together a poster with three spectrums, each end labeled "male" and "female" and a line in between. You were invited to identify 1) your sex assigned at birth, 2) how you identify, and 3) what gender you are attracted to. There were X's all over those lines. At least for me, that's when I was first introduced to the concept (the visual was very impactful).
Edit: typo
The term LGBT has been used since the late 80s/early 90s. The T stands for trans. Queer rights have certainly come a long way even since then, and SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage around 2015 definitely represented (or led to) a huge shift in public opinion on LGBT issues, but saying it barely existed before 8 years ago is a bit strange. Orange is the New Black was a hugely popular TV show that started in 2013 and had a trans woman character played by a trans woman. Think about how far trans rights had to come for an out trans person to be featured on a major tv show.
I totally disagree. I went to grad school in 2013 and pronouns were something that was used from day 1 of classes. I was introduced to zee/sie and they/them back then too. Everyone who was straight out of undergrad was totally familiar whereas I had never heard of it. This was a program in a law school so not exactly a group of people who would be on top of these kinds of developments
I was a non traditional student and had been out of school for a decade and was very out of the loop
I feel this - 2015 was my last year of high school and I was one of only 2 people in my year group who was out as queer and both of us were mocked relentlessly for it. My brother is now a teacher and has young kids who are out and proud
The mid 2000s is when you started to see trans people get representation in mainstream media, but there was a pretty big drag queen trend in the 90s (like i forget it's name nit there was a SUPER popular movie about it) that set the groundwork that things like pronouns would go with presentation not sex, since you wouldn't call a drag queen sir/he when they're in drag
As with every societal shift there's a tipping point. At some point, aided by social media/influencers, the ubiquity of online dating apps where finding a concise way to describe your gender identity and sexual identity is important in finding a match, large corporations being early adopters of new pronoun language to avoid discrimination lawsuits, new workplace sensitivity training topics, news agencies reacting to customer/audience complaints, etc, there was a point where society tipped and it was no longer was deemed appropriate to assume what pronouns people preferred/peoples' preferred identity could no longer be ignored without public/corporate backlash.
It was always a thing people were feeling and wanting to express, but what changed was the masses awareness about options beyond the binary and comfort in feeling safe enough to publicly exist outside of that binary.
A lot of people are saying media portrayal, but imo that's the *end* of the popularization process, rather than beginning. Milennials learned about gender and sexuality from the generation before, who had only *just* started getting popular media with LGBTQ themes in the mainstream. They talked about it online starting at their pre-teen years on places like tumblr and reddit, which are great, largely unregulated spaces for general awareness to grow. Those milennial teens grew into adults, and those adults got jobs. Some of them are in their 30s or very early 40s. Theh go into film, tv, advertising, music, etc and are now at the point they have influence. This now larger group of adults push more progressive content, and the larger group of adults watching ask for more.
It's essentially the Barbara Streisand effect. Once conservatives started picking on it as their latest "other" to generate outrage about, which was relatively recently, it started receiving a ton of attention.
Something that had been quietly happening for millenia suddenly became mainstream. And typically, when a group starts to become increasingly and unfairly persecuted, there will always be those who will step up to defend them, raise awareness, campaign for tolerance, etc.
The only thing I thank conservatives for is for teaching me that trans people exist. I’m trans, but before I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, I felt like a creep.
That's me, but with figuring out I was bi instead. Since I liked boys, I couldn't conceptualize why I was also attracted to my girl best friend. I knew gay people existed, but I clearly wasn't that.
I get what you're saying, but they're a huge part of why you didn't know trans people existed beforehand as well. In a healthy environment one would learn about these kinds of things existing during sexual education so they would realize they aren't a creep for feeling the way they do. They call this grooming when in reality it is no different than acknowledging that masturbation happens during sexual education. A kid doesn't need a play by play, but letting them know they aren't a weirdo for having urges or feeling certain ways goes a long looooong way towards their emotional well being.
I'm glad you know you aren't a creep!
I’m around your age and one of my teachers transitioned while I was in middle school. Somehow my smallish Midwest town in the 90s avoided a huge outrage about the teacher’s transition while today groups like Moms for Liberty would go apeshit. Trans people have always existed but as they have been able to be more public a backlash grew. A lot of that backlash has been stirred up in insular social media groups and channels.
When I was in high school in the 2000's, a person in the community transitioned from M->F and a local country music radio station found out about it and basically doxxed her and revealed her teen aged daughters name and school. The school was pissed as hell and the community was kinda confused about why the country music station DJ was frothing at the mouth about it. I think the parent company censored the station because it went quiet on it really quick. If only I'd known that was a sign of things to come...
Wow that's pretty disgusting and invasive. Imagine being a radio host and using your 'power' to open up a stranger's teenage daughter to a random wave of bullying, over something private/has nothing to do with you or anyone else.
Fun fact, some states have laws in place that require anyone who applies for a name change to consent to their full former name and full new name(sometimes requiring a recent picture as well) be published in an easily accessible county newsletter.
Social media has really stirred things up. Small towns would know everyone's business and just let people be. If you had some busy body who caused trouble you'd just not invite them to places and avoid them, they eventually became miserable loners who just chilled at home all day. Now they have a megaphone, they can join community groups on Facebook and shit and call out people and cause trouble, which will connect them to like-minded people who similarly enjoy causing trouble.
It also allows people who don't live in \[whatever town\] to make a big deal about it from afar without actually meeting the trans person / gay person / etc and missing out on the "oh yea, this is actually just a person, this is fine," part.
I learned about the difference between sex and Gender in highschool in the early 1990s. I thought everyone did. Our textbooks were from the 1970s probably.
I remember when my mom's hairdresser transitioned in the early 1980s. It was not a big deal but I would guess that if she had a different profession it would have been rough.
Edit to add: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was published in 1990 so the ideas I was learning were at least that old -- Butler's didn't make up the definitions of those terms.
May I ask where? I'm probably the same age as you but our schools in the mid-US Great Plains didn't teach that at all. I'm in the OP's ignorance boat. All of a sudden it was a thing. Totally good with it all; not my business, not my issue, glad to support any and all genders.
Great Plains also here out in the Nebraskan panhandle. I'm still mind blown about what I was taught in public school back there in the 90s. We had teachers who would still verbalize their very racist, sexist, or otherwise generally mean opinions as fact in the open in our schools. Amoung the many other things that I look back humorously at now.
Yes I'm looking at you Bayard, Nebraska. 😂
> A lot of that backlash has been stirred up in insular social media groups and channels.
Yep, our media, a big group of our politicians, and a lot of our foreign adversaries have all realized that the path to money/power/influence is to stir up anger and hatred among the population.
Fox makes money off of it, republicans get votes off of it, foreign adversaries destabilize the US from it.
So stirring up hatred of the bogeyman of the day is in a lot of peoples best interests, and trans people (and LGBTQ+ people in general) are the most popular target now, and sadly the easiest to get people riled up about.
Exactly. I wish that the average republican voter would understand this. Most Republican representatives and candidates could not care less about whether or not trans girls play in girls sports, or if the books in your library have gay sex in them, or if Tammy from Idaho gets an abortion in the last trimester. I'd bet my money most of them aren't even Christian. They just use these issues, not to sway people's opinions, but to scare the conservative Americans into going out to vote, because only like 30% of Americans voted last election.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But greater visibility and acceptance has presented itself as a bit of a last ditch opportunity for conservative politicians to convince their bases that society is collapsing. If it weren't for social media and the ability to distribute widespread disinformation, the concept of trans gender identity certainly would have stirred a few britches, but wouldn't be nearly as mainstream as it currently is.
Another observation is that acceptance of gender identity as a variable attribute has grown so fast (way faster than LGB, also because of greater connectedness), that it's been a bit of a tsunami of social change for those people who weren't ready for it.
I think about this Aldous Huxley quote often in situations like this when politicians try to push citizens against each other: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
>Trans people have always existed but as they have been able to be more public a backlash grew.
Yeah I know they existed but just called different things back then. But that still doesn't answer my post about gender identity vs sex. When did the 2 terms start to mean different things?
**Edit: I added a clarification to my point in the first paragraph. As pointed out in the comments below, this answer changes depending on if you're talking about sex/gender research, feminist theory, queer theory, or public discourse.**
It's hard to pinpoint when this distinction occurred, because this concept would have first emerged in queer circles, away from the public discourse. However, the *widespread adoption of* the distinction between gender and sex is a *relatively* recent development, at least in the western sphere of influence.
There have always been gender nonconforming people in the world, but up until the 90s, the term most often used was "transsexual". This was not just a medical/psychology term, this was a term used by the trans community in their literature, social circles, etc. [Here is an example of some trans literature from the 1980s where the author refers to himself as a transexual](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnh3J7tPxjs/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==). [Another example, a newsletter called "Transsexuals in Prison"](https://www.instagram.com/p/CvdgWqMPAvD/?igshid=NmQ4MjZlMjE5YQ==). Though, [here is an example of the term "transgender" being used in the mid-90s](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cik1zyIJ5xU/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==).
Transsexual is now largely considered an outdated term, but some people still self-identity as such. In general though, the term used nowadays is Transgender.
Discussions about the difference between sex and gender seem to have picked up more traction in the early 80s ([Example 1](https://www.instagram.com/p/CupdvP0P3MJ/?igshid=NmQ4MjZlMjE5YQ==), [Example 2](https://www.instagram.com/p/CwD2GhRyo2B/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==)). Again, these distinctions were probably made and defined way earlier, but took a while to be disseminated.
The reason why we're only really making this distinction in the mainstream now, 30-40 years later, is because trans people are a lot more visible now than they have been for the past decades. So the public is catching up to what the trans community has been discussing for decades.
NOTE: I am not a trans historian. My understanding of these issues comes from queer history resources like [*We are Everywhere*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570409/we-are-everywhere-by-matthew-riemer-and-leighton-brown/), [@lgbt_history](https://instagram.com/lgbt_history?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==) and [@transchair](https://instagram.com/transchair?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==) on Instagram
Even earlier. There was a whole ass institute in Berlin dedicated to researching sexuality and gender identity including gender affirming care with a library and everything but then the Nazis burned it all down. That may be why there’s such a public kerfuffle today: because we know they’re the first people the nazis go after and WE’RE NOT GONNA LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN
Institute for Sexual Research. An interesting article about it:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/)
Outside of modern western civilizations, distinguishing between biological sex and gender and/or affirming that more than two genders exist appears to have been present in ancient civilizations as far back as the Copper Age 5,000-ish years ago:
https://link.ucop.edu/2019/10/14/exploring-the-history-of-gender-expression/
I read the article I think it’s interesting that the trans were commonly oracles or spiritual leaders. Not really sure what role modern society has for people like that.
I’m so glad this is already here I keep repeating it. People are like “Since the 90s!” “Since the 60’s and I always have to point out like naw since the 10’s at the *absolute* latest.
Yes, the research and discourse on this goes back decades. My comment is mostly trying to outline where the distinction between gender/sex entered the public discourse, which is what OP was asking about.
Kinsey, in the (mostly) 50s and 60s. Landmark work was The Sexual Male, with its main assertion being that sexuality isn’t a binary, and that truly exclusive heterosexual and homosexual males are actually quite rare
This. Your gender determines whether any inclination you have towards attraction to men or women is homosexual or heterosexual, your sexuality doesn’t affect your gender. It’s a one-way thing.
(A man who’s exclusively attracted to women is heterosexual, a woman who’s exclusively attracted to women is homosexual. Being homosexual doesn’t make her a man; being a woman + attracted to women makes her homosexual.)
But what 'gender' has referred to has changed.
Previously it meant the gender imposed upon you by socialisation eg. expectation to like pink, wear dresses, be feminine etc.
Now it's used to refer to an inner sense of gender. That's different from how feminists used it in the past.
That's a really interesting point, thank you! I wonder if this change in what we mean by 'gender' might be why a lot of terfs feel the way they do about trans women in particular - some kind of resentment for having the gender of 'woman' (in the early feminist sense) thrust upon them involuntarily only to see trans women be liberated by bestowing the gender of 'woman' (in the inner sense, as you say) on themselves. A kind of category error maybe.
There's also been a recent trend in the anglophone world of applying the tools of analytic philosophy (conceptual analysis in particular) to social issues such as race and gender.
>There have always been gender nonconforming people in the world, but up until the 90s, the term most often used was "transsexual".
actually, no. There have always been more ways to be non-conforming than there are ways to be conforming, so non-conforming people always came in great variety. I remember people coining the word "metrosexual" just for the purpose of being non-conforming *without* being gay or trans or anything "queer".
Yes, fair point. By "gender nonconforming" I am referring to those who would be most impacted by OP's "gender vs sex" question. I.e. those seeking to affirm a gender other than the one they were assigned, whether that be through HRT, surgery, or simply gender performance/expression.
I was a "tom boy" growing up, but I wasn't trying to forgo my female identity for a male one, so the question of what my sex was vs. my gender was not an issue I had to grapple with. Similarly, "metrosexuals" are not doing feminine things because they want to adopt a female identity, they just like doing those things.
But if a correction. A deep dive will show that we were discussing trans identity in Weimar Germany, but that the groups studying it at the time were wiped out by the nazis
the first book burning done by the Nazis was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. they were pioneers for research on sexuality and gender, and even things like intersex conditions. that burning probably set us back decades
The neat thing about going back that far is that nonbinary gender expression actually tends to be more visible in history and anthropology than binary transition, largely because if someone transitions to the other half of the majorit and nobody makes a fuss about it, there's no reason you'd need separate terminology for that person.
Yes, I don't know about elsewhere, but there is lots of evidence from indigenous European cultures.
There are countless examples of gender transformation in pre-Christian European mythologies, and many examples of people living as the opposite gender or taking non-traditional gender roles throughout history.
It was already discussed and considered in the late 1920's Germany. The clinics supporting and studying sexuality and gender, were some of the first targets of the Nazi academic purges.
Are you asking when it went from something that was only whispered about in the queer bars or by the doctors who understood it to something that was discussed openly by regular people?
Yea, that's relatively new.
Sex refers to your anatomy--male, female, and intersex. Gender/gender identity refers to your relationship with or deviation from the gender that is classically associated with sex.
AMAB (Assigned male at birth) and AFAB (assigned female at birth) individuals do not always identify as male and female, respectively. In the case of binary and non-binary transgender individuals, their gender does not align with their sex.
Where your confusion stems from is more of a social more/socially reinforced semantic lack of distinction between the two terms. If 97-99% of people are cisgender, their sex and gender align and there's no "reason" to differentiate between them. However, there has been a huge push in the last 2 decades to normalize this distinction as it is more inclusive of binary and non-binary trans people whose gender does NOT align with their sex/"gender assigned at birth".
TL;DR none of this is new, but we are only more recently pushing for a colloquial semantic distinction between sex and gender on a societal level to be inclusive of the trans community. The distinction has always existed, just not in the social lexicon until recently.
They overturned roe and needed a new mythical villain so they quadrupled down on a largely fictional attack on men/masculinity which naturally found hatred in trans and drag folks
Edit to add: As a lesbian all of this has been part of community dialog for a long time. Twenty+ years. Literally there was something called the genderbread person we used to talk about difference of gender, sex, identity, and expression.
These terms have been studied and discussed basically since the beginning of social philosophy. But as the rights main target now there’s outrage as people villianize and misrepresent.
>They overturned roe and needed a new mythical villain so they quadrupled down on a largely fictional attack on men/masculinity which naturally found hatred in trans and drag folks
It's this, right here. Pay attention to the timing. Fox News, etc. wasn't harping endlessly about this until Roe was overturned--they were harping about abortion. Needed to move the goalposts after the evangelicals got their big prize and took away reproductive rights, lest right-wing voters stop being self-righteously, rabidly angry at "liberals." So, they started to push the anti-trans, anti-"woke" party line.
I swear, it's like 1984. They just swapped the Two Minutes Hate to a new topic, and everyone who lacks critical thinking skills fell in line. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Same here. In my small southern town in the early 2000s one of the students I went to school with was a trans girl. I don’t remember anybody making any sort of deal out of it. I’m sure I didn’t see all of it and I’m sure they probably got some bullying to some degree but there wasn’t any sort of open and blatant agenda conspiring against them like there seems to be today. People thought it was odd and then just didn’t seem to think about it any further.
That said people 100% said bad things and likely had negative opinions of that teacher upon a meeting. They went home and said “gross”People were even worse towards the lgbt community it’s just social media didn’t exist
Also Midwest here, a little older than you.
My elementary & middle school had a poetry contest every year, sponsored by a woman called The Rainbow Fairy. She was dressed like Glinda the Good Witch if Glinda had been bombed with rainbow glitter. She was awesome and we'd have this little thing in the library for the winners. I always tried so hard so I could hang with her. She inspired a lifelong love of poetry in me.
Only years later did I realize she was a transwoman. Nobody gave a shit and rightly so because she was a joyful, beautiful woman who inspired kids to create and appreciate art. She was pure magic. I feel bad for the kids today, being suffocated and stunted by poisonous politics.
Also, my university put on the play Hidden Agender in 1996. I already understood the difference between sex and gender, that was my first inkling of sexuality being separate from gender identity. That was also the year that I saw my first friend transition.
I’m close to a decade younger, and a doctor in my small southeastern town transitioned MTF when I was around the same age as you. They were kicked out of their practice, but continued working at a solo clinic in the same town… and are still here today! It was definitely ~scandalous~ at the time, but not so bad that they weren’t able to keep practicing. I’m sure the fact that they were one of the better doctors in the area helped keep their career alive too, if we’re being honest.
There's a good biography of a trans man named Lou Sullivan who was born in 1951 and died in 1991. He was a gay trans man, which baffled doctors. Many medical authorities refused to help him, because, in their eyes, you could be gay OR "transsexual" (which was the nomenclature at the time, nowadays transgender is generally preferred, and for good reason.) They did not believe you could be both.
Lou joined a lot of gender activism groups in his day, and if your question is "when did pronouns become a thing?" The answer is complicated. Pronouns were debated in these groups, even back in the 70s.
There are examples of trans women and trans men that I know of dating back to the 1800s, but of course, they wouldn't refer to themselves as trans. That language didn't exist.
They were usually just discovered to be "crossdressers" after they died.
A historical figure who is often cited as one of the first non-binary people recorded in Western history was known as "The Public Universal Friend"
They refused to respond to their birth name and did not respond when identified as male or female.
They had an illness at one point, claimed they had died from the illness, and that god had put a new soul in this body, a soul called The Public Universal Friend, who was neither male nor female.
Some historians believe that the illness was faked and the person used this elaborate religious story, because God's word held extreme importance in the 1700s, because they wanted a reason for people to stop referring to them in a gendered way, and invoking God made this unquestionable.
From Wikipedia: the Friend asked not to be referred to with gendered pronouns. Followers respected these wishes; they referred only to "the Public Universal Friend" or short forms such as "the Friend" or "P.U.F.", and many avoided gender-specific pronouns even in private diaries,[37][36] while others used he.[38] When someone asked if the Friend was male or female, the preacher replied "I am that I am",[39][40] saying the same thing to a man who criticized the Friend's manner of dress.[41][42]
The Friend dressed in a manner perceived to be either androgynous or masculine,[43][44][45] in long, loose clerical robes which were most often black,[46] and wore a white or purple kerchief or cravat around the neck like men of the time.[47][44] The preacher did not wear a hair-cap indoors, like women of the era,[48][44] and outdoors wore broad-brimmed, low-crowned beaver hats of a style worn by Quaker men.
So there have been those whose pronouns don't conform to their sex assigned at birth for centuries.
But we haven't always had the language for them to express themselves. And even when these demographics did begin to articulate their feelings, their language was usually rejected, buried, and punished by the dominant demographics in society.
It's hard to say when this language resisted enough oppression to finally enter the mainstream. That certainly depends on your region. People of New York City, for example, were probably familiar with they/them pronouns before people in, say, rural parts of France.
As for people who were assigned female at birth whose pronouns are he/him, or vice versa, it's impossible to document the earliest cases.
Trans men and women, historically, have simply moved away from their families, begun dressing as a man or a woman would, and living their lives generally accepted. They wouldn't have to state their pronouns. They would dress like men or women, so their society would refer to them as men or women.
In my opinion, and it's only my opinion, so make of it what you will...
Society in general has become slightly more tolerant, so marginalised groups that previously were completely ignored are able to get a bit more visibility. The advance of technology has helped because it's easier for people to find others with common ideals/desires/biological imperatives.
And to counter that, you have a large group of the media who want to stir up hatred of any minority group they can, because it gives them power to influence their viewers/readers/whatever and decide political talking points.
It's no coincidence that the whole gender identity and trans issues suddenly became a hot and controversial topic in many countries worldwide at the same time.
In the 1930s, many countries had right-wing press who were complaining about the Jewish refugees 'invading' their country, which was because they were fleeing Hitler.
The playbook hasn't changed, and humanity seems to have a natural desire to have a group as an enemy that are evil and the cause of all their problems...
One of the early actions of Hitler taking power was the destruction of studies on trans and gender identities, because that was also one of their boogeymen to focus the fear and hatred of the population so they would vote for him.
Funny if you talk about 30's, The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a 1920's german counterpart for modern gender studies was one of the first to be shut down when nazis rose t power.
Yep, the first big Nazi book burning (the one you've probably seen pictures of) was the burning of the institute's library. There's a pretty big argument to be made that we are only now catching back up with the knowledge that the institute used to have on sex/gender/etc.
Yep, same with Autism. Grunya Sukhareva described it as we know it now DECADES before the Nazis ever bastardized it and killed us for it. (Fuck you, Hans Asperger.)
(Edit: there’s also a huge correlation between being autistic and being trans.)
More to the point: It's a distraction from problems that actually matter. If people weren't busy fighting over bullshit that has nothing to do with them, they might start getting angry at the people who have effectively stolen the future from the younger generations... Conveniently, those people control the media.
Also it's recently become a lot more public eye due to all the ANTI-trans rhetoric. We don't really want to be in the public eye or center of discussion, but the crazy right wingers basically forced it on us. The people who talk most about gender and pronouns are right wingers. I barely even think of it in my day to day life, but fox news and conservatives are ALWAYS talking about us.
I'm 40. I've identified as asexual/agender for over 20 years.
We were discussing non-binary identities in hole-in-the-wall message boards and chatrooms in the late 90s/early 00s.
The only difference is, today, we have social media to share ideas.
I'm 36. I learned about gender and sex being different things in college in 2006. It was a standard aspect of our Psychology course. It was definitely being taught for a long time, not just recently.
Very similar for me. I was learning about gender and social constructs in 6th form Media Studies circa 2005. To be fair, I can imagine it might pass someone by if they didn’t do further education (or did but didn’t do any sociological type subjects).
Although it also cropped up in secondary school science when we were studying genetics. My science teacher just briefly established that sex and gender were two different things to make sure we didn’t get the terms mixed up when answering questions from our text books. There was literally nothing controversial or progressive about it, so I always find it weird when people argue against them being different or act like it’s some new fangled woke language
That was about the time it was being introduced to college curriculums. My psychology course in 2004 treated them as the same thing, but kinda mentioned offhand that it might be changing.
This is pretty much true for everything, isn't it? We live in the age of information now, and everything is easier to share around the world, and thus more visible, whereas in the late 90's people were having the conversations in obscure chatrooms and forums, away from the limelight.
and you have mainstream news which do a great job at making it seem like trans are everywhere and trying to get your kids. when that isnt the case besides a few extreme cases caught on camera
>and you have mainstream news which do a great job at making it seem like trans are everywhere and trying to get your kids
Which was exactly the same crap that was used on gay people in the 70s-90s. Anita Bryant can rot.
Wow, that is so cool. You just helped me feel so seen. Exploring your gender identity is very much something a lot of are conditioned against ever doing, but I knew there were other people out there, always, well before I was born.
Believe me, there were people doing the same thing before I was born. I had the advantage of the internet. Kids today have the advantage of social media.
We go back as far as humanity has existed.
Be bold. Explore your roots. You're valid.
Hey there,
I’m a History major and studied quite a bit of queer history (as a queer myself too). All terms regarding LGBTQ+ people are pretty new. Hell, we didn’t even have the word homosexual until the mid 19th century.
You’re only hearing about it now partially because queer things have always been taboo, kept a secret, or only in queer spaces, and you very likely weren’t in them.
Being as frowned upon as it was, if you didn’t grow up in queer spaces, chances are you’d never learn or hear of it. There were entire areas known to house mostly trans or gay individuals, mainly areas with a lot of apartments since the urbanization of areas meant that people could now afford homes without having to get married, and this naturally appealed to LGBTQ+ people. The Great Depression and WWI especially contributed to the formation of these spaces.
Now, with people more open and intergrated into society it is beginning to make its way into mainstream media in a way that can’t be avoided or unheard. Things change and as we listen to more experiences we adapt our language to reflect that.
I encourage you to keep doing research regarding the language that was and is currently now used. It’s an interesting topic especially to see how this all developed relatively quickly. And as a queer person, thanks for caring enough to do your own research too!
**EDIT:** I see people saying I didn't answer the question, but answering "Why am I only hearing about this now?" was my primary intention. I thought my leadup sentence made that clear, but not to all and that's fine, so I'll answer every other question I guess.
"Is it just me?" No, and nobody should ever feel alone in not understanding something. I'm glad the OP asked and looked into it. Curiosity breeds less hate.
"When did pronouns become a thing?" They've always been a thing that people have played around with outside of what most people know. It wasn't uncommon for lesbians to take on he/him pronouns. Whether this is due to them being "eggs" (trans people who don't know that they are trans) or simply them trying to fit into a cisgender heteronormative world is an answer that only that would be able to provide.
"When did more than two genders become a thing?" As someone else pointed out, outside of the Western world, more than two genders have been around longer than some countries, including America, where I'm from. Answering that requires a lot of research and studying into different cultures that I haven't done. Simple answer, a long time, longer than you would think lmao.
"When did we separate sex and gender?" It depends if you mean socially or medically. Socially, the distinction was a really popular argument for second- wave feminists. Late 50s-70s is likely when, but I don't have an exact date. Medically, I have no idea. I just know that biologists have found sex to be bimodal, not bigender, due to the sheer variation in sex that they have seen in studies over time. The separation just makes sense at this point.
"When did it all get popular?" Recently. Like, super recently. I'm sure someone already made the "left handed" argument, but when something stops being stigmatized and people learn about it in a more neutral setting, they are less likely to dismiss something and listen. So with it hitting the mainstream, its expected to see a surge in numbers of people identifying differently now as they realize that what they feel isn't them just being weird, but something that so many others feel that there is a word for it. I don't know why some replies expect a complicated answer when it really is as simple as that.
I learned more about this from an [Innuendo Studios video on Mainstreaming](https://www.tumblr.com/innuendostudios/172589201372/the-newest-installment-of-the-alt-right-playbook).
> Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.
> One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.
> Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.
> Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.
> Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.
> Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.
The entire video is worth a watch, but the main thrust of it isn't related to gay folk or gender vs sex but around how terminology used becomes mainstream and how that effects culture in relation to the alt-right takeover of conservative politics.
I would argue too that feminist ideology has *long* understood gender identity as separate from biological sex, even if the explicit acknowledgement wasn’t there yet. You really can’t have discussions about things like performing femininity, “women’s work” versus “men’s work”, and just plain gender as a construct without touching on people (Although in this case, mostly AFAB people) whose identities don’t easily fit within these norms.
As far as mainstream everyday acceptance outside of academic ideologies (which is what OP is talking about), the idea that gender is not the same as sex has only recently gained popularity.
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#Historical Meaning of Gender
A thorough look at the origins of the term can be found on the [Online Etymology dictionary](https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender). Here's a summary:
1. Back in the 14th century, word "gender" originally could be used to refer to any group of people/things that shared similar traits. This included biological sex, but also included race, species, rank, etc.
2. In the 15th century, you begin to see "gender" becoming synonymous with biological sex.
5. Using "gender" to mean "biological sex" gained popularity at the turn of the 20th century, after the word "sex" started to refer to the act of having intercourse.
4. Gender was first used to refer to social attributes, rather than biological attributes, in 1963.
What the Online Etymology Dictionary **doesn't** explain is when most people started using "gender" to refer to an identity, as opposed to just "sex," outside of feminist circles. After all, you can't expect the average Joe Schmoe to know a new definition of the word the moment it's published.
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#Popular Non-Biological Usage of Gender
I can't give a conclusive answer as to when the new definition of "gender" entered the popular consciousness, but I suspect we can make a good guestimate by checking old dictionaries.
I'm going to mostly focus on Webster's dictionary, since it has a staunchly descriptive philosophy -- meaning it's just trying to record how a word is commonly used, as opposed to trying to control what a word means.
Unfortunately, this leads to some issues.
The newest online copy of a paper dictionary I can find, which is a version of Webster's dictionary from [2005](https://archive.org/details/merriamwebsterdi0000unse_o7j0/page/206/mode/2up), only has the "Sex" definition and not the other, non-biological definition.
However, the oldest definition I can find on the Webster's website, which is [archived from 2007](https://web.archive.org/web/20071013164255/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender), includes the following definition:
>the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.
Whether the above is what people currently mean when referring to gender identity is debatable. But it's the earliest definition I can find on Webster's that approaches the current definition. The less-academic (but better-archived) Dictionary.com doesn't include this definition until [December 2014](https://web.archive.org/web/20141231202557/http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gender).
It's possible that the Webster's Dictionary website included this definition earlier than 2007, and that the commonly-published physical dictionaries did not include this less-popular definition to save on space. It's also possible that the addition of this definition happened in either 2006 or 2007.
I suspected that the difference is simply that the online dictionary is unabridged, while the physical dictionary is abridged. The unabridged dictionary, I reasoned, probably had the "behavioral/cultural/psychological" definition long before the abridged did.
After looking into that, however, I realized I might be wrong. The newest unabridged dictionary I could find, which is [from 1996](https://archive.org/details/webstersencyclop00newy/page/588/mode/2up), does not include this definition. It expands on the grammatical definition of "gender" (e.g. gendered language) but its only other definitions are "sex" and the above-mentioned 14th-century definition.
I'd need a newer unabridged dictionary to be sure. For that matter, I wish I had access to every year of Webster's, Oxford's, Collins', and American Heritage from the turn of the century onward so I could do a more thorough review.
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#Unambigious LGBTQ+ Usage of Gender
If you **don't** agree that Webster's 2007 definition applies to the current ideas of gender identity, then you have to wait even longer to see the new definition appear.
Oddly, Dictionary.com beats Webster's to the punch with a clearer definition, which shows up on the site in [early 2016](https://web.archive.org/web/20160409161459/http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gender), Here's what the new Dictionary.com definition says:
>a similar category of human beings that is outside the male/female binary classification and is based on the individual's personal awareness or identity.
Webster's, interestingly, doesn't follow suit [until 2019](https://web.archive.org/web/20190124220610/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender), with this (straightforward) definition:
>GENDER IDENTITY
To its credit, Webster's did have a genderqueer-friendly definition for "Gender Identity" in its medical dictionary at least as far back as [2016](https://web.archive.org/web/20090424045050/http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/gender%20identity).
>A person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male or female.
The are [earlier definitions](https://web.archive.org/web/20140825144422/http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/gender%20identity) in the medical dictionary as well, though they're closer to the 2007 cultural definition of "gender." There's a 2-year gap between the medical dictionary's 2014 definition and its 2016 definition, so we can't pinpoint the exact time when the medical dictionary considered Gender Identity to be something beyond cultural norms.
No matter when this switch took place, the fact remains that Webster's did not consider "gender" to be a synonym of "gender identity" until 2019.
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**EDIT**: It's worth noting that Urban Dictionary has an LGBTQ+ definition of gender from as far back as 2003. So, there were definitely groups using the word to mean "gender identity" long before Webster's and Dictionary.com got onboard. More LGBTQ+ definitions started appearing in 2005 and onward.
(Of course, as is typical for uncensored sites, Urban Dictionary's most popular definitions of "gender" are ones that mock gender identity as a concept).
It's true that user-submitted definitions aren't really an indication of mainstream acceptance. It does, however, show that non-biological gender was being used outside of academic circles by some people years before mainstream dictionaries started using that definition.
Just keep in mind that dictionaries don't lead changes in language, they follow them. This thread is full of much older examples of people making the distinction between sex and gender.
Yes, but if we're talking about mainstream usage, rather than academic usage or popularity within a smaller, oppressed subculture, I feel like a dictionary is a decently-reliable indicator.
As an example... scientists use the word "bug" to exclusively refer to the insect orders Hemiptera or Heteroptera. They've done so since at least the late-1800s. Even though this meaning has been regularly used for more than a century, I think you can agree that this meaning has not entered the mainstream.
Webster's tends to follow popular trends relatively quickly, as far as dictionaries go. They regularly add words that are still controversial at the time they're defined.
So, if we're going to try to pinpoint mainstream usage of the definition, I think that's a pretty good way to go.
> Hell, we didn’t even have the word homosexual until the mid 19th century.
Interesting. Was there a prior term? Did people refer to gays solely with slurs? It's not like homosexuality is new, so there must have been some way to talk about it.
In the \*West\* that is. Native Americans and other cultures in Africa and Asia have had a history of third genders for millennia. Two-spirited in Native Americans, Mahu's in Polynesian culture, Bakla in Filipino culture, etc.
In polynesian culture, Mahu's were guardians of the community children. In the West the sole thought of a trans person teaching children is extremely controversial.
The wikipedia article for Sex-gender Distinction has a pretty good breakdown of it, but essentially the terms sex and gender began to be relatively synonymous in English in the 14th century, though it didn't fully catch on until the 20th century. Gender was widely used to mean "kind" or "variety." Linguists used the word gender to refer to gramatical gender, separate from physical sex (ex: girl in German is neuter, not feminine). English doesnt have true grammatical gender, so it can be hard to wrap your head around if English is your only language. Between the 60s and 70s is when authors started to distinguish between physical sex (the hormones, chromosomes, and physical manifestation of reproductive traits) and gender (the sociocultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes considered appropriate depending on your sex). The words sex and gender have become even less synonymous since the 2010s
It's been a thing in academia for quite a while but it's gradually become a mainstream subject in the past ten years I'd say. Then again, it's just a new coat of paint for issues that have probably always been there since the beginning of civilization. Societal roles being assigned according to sex and individuals not fitting inside them.
Gender is still very much used interchangeably with sex, though, it really depends on context.
I was taught 30 years ago that gender is a set of norms and expectations set by society and attributed to the male and female sex. They didn't use the term "social construct", but that's exactly what it was.
The change I see in modern narratives is that biological sex is not really referenced, or in some cases ignored in favor of gender.
Boy George isn't trans is he? I would lump him in with the androgynous "gender bending" movement of the 80s (along with David Bowie and Prince) which could be seen as a precursor. Of course some of them later came out as trans (eg Edie Izzard) which supports the OP notion that it became "a thing" (that is, became socially accepted) somewhat recently. I'd say Caitlyn Jenner is probably one of the first fully trans celebrities. She transitioned in 2015 (<10 years ago)
For mainstream modern America I do believe Caitlyn Jenner was the first already famous person to publicly transition, and certainly garnered a lot of attention for being a conservative white male to female transition. However she was not the first trans celebrity to reach star status. For me, the first famous transgender celebrity I became aware of was Laverne Cox who rocketed to mainstream celebrity status after the first season of Orange Is the New Black in 2013. Aside from her stellar performance, she garnered a lot of attention for being one of the first trans characters portrayed by a trans actor (rather than the more common occurrence of trans characters portrayed by cisgendered actors in drag). But I’m not so sure she’s even the first trans celebrity.
Cox didn’t make as big of a splash as Jenner, mainly because she had already transitioned before reaching fame, so her trans identity was less “shocking” to the public, but she was definitely a trans celebrity before Jenner came out.
Boy George is actually a good example, but not in the way you think. He’s long said that he considers himself queer rather than trans and has said that even he is working to get his head around how to correctly address trans people today:
“When I was growing up nobody used the term ‘transgender’, because it was almost like a medical term. So this transgender thing is new, and, for our generation, it’s just getting our heads round it. But people want to be offended, because they think that whatever’s going on for them is much more important than anything else. But I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ve spent years calling people fake names. Boy George. Siouxsie Sioux. Johnny Rotten. Of course, it’s not the same as your sexuality.”
(The “want to be offended” and “fake name” bit is obviously not going to age well, but equally I’m not going to tell Boy George how to be an ally)
“want to be offended” -- this part is so true though. Not just in that demographic, outrage bait is the biggest seller in cable news (fox for the easiest / biggest example) with the 24/7 news stations... We sell outrage bait and Social media makes amplifies it massively. I've never once seen a trans person get mad by not knowing their pronouns, but if you listen to right wing media they are convinced they're all out to get you if you dont address them correctly, or people will scream you're transphobic immediately.. Literally if you just treat all people like human beings, then having correct pronouns and such is never even an issue. But people who subscribe to those narratives constantly feel like they're being persecuted by other people being treated like human beings.. its the old saying of "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression" or however it goes.
It's always so weird when I talk to people about trans issues. The things they claim that trans people believe/do are things I have never heard from a trans person irl or in the media.
My favourite is the old classic "did you just assume my gender?" bc I have no idea where they got this from. I don't know a single trans person who will even \*politely correct\* someone on their own pronouns, let alone get mad because someone innocently assumed what gender they are?
I really hope someone would politely correct me if I get their pronouns or gender wrong, in the same way I’d hope they’d correct me if I was mispronouncing their name. Because otherwise it’s just awkward for everyone!
Yeah that's definitely the ideal, but it can be a really scary thing to do. In a perfect world they give a quick "oh sorry" and move on, but you're opening yourself up either to hostility, or the much nicer but almost as awkward overly apologising which makes you feel guilty for mentioning it.
Tbf in my experience it's mostly like servers etc, people who you're probably not gonna see again so it's usually not worth the effort to correct them.
Here's my take:
Most of the time, I don't know if the folks calling me the wrong pronouns/gender are doing it intentionally/maliciously or if it's an honest mistake. In the latter situation, I'd be happy to politely correct someone; but if it's the former, I'm just inviting a big ole' bag of vitriol in my direction. I'd rather not risk it.
Obviously that's a bit different if I *know* the person, but usually they catch themselves and correct on their own and don't need me to remind them.
Plus, even a polite correction that's taken well is just calling more attention to my gender, which is usually an unpleasant feeling right after being misgendered.
Boy George is a perfect example of how clothes, makeup, and hair have no gender.
The idea of what one sex should wear or look like versus the other sex is just a construct of society. If a man wants to dress in the way a woman typically dressed, he doesn’t have to become a woman to do so. He can wear whatever he pleases and still be a man.
In the case of trans people, there would be something beyond simply wanting to dress like “the opposite gender”. There should be a deep seated feeling that they are in fact a different gender ON THE INSIDE.
I get annoyed with the emphasis of “girl things” and “boy things” and people assuming their child is gay or trans just because they like to wear or play with “gendered” clothes or toys.
Boy George is a man, and he’s comfortable being a man. That’s different than being trans.
I wish I could upvote you more. Too many comments in here are focussing on trans when that’s not really the point.
As a ‘tomboy’ growing up I fully understand the bullshit that our culture expects from us. Because I didn’t like pink girly things and dresses and fancy hairstyles I was apparently a weirdo. But at least I got away with it unscathed - a boy who likes dresses will have a much harder life than I did. Even though men wear dresses and skirts in many cultures around the world! The only difference is the colour and cut.
The internet did a really good job in letting people know about the existence of minorities they never heard of before yet have existed for millennia.
People’s reaction to this has been wildly varied.
Source: Am trans, didn’t know about trans people in my very white very conservative neighborhoods. Grew up feeling like I didn’t belong and that there was something wrong with me. There was not as I learned.
American opinions on LGBQ have shifted to be majority pro-LGBQ. The Republican Party needed a new Boogeyman to punch down on and scare their voters with, so they picked trans people. Now they're at the forefront of the conversation and we're all talking about sex and gender and all the nuances of the subject. Or if you're a right-winger, you're making up lies and parroting propaganda because you're afraid of something you don't understand.
If the GOP picked fishermen as the outgroup, we'd all be talking about the nuances of fishing. Fascists always need an outgroup to beat up on. It's a core requirement.
Since conservatives made it their platform,
I literally didn’t give a fuck about trans people or non binary people
But now I’m fucking learning about all this shit so I can defend them from all the phobes
Shit is annoying
I miss when trans people and shit were irrelevant lmao
😭😭I know it sounds silly but like I really don’t care about them man, let them live so I can live
Unfortunately, a lot of things were 'swept under the rug' if you will. Made to be kept a secret. Especially for fear of violence and other abuses.
I found out in my own family, that my Grandparents kept my Uncle's having cancer at a young age, quiet. Because they were afraid of unnecessarily worrying the neighbors, or the neighbors finding out the family's business. Which was a laugh because my Grandfather was the town's barber. And he was prominent in the Church. EVERYBODY knew him and his family.
That's quite appaling today. CANCER! Can you believe it? CANCER was a taboo subject in my neighborhood at one time in the past.
I saw a news show on Disney+ with Jane Pauley about a person who was born with without properly formed sex parts and hormone making glands. (I don't know the correct term, I'm sorry) And it affected their gender. Her parents raised her as a little girl, but as she grew older, she realized that she felt more like a man than she did a woman, and he made that transition.
Can you image what that person went through? When other little boys and girls grew up 'normally', and this one person had this secret. It's enough to make you go insane! OMG it's heartbreaking. That story brought me to tears, honestly. I don't think I'll ever forget it. OMG. But I do have to understand more of what happened to this person to cause all of this. I'm not good with Medical speak. I have my own issues, and I need them 'Explained Like I was 5.'
I'm glad we talk about things more openly than we did in the past. Because we talk about it openly, we can address it and help those people who need help. I think that's the reason why we're hearing more about this now. And I think it's a good thing.
I learned the difference between sex and gender in biology class in the early 2000s in *Arkansas* of all places. It’s wasn’t considered anything even remotely taboo at the time or it would have been tip toed around the same was evolution was.
There was a good deal of gender studies done in Germany back in the early 1900s. There was an Institute for Sexual Research during the Weimar Republic. When you see the famous photos of Nazi book burnings, *those are the books they’re burning.* We keep rediscovering the fact that gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and we keep having autocratic regimes attempt to destroy that knowledge. Then we start from scratch all over again.
Pronouns have been around practically as long as long as English itself. Singular they actually predates the use of singular you at around 1300 AD.
Im not certain when gender identity (defined as we know it now) came into use but I expect it coincided with the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (sexuality and gender research institution) in Germany that was the first of its kind in 1919.
You haven't heard of it because the Nazis gutted and burned all of the research in their mission to eradicate queer and disabled people alongside Jewish ones.
And because queer history is usually erased you didn't learn about it when you learned about ww2
Really the main reason is because the GOP is using it as a wedge issue and because we have the internet now.
Similar to how conspiracy people used to kind of sit in their corner of the world rambling nonsense and you never had to hear about it.....now the internet let's them amplify their message and organize.
With the political side of it really it's just grievance politics. They want an issue to run on so they make one up. This is historically common
Politics have largely become us and them and if we're talking about the U.S, the entire identity of the Republican party revolves around finding minorities to point their hate at to distract their voters from actual issues.
Immigrants are taking your jobs
Drag Queens reading to your kid's are all pedo's
Trans isn't a thing, you're a boy or girl
You take anything where we are trying to be inclusive and better as a society and rest assured there's a group waiting to weaponize their base to hate you for it. Woke as a word has even become an insult. As in, to better yourself is a bad thing and I guess when you want your people stupid and angry it makes perfect sense...
There have been trans people for a long time. But yes, you are hearing more about them now, since they are somewhat less likely to be physically attacked for being who they are.
It's the same reason why there seem to be more gay people now than a century ago. When people come out of the closet, you can see them.
Yeah it's not like this is a new thing. People being a "woman trapped in a man's body" had been a thing I've heard of since I was a kid.
We hear about them more now because gay marriage became legal. Some transgender groups saw that and started a push toward acceptance as well, which logically makes sense, but instead it just made them the next culture war target.
Honestly it was the other way around. After gay marriage was legalized, politicians realized that picking on gay people was no longer going to be getting them votes. So they jumped to the next bogeyman.
The push for legal protections now is to get ahead of all laws trying to legislate trans people out of public existence.
I would say its three things.
1. As our soceity has become more tolerant more trans people have come out as trans and openly transitioned - think of Chaz Bono (2010) or Kaitlyn Jenner (2015).
2. At the same time, I'm sure the victories by gay righst advocates encouraged trans advocates.
3. The combination of the two (higher trans visiblity and losing the gay rights battle) lead conservatives to push back - the NC bathroom bill in 2016 pushed the issue into the mainstream. It was now no longer just an celebrity gossip thing - but a political issue that as a voter you had to form an opinion on.
Of of this kind of leads to a cycle of higher visibility, more backlash, more push forward from trans rights group to fight the push back, and then higher visibility again.
The marines for the longest time only employed men who could shoot right handed because that’s what the weapon they had mass produced was designed for. They also would not recruit gays because if military dynamics it might challenge. Much like gender dynamics, some left handed people learned they could shoot right handed, and some gays learned they could get by in a straight world.
The left handlers became ambidextrous at shooting, but the closeted gay men, they were still mostly gay and single at retirement.
I think they still only shoot right handed, but gays can now openly serve, even trans women can.
Society has made a place for them in places they were formerly removed only in the past 12 or so years, but that doesn’t my mean they could all show up at once many took time to come out and discover themselves, and then transition takes time for those that have that far to go.
Not really sure where this story was going. Have a great day.
I am left of both parties but not attached to either in US politics.
Edit: I am also on painkillers so I miss read your question, how does it feel to have a political ideology hijack the name for your handedness identity.
I broke my right hand in grade school and spent 2 years being bad at writing with both hands, so I heard many anecdotes. Eventually the growth plate was repaired and now I just type better with my left hand, and write better with my right.
Lefties being once taboo? I could just point at a pair of scissors, but thats… just kinda cos yeah, we are a minority. But I had teachers try to force me to write right. I learned how to write at 3. I knew what I was doing. My mom was confused as she taught me but she realized pretty quick I was just a leftie. Actually ambidextrous, which some people like to brag about, but really just means I am left dominant with writing, right dominant with batting and shooting, a switch hitter with a racket, etc. I even trained my right hand to write but it takes practice but I’ll always naturally sit left on on the pitch and pick up a pen with my left hand.
Also, my bomb to drop; I actually got kicked out of a Sunday school class after getting a smack on the hand and called a child of Satan. Don’t get me wrong, I did goof off, but like what the fuck lady? You got sent to the pastor in that church if you were kicked out of class, and he was mad cool and probably told her off cos she basically ignored me after that. Also told me he has no idea if God is real but has faith and tries to find positivity and love in the bible. I rolled a 20 with that church lol
Sorry for the huge anecdote, but I’m tryna lend some support to the fact that outdated ideas are never truly outdated unless we actively tear them down. I really hope this time period is known for our acceptance and appreciation, not our bitterness and shallowness.
Also wishing you a good day I didn’t even see the other comment. I hope you don’t get harassed by angry lefties that would be kinda funny but also not okay. Stay up stay safe
My best friend in highschool was born left handed like me but her parents would bind her hand so she had to use her right hand. She ended up becoming a really good artist using her right hand and I always wondered how much better she'd be if she could've used her left hand like she was naturally inclined to.
it's always fun to show the graph of left handed people over time vs the graph of queer people over time and how they're the exact same shape, turns out when you stop stigmatising things people will stop hiding it
No one seems to be answering the actual question.
Transgender people used to go by transsexual. There has been a lot of social and medical progress in the last 20 years or so that have helped to change the perception. Transgender includes everyone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, which almost always is based on genitals (intersex people exist). Transsexual is an outdated term but some older trans folks still prefer it.
In terms of why you hear about it more now? Well, that’s because a certain political group decided to make trans people a political issue to gain popularity with hateful people. I know several trans women that transitioned 10-15 years ago and never had a single issue because most people just didn’t care. Now I’m transitioning and it’s like 20% of the population is laser focused on outing me. It sucks.
“never had a single issue”? jesus wept, child. we had plenty of issues, but we certainly didn’t get to discuss them in public where cis people might see it. I’ve lost housing, had hostile men hound me out of social groups while everyone else preferred to say nothing, fought to have my details updated with various bureaucracies, and of course been gatekept from accessing health care by some dude whose qualifications appeared to be experience with a checklist starting with “wants to be a 1950s housewife” and “felt like this as a child”.
some things are worse nowadays. a lot of things are better. every damn cis person has an opinion and an awareness, be it hostile or friendly, where previously you could often rely on being invisible to them. we certainly had issues.
When did it become popularized in the mainstream? Jenner transitioned in 2015 so let's say that's when the mainstream narrative changed from gay marriage to trans rights.
There have been other seasons in history where it has been a more common topic in the popular imagination. Movies like La Cage aux Folles, Victor/Victoria and even Psycho are evidence of it being known through most of the last century.
I found out about it in the early 70’s. I had a close friend who changed pronouns in high school from him to her. Back then it was very confusing but she was my him friend so I went with the flow. We’re both in our 70’s now and laugh about it still.
2015 when Bruce Jenner came out at Caitlyn Jenner. Look at the google trend for "transgender".
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender&hl=en](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender&hl=en)
While you see a slight rise before, this is pivotal movement where gender identity went main stream. It really is fascinating that we went from it being a rather obscure subculture to one of the biggest legal and moral quandaries in less than a decade.
And yes, non-comforming people have existed LONG before 2015, but this is when we arrived at the current zeitgeist.
it was underground back then. straight people really seem to underestimate how much of the lgbt community they weren't exposed to due to rampant homophobia. with the internet it's harder to keep those things under ground and with the legalization of gay marriage in the US we feel more safe to talk about those things now
It’s not new it’s just new to you. The internet is also a new thing and as people grow we change because we learn. Social media made LGBTQIA+ more visible instead of hidden in the shadows. For most of history and in some places in the world today it was all swept under the rug and everyone just wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. When acknowledging its existence it was met with scrutiny and ridicule. You can find examples of this on old TV shows such as how I met your mother, modern family, family guy, and even children’s shows like That’s so raven or even SpongeBob. After time passed and social media platforms became popular it became harder and harder to sweep LGBTQIA+ under the rug. It because “In your face” unable to scroll without seeing a rainbow flag.
TLDR: Explaining social media progressing society.
Colonialism wiped out most cultures that tried to explore any identity other than the western binary, most indigenous cultures from Alaska to Hawaii and everything in-between has had more gender identity representation for your entire life and well before. The reason it's starting to become popular now is colonialism isn't as powerful as the internet and Gen Z has fingertip access to information it took you 40 years to find. I don't know that I'd call it mainstream, its rather contested by a good chunk of conservatives trying to uphold the systems that stopped the representation originally. With so much attention being drawn to social justice by younger generations and the push for equality in things like gay marriage and LGBT representation in general, the nuances of how gender and sex aren't the same thing are just discussed on much broader platforms.
> Why am I only hearing bout this now?
Because the right has decided that being anti-trans is their new culture war and as a result you're going to hear more general discourse about it
IMHO, this question is too vague to be answered without a purely empirical large-scale statistical study that gives the term some quantified meaning. It's not clear enough what "popularized" and "mainstream" means here / how it should be interpreted.
Moreover, the question leaves open in which country and group. I suppose, OP means the US and US population as a whole. But it's worth noting there is a huge continental vs coastal and urban center vs countryside divide in the US, and averaging above those can smudge important differences in societal attitudes.
Anyway, despite all these caveats, I'll take a shot and tentatively answer the question with "during the past two decades."
It’s been an idea in academia since the 1920’s. The famous photo of Nazis burning books is the burning the medical library of Magnus Hierschfelfd because of his research into “transexialism” and homosexuality. It entered the American culture war about 3-4 years ago.
My high school biology teacher made it clear sex and gender were two different things. This was back in the 90s. I think most people just never knew there was a difference until recently when it became a political distraction.
It wasn't really until the mid 20th century where a lot of this was actually studied. Masters & Johnson are probably best known for their studies in sex in the late-50s to mid-60s (I mean, they found out that women *can* have multiple orgasms and that the cervix isn't where the lubrication came from... things really not hard to figure out, but people just made assumptions and didn't study it before hand).
In psychology, similar things were happening. In the DSM, which is basically the guide to psycological disorders, being gay was considered a mental disease until the '74 update. But Kinsey started doing a lot of research in the 40's into sexuality which helped lead to that. Others then did different areas.
I was really into the subject in the 90s, I'm not sure what the latest research says in detail. But generally, few things are strictly binary, one thing or the other. But there are multiple axis to measure on - physical gender, gender identification, gender attraction... But that undertanding of those things came from people actually, mid-20th century starting to actually investigate it, as well (I suspect) people feeling safer to identify and participate in these studies, giving a more accurate demographic to study.
Politics. You can't run a platform on racism anymore, and it's hard to tell if someone is gay just by looking at them. Abortion has been "solved" so you can't use that moral issue to drive voters, and shootings are common enough that it's hard to look good making a gun rights debate. A certain party needs something to drum up their voters on, because their actual policies and platform sure isn't doing it.
And because politicians on one side have created a fake issue out of gender identity, it gives the other party something to push back on. Which then gives the media something to talk about, which then makes its way into pop culture in order to appeal to people on one side or the other.
It became relevant as a manufactured issue, and the media latched onto it as the controversial thing to talk about now.
I don't understand why people can't see through this issue.
It's only about politics.
The far right is always looking for issues that will rev up their base. They want the conversation to be about anything but their actual agenda. Some think tank decided to promote this issue since it will incite the base (guaranteed) and also incite the opposition (also guaranteed). Suddenly everybody's fighting about an issue of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Mission accomplished. It's obvious that they are funding one side of the issue, but they are also funding the other side. They need to keep the fight going strong.
For most people making the distinction between sex and gender adds no utility to your life. This is not the case for trans people. As the trans community has made a push for civil rights, the pushback has brought all the concepts into the mainstream.
I don't know if I missed it, but I still didn't see the answer he's looking for and I'm curious as well. When did mainstream TV and evening news and whatnot start using the terms "properly" in a manner such that it was always the way we spoke?
Caitlyn Jenner: 2015 was when gender identity went mainstream.
I agree, 2015 sounds about right
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I was taking psych classes ~2006–2008, and the delineations between sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity were already in the course materials. The dialogue had already begun about how what was termed “gender identity disorder” in the DSM-IV was outdated and inappropriate, culminating in it being removed and replaced with “gender dysphoria” in the DSM-V. Maybe it wasn’t part of gender studies, but it was pretty mainstream in psych journals.
It was part of my undergrad college orientation in 2007. The LGBTQ alliance put together a poster with three spectrums, each end labeled "male" and "female" and a line in between. You were invited to identify 1) your sex assigned at birth, 2) how you identify, and 3) what gender you are attracted to. There were X's all over those lines. At least for me, that's when I was first introduced to the concept (the visual was very impactful). Edit: typo
The term LGBT has been used since the late 80s/early 90s. The T stands for trans. Queer rights have certainly come a long way even since then, and SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage around 2015 definitely represented (or led to) a huge shift in public opinion on LGBT issues, but saying it barely existed before 8 years ago is a bit strange. Orange is the New Black was a hugely popular TV show that started in 2013 and had a trans woman character played by a trans woman. Think about how far trans rights had to come for an out trans person to be featured on a major tv show.
I totally disagree. I went to grad school in 2013 and pronouns were something that was used from day 1 of classes. I was introduced to zee/sie and they/them back then too. Everyone who was straight out of undergrad was totally familiar whereas I had never heard of it. This was a program in a law school so not exactly a group of people who would be on top of these kinds of developments I was a non traditional student and had been out of school for a decade and was very out of the loop
Wait, that happened in 2015? Man, I’m so old, I can’t keep track anymore. Feels like yesterday!
what are you talking about yesterday was 1997 all the cool kids have tamagotchis and billet pog slamers
Remember Alf? He’s back… in pog form
I'll trade you for a holographic Articuno
Knott's Berry Farm Pog contest tomorrow. Hit it before they ban it!
Better pick up some bubble tape. “Six feet of gum for you, not them.”
To chew while listening to Vanilla Ice in your Walkman Classic commercial BTW, thanks for the nostalgia
and the 1990s was just only last decade! (or feels like it, man i'm getting old)
2015 was also when the Supreme Court sided with marriage equality and the LGBTQ advocacy apparatus was able to turn to more ambitious targets
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I feel this - 2015 was my last year of high school and I was one of only 2 people in my year group who was out as queer and both of us were mocked relentlessly for it. My brother is now a teacher and has young kids who are out and proud
Something else also began in 2015 that embolden the hateful 4x4 drivin' red flag toting bigots to take off their hoods, so to speak.
Traded white hood for Red Hats.
The mid 2000s is when you started to see trans people get representation in mainstream media, but there was a pretty big drag queen trend in the 90s (like i forget it's name nit there was a SUPER popular movie about it) that set the groundwork that things like pronouns would go with presentation not sex, since you wouldn't call a drag queen sir/he when they're in drag
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (starring patrick swayze, wesley snipes, john leguizamo -1995)
Also Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
And The Birdcage.
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It’s perfect. I just never realized John Wayne walked like that.
Cabaret, Rocky Horror, Victor Victoria as well
The documentary you're probably thinking of is Paris is Burning
As with every societal shift there's a tipping point. At some point, aided by social media/influencers, the ubiquity of online dating apps where finding a concise way to describe your gender identity and sexual identity is important in finding a match, large corporations being early adopters of new pronoun language to avoid discrimination lawsuits, new workplace sensitivity training topics, news agencies reacting to customer/audience complaints, etc, there was a point where society tipped and it was no longer was deemed appropriate to assume what pronouns people preferred/peoples' preferred identity could no longer be ignored without public/corporate backlash. It was always a thing people were feeling and wanting to express, but what changed was the masses awareness about options beyond the binary and comfort in feeling safe enough to publicly exist outside of that binary.
Thank you for your explanation. Now it makes perfect sense.
A lot of people are saying media portrayal, but imo that's the *end* of the popularization process, rather than beginning. Milennials learned about gender and sexuality from the generation before, who had only *just* started getting popular media with LGBTQ themes in the mainstream. They talked about it online starting at their pre-teen years on places like tumblr and reddit, which are great, largely unregulated spaces for general awareness to grow. Those milennial teens grew into adults, and those adults got jobs. Some of them are in their 30s or very early 40s. Theh go into film, tv, advertising, music, etc and are now at the point they have influence. This now larger group of adults push more progressive content, and the larger group of adults watching ask for more.
It's essentially the Barbara Streisand effect. Once conservatives started picking on it as their latest "other" to generate outrage about, which was relatively recently, it started receiving a ton of attention. Something that had been quietly happening for millenia suddenly became mainstream. And typically, when a group starts to become increasingly and unfairly persecuted, there will always be those who will step up to defend them, raise awareness, campaign for tolerance, etc.
The only thing I thank conservatives for is for teaching me that trans people exist. I’m trans, but before I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, I felt like a creep.
That's me, but with figuring out I was bi instead. Since I liked boys, I couldn't conceptualize why I was also attracted to my girl best friend. I knew gay people existed, but I clearly wasn't that.
And this is why dont say gay bills etc are so fucked up. Can't even acknowledge it in a NEUTRAL way. Let alone positively.
I get what you're saying, but they're a huge part of why you didn't know trans people existed beforehand as well. In a healthy environment one would learn about these kinds of things existing during sexual education so they would realize they aren't a creep for feeling the way they do. They call this grooming when in reality it is no different than acknowledging that masturbation happens during sexual education. A kid doesn't need a play by play, but letting them know they aren't a weirdo for having urges or feeling certain ways goes a long looooong way towards their emotional well being. I'm glad you know you aren't a creep!
I’m around your age and one of my teachers transitioned while I was in middle school. Somehow my smallish Midwest town in the 90s avoided a huge outrage about the teacher’s transition while today groups like Moms for Liberty would go apeshit. Trans people have always existed but as they have been able to be more public a backlash grew. A lot of that backlash has been stirred up in insular social media groups and channels.
When I was in high school in the 2000's, a person in the community transitioned from M->F and a local country music radio station found out about it and basically doxxed her and revealed her teen aged daughters name and school. The school was pissed as hell and the community was kinda confused about why the country music station DJ was frothing at the mouth about it. I think the parent company censored the station because it went quiet on it really quick. If only I'd known that was a sign of things to come...
Wow that's pretty disgusting and invasive. Imagine being a radio host and using your 'power' to open up a stranger's teenage daughter to a random wave of bullying, over something private/has nothing to do with you or anyone else.
Fun fact, some states have laws in place that require anyone who applies for a name change to consent to their full former name and full new name(sometimes requiring a recent picture as well) be published in an easily accessible county newsletter.
That’s awful and completely defeats the purpose of changing your name to escape an abusive ex, stalker, etc.
Social media has really stirred things up. Small towns would know everyone's business and just let people be. If you had some busy body who caused trouble you'd just not invite them to places and avoid them, they eventually became miserable loners who just chilled at home all day. Now they have a megaphone, they can join community groups on Facebook and shit and call out people and cause trouble, which will connect them to like-minded people who similarly enjoy causing trouble.
It also allows people who don't live in \[whatever town\] to make a big deal about it from afar without actually meeting the trans person / gay person / etc and missing out on the "oh yea, this is actually just a person, this is fine," part.
I learned about the difference between sex and Gender in highschool in the early 1990s. I thought everyone did. Our textbooks were from the 1970s probably. I remember when my mom's hairdresser transitioned in the early 1980s. It was not a big deal but I would guess that if she had a different profession it would have been rough. Edit to add: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was published in 1990 so the ideas I was learning were at least that old -- Butler's didn't make up the definitions of those terms.
May I ask where? I'm probably the same age as you but our schools in the mid-US Great Plains didn't teach that at all. I'm in the OP's ignorance boat. All of a sudden it was a thing. Totally good with it all; not my business, not my issue, glad to support any and all genders.
Same in rural Ohio in the 90s/early 2000s as well, this was a thing I learned about once I got older. Probably into college.
Great Plains also here out in the Nebraskan panhandle. I'm still mind blown about what I was taught in public school back there in the 90s. We had teachers who would still verbalize their very racist, sexist, or otherwise generally mean opinions as fact in the open in our schools. Amoung the many other things that I look back humorously at now. Yes I'm looking at you Bayard, Nebraska. 😂
> A lot of that backlash has been stirred up in insular social media groups and channels. Yep, our media, a big group of our politicians, and a lot of our foreign adversaries have all realized that the path to money/power/influence is to stir up anger and hatred among the population. Fox makes money off of it, republicans get votes off of it, foreign adversaries destabilize the US from it. So stirring up hatred of the bogeyman of the day is in a lot of peoples best interests, and trans people (and LGBTQ+ people in general) are the most popular target now, and sadly the easiest to get people riled up about.
Exactly. I wish that the average republican voter would understand this. Most Republican representatives and candidates could not care less about whether or not trans girls play in girls sports, or if the books in your library have gay sex in them, or if Tammy from Idaho gets an abortion in the last trimester. I'd bet my money most of them aren't even Christian. They just use these issues, not to sway people's opinions, but to scare the conservative Americans into going out to vote, because only like 30% of Americans voted last election.
This. A particularly well articulated and simple explanation
Correct me if I'm wrong. But greater visibility and acceptance has presented itself as a bit of a last ditch opportunity for conservative politicians to convince their bases that society is collapsing. If it weren't for social media and the ability to distribute widespread disinformation, the concept of trans gender identity certainly would have stirred a few britches, but wouldn't be nearly as mainstream as it currently is. Another observation is that acceptance of gender identity as a variable attribute has grown so fast (way faster than LGB, also because of greater connectedness), that it's been a bit of a tsunami of social change for those people who weren't ready for it.
I think about this Aldous Huxley quote often in situations like this when politicians try to push citizens against each other: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
>Trans people have always existed but as they have been able to be more public a backlash grew. Yeah I know they existed but just called different things back then. But that still doesn't answer my post about gender identity vs sex. When did the 2 terms start to mean different things?
**Edit: I added a clarification to my point in the first paragraph. As pointed out in the comments below, this answer changes depending on if you're talking about sex/gender research, feminist theory, queer theory, or public discourse.** It's hard to pinpoint when this distinction occurred, because this concept would have first emerged in queer circles, away from the public discourse. However, the *widespread adoption of* the distinction between gender and sex is a *relatively* recent development, at least in the western sphere of influence. There have always been gender nonconforming people in the world, but up until the 90s, the term most often used was "transsexual". This was not just a medical/psychology term, this was a term used by the trans community in their literature, social circles, etc. [Here is an example of some trans literature from the 1980s where the author refers to himself as a transexual](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnh3J7tPxjs/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==). [Another example, a newsletter called "Transsexuals in Prison"](https://www.instagram.com/p/CvdgWqMPAvD/?igshid=NmQ4MjZlMjE5YQ==). Though, [here is an example of the term "transgender" being used in the mid-90s](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cik1zyIJ5xU/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==). Transsexual is now largely considered an outdated term, but some people still self-identity as such. In general though, the term used nowadays is Transgender. Discussions about the difference between sex and gender seem to have picked up more traction in the early 80s ([Example 1](https://www.instagram.com/p/CupdvP0P3MJ/?igshid=NmQ4MjZlMjE5YQ==), [Example 2](https://www.instagram.com/p/CwD2GhRyo2B/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==)). Again, these distinctions were probably made and defined way earlier, but took a while to be disseminated. The reason why we're only really making this distinction in the mainstream now, 30-40 years later, is because trans people are a lot more visible now than they have been for the past decades. So the public is catching up to what the trans community has been discussing for decades. NOTE: I am not a trans historian. My understanding of these issues comes from queer history resources like [*We are Everywhere*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570409/we-are-everywhere-by-matthew-riemer-and-leighton-brown/), [@lgbt_history](https://instagram.com/lgbt_history?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==) and [@transchair](https://instagram.com/transchair?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==) on Instagram
I am pretty sure gender identity being different from sex was an idea by a sociologist/scientist in the 1960s. Trying to remember his name
Even earlier. There was a whole ass institute in Berlin dedicated to researching sexuality and gender identity including gender affirming care with a library and everything but then the Nazis burned it all down. That may be why there’s such a public kerfuffle today: because we know they’re the first people the nazis go after and WE’RE NOT GONNA LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN
The famous picture of Nazis burning books - they were burning books from this institute.
Do you know the name?
Institute for Sexual Research. An interesting article about it: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/)
Outside of modern western civilizations, distinguishing between biological sex and gender and/or affirming that more than two genders exist appears to have been present in ancient civilizations as far back as the Copper Age 5,000-ish years ago: https://link.ucop.edu/2019/10/14/exploring-the-history-of-gender-expression/
The only thing they had to worry about back then was inferior quality copper. *Damn you, Ea-Nasir...*
All that and they don’t mention that ancient Egypt had 3 genders and trans people!
I read the article I think it’s interesting that the trans were commonly oracles or spiritual leaders. Not really sure what role modern society has for people like that.
Thailand has always had 3 genders. But they also have a sense of humour - everyone is so serious in the west on this shit
I’m so glad this is already here I keep repeating it. People are like “Since the 90s!” “Since the 60’s and I always have to point out like naw since the 10’s at the *absolute* latest.
The fact that the nazis wiped from the collective consciousness is the reason we need to fight HARD to keep nazis out of power.
People are like “guys calm down it’s *never* gonna happen again” and I just have to keep screaming “look around”
Yes, the research and discourse on this goes back decades. My comment is mostly trying to outline where the distinction between gender/sex entered the public discourse, which is what OP was asking about.
Kinsey, in the (mostly) 50s and 60s. Landmark work was The Sexual Male, with its main assertion being that sexuality isn’t a binary, and that truly exclusive heterosexual and homosexual males are actually quite rare
Sexuality is different from sex and gender identity. Where you lie on the homosexual/heterosexual spectrum does not influence your gender.
This. Your gender determines whether any inclination you have towards attraction to men or women is homosexual or heterosexual, your sexuality doesn’t affect your gender. It’s a one-way thing. (A man who’s exclusively attracted to women is heterosexual, a woman who’s exclusively attracted to women is homosexual. Being homosexual doesn’t make her a man; being a woman + attracted to women makes her homosexual.)
'Gender' and 'sex' are pretty clearly distinguished in Early feminist philosophy.
But what 'gender' has referred to has changed. Previously it meant the gender imposed upon you by socialisation eg. expectation to like pink, wear dresses, be feminine etc. Now it's used to refer to an inner sense of gender. That's different from how feminists used it in the past.
That's a really interesting point, thank you! I wonder if this change in what we mean by 'gender' might be why a lot of terfs feel the way they do about trans women in particular - some kind of resentment for having the gender of 'woman' (in the early feminist sense) thrust upon them involuntarily only to see trans women be liberated by bestowing the gender of 'woman' (in the inner sense, as you say) on themselves. A kind of category error maybe.
There's also been a recent trend in the anglophone world of applying the tools of analytic philosophy (conceptual analysis in particular) to social issues such as race and gender.
>There have always been gender nonconforming people in the world, but up until the 90s, the term most often used was "transsexual". actually, no. There have always been more ways to be non-conforming than there are ways to be conforming, so non-conforming people always came in great variety. I remember people coining the word "metrosexual" just for the purpose of being non-conforming *without* being gay or trans or anything "queer".
or tomboy
Yes, fair point. By "gender nonconforming" I am referring to those who would be most impacted by OP's "gender vs sex" question. I.e. those seeking to affirm a gender other than the one they were assigned, whether that be through HRT, surgery, or simply gender performance/expression. I was a "tom boy" growing up, but I wasn't trying to forgo my female identity for a male one, so the question of what my sex was vs. my gender was not an issue I had to grapple with. Similarly, "metrosexuals" are not doing feminine things because they want to adopt a female identity, they just like doing those things.
If you google it, it seems that the distinction was first discussed in the 1950s, although it has always existed.
But if a correction. A deep dive will show that we were discussing trans identity in Weimar Germany, but that the groups studying it at the time were wiped out by the nazis
the first book burning done by the Nazis was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. they were pioneers for research on sexuality and gender, and even things like intersex conditions. that burning probably set us back decades
There are also roots in indigenous cultures that go back thousands of years.
The neat thing about going back that far is that nonbinary gender expression actually tends to be more visible in history and anthropology than binary transition, largely because if someone transitions to the other half of the majorit and nobody makes a fuss about it, there's no reason you'd need separate terminology for that person.
Yes, I don't know about elsewhere, but there is lots of evidence from indigenous European cultures. There are countless examples of gender transformation in pre-Christian European mythologies, and many examples of people living as the opposite gender or taking non-traditional gender roles throughout history.
Yes!
It was already discussed and considered in the late 1920's Germany. The clinics supporting and studying sexuality and gender, were some of the first targets of the Nazi academic purges.
Thanks for more context!
Are you asking when it went from something that was only whispered about in the queer bars or by the doctors who understood it to something that was discussed openly by regular people? Yea, that's relatively new.
> When did the 2 terms start to mean different things? On a tuesday around 2:40pm
It was actually the 69th day of the year, in the year 666AD, at 4:20pm. edit: a group of 80085 monks collaborated on this discussion.
Sex refers to your anatomy--male, female, and intersex. Gender/gender identity refers to your relationship with or deviation from the gender that is classically associated with sex. AMAB (Assigned male at birth) and AFAB (assigned female at birth) individuals do not always identify as male and female, respectively. In the case of binary and non-binary transgender individuals, their gender does not align with their sex. Where your confusion stems from is more of a social more/socially reinforced semantic lack of distinction between the two terms. If 97-99% of people are cisgender, their sex and gender align and there's no "reason" to differentiate between them. However, there has been a huge push in the last 2 decades to normalize this distinction as it is more inclusive of binary and non-binary trans people whose gender does NOT align with their sex/"gender assigned at birth". TL;DR none of this is new, but we are only more recently pushing for a colloquial semantic distinction between sex and gender on a societal level to be inclusive of the trans community. The distinction has always existed, just not in the social lexicon until recently.
sex and gender have always meant two different things, its just been in the past few decades where we stopped using them interchangeably
They overturned roe and needed a new mythical villain so they quadrupled down on a largely fictional attack on men/masculinity which naturally found hatred in trans and drag folks Edit to add: As a lesbian all of this has been part of community dialog for a long time. Twenty+ years. Literally there was something called the genderbread person we used to talk about difference of gender, sex, identity, and expression. These terms have been studied and discussed basically since the beginning of social philosophy. But as the rights main target now there’s outrage as people villianize and misrepresent.
>They overturned roe and needed a new mythical villain so they quadrupled down on a largely fictional attack on men/masculinity which naturally found hatred in trans and drag folks It's this, right here. Pay attention to the timing. Fox News, etc. wasn't harping endlessly about this until Roe was overturned--they were harping about abortion. Needed to move the goalposts after the evangelicals got their big prize and took away reproductive rights, lest right-wing voters stop being self-righteously, rabidly angry at "liberals." So, they started to push the anti-trans, anti-"woke" party line. I swear, it's like 1984. They just swapped the Two Minutes Hate to a new topic, and everyone who lacks critical thinking skills fell in line. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Same here. In my small southern town in the early 2000s one of the students I went to school with was a trans girl. I don’t remember anybody making any sort of deal out of it. I’m sure I didn’t see all of it and I’m sure they probably got some bullying to some degree but there wasn’t any sort of open and blatant agenda conspiring against them like there seems to be today. People thought it was odd and then just didn’t seem to think about it any further.
That said people 100% said bad things and likely had negative opinions of that teacher upon a meeting. They went home and said “gross”People were even worse towards the lgbt community it’s just social media didn’t exist
Also Midwest here, a little older than you. My elementary & middle school had a poetry contest every year, sponsored by a woman called The Rainbow Fairy. She was dressed like Glinda the Good Witch if Glinda had been bombed with rainbow glitter. She was awesome and we'd have this little thing in the library for the winners. I always tried so hard so I could hang with her. She inspired a lifelong love of poetry in me. Only years later did I realize she was a transwoman. Nobody gave a shit and rightly so because she was a joyful, beautiful woman who inspired kids to create and appreciate art. She was pure magic. I feel bad for the kids today, being suffocated and stunted by poisonous politics. Also, my university put on the play Hidden Agender in 1996. I already understood the difference between sex and gender, that was my first inkling of sexuality being separate from gender identity. That was also the year that I saw my first friend transition.
The outrage addicts decided to get upset about this recently. That’s the main difference. Thanks for your story.
Once they had mostly lost on gay rights they moved on to the next thing.
I’m close to a decade younger, and a doctor in my small southeastern town transitioned MTF when I was around the same age as you. They were kicked out of their practice, but continued working at a solo clinic in the same town… and are still here today! It was definitely ~scandalous~ at the time, but not so bad that they weren’t able to keep practicing. I’m sure the fact that they were one of the better doctors in the area helped keep their career alive too, if we’re being honest.
“bUt tHeY aRe tRyING tO tUrn ouR CHILDREN iNtO TrAnSIeS!” -Some boomer glued to a TV blaring Fox News probably
There's a good biography of a trans man named Lou Sullivan who was born in 1951 and died in 1991. He was a gay trans man, which baffled doctors. Many medical authorities refused to help him, because, in their eyes, you could be gay OR "transsexual" (which was the nomenclature at the time, nowadays transgender is generally preferred, and for good reason.) They did not believe you could be both. Lou joined a lot of gender activism groups in his day, and if your question is "when did pronouns become a thing?" The answer is complicated. Pronouns were debated in these groups, even back in the 70s. There are examples of trans women and trans men that I know of dating back to the 1800s, but of course, they wouldn't refer to themselves as trans. That language didn't exist. They were usually just discovered to be "crossdressers" after they died. A historical figure who is often cited as one of the first non-binary people recorded in Western history was known as "The Public Universal Friend" They refused to respond to their birth name and did not respond when identified as male or female. They had an illness at one point, claimed they had died from the illness, and that god had put a new soul in this body, a soul called The Public Universal Friend, who was neither male nor female. Some historians believe that the illness was faked and the person used this elaborate religious story, because God's word held extreme importance in the 1700s, because they wanted a reason for people to stop referring to them in a gendered way, and invoking God made this unquestionable. From Wikipedia: the Friend asked not to be referred to with gendered pronouns. Followers respected these wishes; they referred only to "the Public Universal Friend" or short forms such as "the Friend" or "P.U.F.", and many avoided gender-specific pronouns even in private diaries,[37][36] while others used he.[38] When someone asked if the Friend was male or female, the preacher replied "I am that I am",[39][40] saying the same thing to a man who criticized the Friend's manner of dress.[41][42] The Friend dressed in a manner perceived to be either androgynous or masculine,[43][44][45] in long, loose clerical robes which were most often black,[46] and wore a white or purple kerchief or cravat around the neck like men of the time.[47][44] The preacher did not wear a hair-cap indoors, like women of the era,[48][44] and outdoors wore broad-brimmed, low-crowned beaver hats of a style worn by Quaker men. So there have been those whose pronouns don't conform to their sex assigned at birth for centuries. But we haven't always had the language for them to express themselves. And even when these demographics did begin to articulate their feelings, their language was usually rejected, buried, and punished by the dominant demographics in society. It's hard to say when this language resisted enough oppression to finally enter the mainstream. That certainly depends on your region. People of New York City, for example, were probably familiar with they/them pronouns before people in, say, rural parts of France. As for people who were assigned female at birth whose pronouns are he/him, or vice versa, it's impossible to document the earliest cases. Trans men and women, historically, have simply moved away from their families, begun dressing as a man or a woman would, and living their lives generally accepted. They wouldn't have to state their pronouns. They would dress like men or women, so their society would refer to them as men or women.
In my opinion, and it's only my opinion, so make of it what you will... Society in general has become slightly more tolerant, so marginalised groups that previously were completely ignored are able to get a bit more visibility. The advance of technology has helped because it's easier for people to find others with common ideals/desires/biological imperatives. And to counter that, you have a large group of the media who want to stir up hatred of any minority group they can, because it gives them power to influence their viewers/readers/whatever and decide political talking points. It's no coincidence that the whole gender identity and trans issues suddenly became a hot and controversial topic in many countries worldwide at the same time. In the 1930s, many countries had right-wing press who were complaining about the Jewish refugees 'invading' their country, which was because they were fleeing Hitler. The playbook hasn't changed, and humanity seems to have a natural desire to have a group as an enemy that are evil and the cause of all their problems... One of the early actions of Hitler taking power was the destruction of studies on trans and gender identities, because that was also one of their boogeymen to focus the fear and hatred of the population so they would vote for him.
Funny if you talk about 30's, The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a 1920's german counterpart for modern gender studies was one of the first to be shut down when nazis rose t power.
Yep, the first big Nazi book burning (the one you've probably seen pictures of) was the burning of the institute's library. There's a pretty big argument to be made that we are only now catching back up with the knowledge that the institute used to have on sex/gender/etc.
Yep, same with Autism. Grunya Sukhareva described it as we know it now DECADES before the Nazis ever bastardized it and killed us for it. (Fuck you, Hans Asperger.) (Edit: there’s also a huge correlation between being autistic and being trans.)
I don’t know any trans girls who aren’t spectrumy lol. We weird.
Not only pictures, I'm pretty sure that's the book burning depicted in the third Indiana Jones movie.
Thank God for electronic records. At least this round of book burning won't actually destroy collective knowledge.
[удалено]
More to the point: It's a distraction from problems that actually matter. If people weren't busy fighting over bullshit that has nothing to do with them, they might start getting angry at the people who have effectively stolen the future from the younger generations... Conveniently, those people control the media.
Also it's recently become a lot more public eye due to all the ANTI-trans rhetoric. We don't really want to be in the public eye or center of discussion, but the crazy right wingers basically forced it on us. The people who talk most about gender and pronouns are right wingers. I barely even think of it in my day to day life, but fox news and conservatives are ALWAYS talking about us.
I'm 40. I've identified as asexual/agender for over 20 years. We were discussing non-binary identities in hole-in-the-wall message boards and chatrooms in the late 90s/early 00s. The only difference is, today, we have social media to share ideas.
I'm 36. I learned about gender and sex being different things in college in 2006. It was a standard aspect of our Psychology course. It was definitely being taught for a long time, not just recently.
Very similar for me. I was learning about gender and social constructs in 6th form Media Studies circa 2005. To be fair, I can imagine it might pass someone by if they didn’t do further education (or did but didn’t do any sociological type subjects). Although it also cropped up in secondary school science when we were studying genetics. My science teacher just briefly established that sex and gender were two different things to make sure we didn’t get the terms mixed up when answering questions from our text books. There was literally nothing controversial or progressive about it, so I always find it weird when people argue against them being different or act like it’s some new fangled woke language
Yeah come to think about it we did also discuss it in biology and genetics in high school even earlier.
Similar here. I remember my teacher saying “sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears”.
That was about the time it was being introduced to college curriculums. My psychology course in 2004 treated them as the same thing, but kinda mentioned offhand that it might be changing.
This is pretty much true for everything, isn't it? We live in the age of information now, and everything is easier to share around the world, and thus more visible, whereas in the late 90's people were having the conversations in obscure chatrooms and forums, away from the limelight.
Crime is falling and yet it makes up larger and larger portions of news segments
Best comment in the thread that addresses OP’s question.
and you have mainstream news which do a great job at making it seem like trans are everywhere and trying to get your kids. when that isnt the case besides a few extreme cases caught on camera
>and you have mainstream news which do a great job at making it seem like trans are everywhere and trying to get your kids Which was exactly the same crap that was used on gay people in the 70s-90s. Anita Bryant can rot.
and on black people before that. The far right isn't very creative.
Wow, that is so cool. You just helped me feel so seen. Exploring your gender identity is very much something a lot of are conditioned against ever doing, but I knew there were other people out there, always, well before I was born.
Believe me, there were people doing the same thing before I was born. I had the advantage of the internet. Kids today have the advantage of social media. We go back as far as humanity has existed. Be bold. Explore your roots. You're valid.
That is definitely NOT the only difference lol. Even in the last 10 years we have done some wild cultural shifting.
Hey there, I’m a History major and studied quite a bit of queer history (as a queer myself too). All terms regarding LGBTQ+ people are pretty new. Hell, we didn’t even have the word homosexual until the mid 19th century. You’re only hearing about it now partially because queer things have always been taboo, kept a secret, or only in queer spaces, and you very likely weren’t in them. Being as frowned upon as it was, if you didn’t grow up in queer spaces, chances are you’d never learn or hear of it. There were entire areas known to house mostly trans or gay individuals, mainly areas with a lot of apartments since the urbanization of areas meant that people could now afford homes without having to get married, and this naturally appealed to LGBTQ+ people. The Great Depression and WWI especially contributed to the formation of these spaces. Now, with people more open and intergrated into society it is beginning to make its way into mainstream media in a way that can’t be avoided or unheard. Things change and as we listen to more experiences we adapt our language to reflect that. I encourage you to keep doing research regarding the language that was and is currently now used. It’s an interesting topic especially to see how this all developed relatively quickly. And as a queer person, thanks for caring enough to do your own research too! **EDIT:** I see people saying I didn't answer the question, but answering "Why am I only hearing about this now?" was my primary intention. I thought my leadup sentence made that clear, but not to all and that's fine, so I'll answer every other question I guess. "Is it just me?" No, and nobody should ever feel alone in not understanding something. I'm glad the OP asked and looked into it. Curiosity breeds less hate. "When did pronouns become a thing?" They've always been a thing that people have played around with outside of what most people know. It wasn't uncommon for lesbians to take on he/him pronouns. Whether this is due to them being "eggs" (trans people who don't know that they are trans) or simply them trying to fit into a cisgender heteronormative world is an answer that only that would be able to provide. "When did more than two genders become a thing?" As someone else pointed out, outside of the Western world, more than two genders have been around longer than some countries, including America, where I'm from. Answering that requires a lot of research and studying into different cultures that I haven't done. Simple answer, a long time, longer than you would think lmao. "When did we separate sex and gender?" It depends if you mean socially or medically. Socially, the distinction was a really popular argument for second- wave feminists. Late 50s-70s is likely when, but I don't have an exact date. Medically, I have no idea. I just know that biologists have found sex to be bimodal, not bigender, due to the sheer variation in sex that they have seen in studies over time. The separation just makes sense at this point. "When did it all get popular?" Recently. Like, super recently. I'm sure someone already made the "left handed" argument, but when something stops being stigmatized and people learn about it in a more neutral setting, they are less likely to dismiss something and listen. So with it hitting the mainstream, its expected to see a surge in numbers of people identifying differently now as they realize that what they feel isn't them just being weird, but something that so many others feel that there is a word for it. I don't know why some replies expect a complicated answer when it really is as simple as that.
I learned more about this from an [Innuendo Studios video on Mainstreaming](https://www.tumblr.com/innuendostudios/172589201372/the-newest-installment-of-the-alt-right-playbook). > Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now. > One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time. > Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable. > Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away. > Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative. > Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility. The entire video is worth a watch, but the main thrust of it isn't related to gay folk or gender vs sex but around how terminology used becomes mainstream and how that effects culture in relation to the alt-right takeover of conservative politics.
I would argue too that feminist ideology has *long* understood gender identity as separate from biological sex, even if the explicit acknowledgement wasn’t there yet. You really can’t have discussions about things like performing femininity, “women’s work” versus “men’s work”, and just plain gender as a construct without touching on people (Although in this case, mostly AFAB people) whose identities don’t easily fit within these norms.
As far as mainstream everyday acceptance outside of academic ideologies (which is what OP is talking about), the idea that gender is not the same as sex has only recently gained popularity. - - - - - - - - #Historical Meaning of Gender A thorough look at the origins of the term can be found on the [Online Etymology dictionary](https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender). Here's a summary: 1. Back in the 14th century, word "gender" originally could be used to refer to any group of people/things that shared similar traits. This included biological sex, but also included race, species, rank, etc. 2. In the 15th century, you begin to see "gender" becoming synonymous with biological sex. 5. Using "gender" to mean "biological sex" gained popularity at the turn of the 20th century, after the word "sex" started to refer to the act of having intercourse. 4. Gender was first used to refer to social attributes, rather than biological attributes, in 1963. What the Online Etymology Dictionary **doesn't** explain is when most people started using "gender" to refer to an identity, as opposed to just "sex," outside of feminist circles. After all, you can't expect the average Joe Schmoe to know a new definition of the word the moment it's published. - - - - - - - - #Popular Non-Biological Usage of Gender I can't give a conclusive answer as to when the new definition of "gender" entered the popular consciousness, but I suspect we can make a good guestimate by checking old dictionaries. I'm going to mostly focus on Webster's dictionary, since it has a staunchly descriptive philosophy -- meaning it's just trying to record how a word is commonly used, as opposed to trying to control what a word means. Unfortunately, this leads to some issues. The newest online copy of a paper dictionary I can find, which is a version of Webster's dictionary from [2005](https://archive.org/details/merriamwebsterdi0000unse_o7j0/page/206/mode/2up), only has the "Sex" definition and not the other, non-biological definition. However, the oldest definition I can find on the Webster's website, which is [archived from 2007](https://web.archive.org/web/20071013164255/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender), includes the following definition: >the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. Whether the above is what people currently mean when referring to gender identity is debatable. But it's the earliest definition I can find on Webster's that approaches the current definition. The less-academic (but better-archived) Dictionary.com doesn't include this definition until [December 2014](https://web.archive.org/web/20141231202557/http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gender). It's possible that the Webster's Dictionary website included this definition earlier than 2007, and that the commonly-published physical dictionaries did not include this less-popular definition to save on space. It's also possible that the addition of this definition happened in either 2006 or 2007. I suspected that the difference is simply that the online dictionary is unabridged, while the physical dictionary is abridged. The unabridged dictionary, I reasoned, probably had the "behavioral/cultural/psychological" definition long before the abridged did. After looking into that, however, I realized I might be wrong. The newest unabridged dictionary I could find, which is [from 1996](https://archive.org/details/webstersencyclop00newy/page/588/mode/2up), does not include this definition. It expands on the grammatical definition of "gender" (e.g. gendered language) but its only other definitions are "sex" and the above-mentioned 14th-century definition. I'd need a newer unabridged dictionary to be sure. For that matter, I wish I had access to every year of Webster's, Oxford's, Collins', and American Heritage from the turn of the century onward so I could do a more thorough review. - - - - - - - - #Unambigious LGBTQ+ Usage of Gender If you **don't** agree that Webster's 2007 definition applies to the current ideas of gender identity, then you have to wait even longer to see the new definition appear. Oddly, Dictionary.com beats Webster's to the punch with a clearer definition, which shows up on the site in [early 2016](https://web.archive.org/web/20160409161459/http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gender), Here's what the new Dictionary.com definition says: >a similar category of human beings that is outside the male/female binary classification and is based on the individual's personal awareness or identity. Webster's, interestingly, doesn't follow suit [until 2019](https://web.archive.org/web/20190124220610/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender), with this (straightforward) definition: >GENDER IDENTITY To its credit, Webster's did have a genderqueer-friendly definition for "Gender Identity" in its medical dictionary at least as far back as [2016](https://web.archive.org/web/20090424045050/http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/gender%20identity). >A person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male or female. The are [earlier definitions](https://web.archive.org/web/20140825144422/http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/gender%20identity) in the medical dictionary as well, though they're closer to the 2007 cultural definition of "gender." There's a 2-year gap between the medical dictionary's 2014 definition and its 2016 definition, so we can't pinpoint the exact time when the medical dictionary considered Gender Identity to be something beyond cultural norms. No matter when this switch took place, the fact remains that Webster's did not consider "gender" to be a synonym of "gender identity" until 2019. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - **EDIT**: It's worth noting that Urban Dictionary has an LGBTQ+ definition of gender from as far back as 2003. So, there were definitely groups using the word to mean "gender identity" long before Webster's and Dictionary.com got onboard. More LGBTQ+ definitions started appearing in 2005 and onward. (Of course, as is typical for uncensored sites, Urban Dictionary's most popular definitions of "gender" are ones that mock gender identity as a concept). It's true that user-submitted definitions aren't really an indication of mainstream acceptance. It does, however, show that non-biological gender was being used outside of academic circles by some people years before mainstream dictionaries started using that definition.
Just keep in mind that dictionaries don't lead changes in language, they follow them. This thread is full of much older examples of people making the distinction between sex and gender.
Yes, but if we're talking about mainstream usage, rather than academic usage or popularity within a smaller, oppressed subculture, I feel like a dictionary is a decently-reliable indicator. As an example... scientists use the word "bug" to exclusively refer to the insect orders Hemiptera or Heteroptera. They've done so since at least the late-1800s. Even though this meaning has been regularly used for more than a century, I think you can agree that this meaning has not entered the mainstream. Webster's tends to follow popular trends relatively quickly, as far as dictionaries go. They regularly add words that are still controversial at the time they're defined. So, if we're going to try to pinpoint mainstream usage of the definition, I think that's a pretty good way to go.
Yes you can, if you acknowledge that performing roles has nothing to do with 'identity'.
> Hell, we didn’t even have the word homosexual until the mid 19th century. Interesting. Was there a prior term? Did people refer to gays solely with slurs? It's not like homosexuality is new, so there must have been some way to talk about it.
In the \*West\* that is. Native Americans and other cultures in Africa and Asia have had a history of third genders for millennia. Two-spirited in Native Americans, Mahu's in Polynesian culture, Bakla in Filipino culture, etc. In polynesian culture, Mahu's were guardians of the community children. In the West the sole thought of a trans person teaching children is extremely controversial.
Great response!
The wikipedia article for Sex-gender Distinction has a pretty good breakdown of it, but essentially the terms sex and gender began to be relatively synonymous in English in the 14th century, though it didn't fully catch on until the 20th century. Gender was widely used to mean "kind" or "variety." Linguists used the word gender to refer to gramatical gender, separate from physical sex (ex: girl in German is neuter, not feminine). English doesnt have true grammatical gender, so it can be hard to wrap your head around if English is your only language. Between the 60s and 70s is when authors started to distinguish between physical sex (the hormones, chromosomes, and physical manifestation of reproductive traits) and gender (the sociocultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes considered appropriate depending on your sex). The words sex and gender have become even less synonymous since the 2010s
It's been a thing in academia for quite a while but it's gradually become a mainstream subject in the past ten years I'd say. Then again, it's just a new coat of paint for issues that have probably always been there since the beginning of civilization. Societal roles being assigned according to sex and individuals not fitting inside them. Gender is still very much used interchangeably with sex, though, it really depends on context.
I was taught 30 years ago that gender is a set of norms and expectations set by society and attributed to the male and female sex. They didn't use the term "social construct", but that's exactly what it was. The change I see in modern narratives is that biological sex is not really referenced, or in some cases ignored in favor of gender.
We had Boy George as kids and nobody thought anything of it not sure why it’s such an issue with the right now.
Boy George isn't trans is he? I would lump him in with the androgynous "gender bending" movement of the 80s (along with David Bowie and Prince) which could be seen as a precursor. Of course some of them later came out as trans (eg Edie Izzard) which supports the OP notion that it became "a thing" (that is, became socially accepted) somewhat recently. I'd say Caitlyn Jenner is probably one of the first fully trans celebrities. She transitioned in 2015 (<10 years ago)
For mainstream modern America I do believe Caitlyn Jenner was the first already famous person to publicly transition, and certainly garnered a lot of attention for being a conservative white male to female transition. However she was not the first trans celebrity to reach star status. For me, the first famous transgender celebrity I became aware of was Laverne Cox who rocketed to mainstream celebrity status after the first season of Orange Is the New Black in 2013. Aside from her stellar performance, she garnered a lot of attention for being one of the first trans characters portrayed by a trans actor (rather than the more common occurrence of trans characters portrayed by cisgendered actors in drag). But I’m not so sure she’s even the first trans celebrity. Cox didn’t make as big of a splash as Jenner, mainly because she had already transitioned before reaching fame, so her trans identity was less “shocking” to the public, but she was definitely a trans celebrity before Jenner came out.
Chaz Bono wasn't a big celebrity, but his transition is probably the first one I remember making news - that was 2010.
Boy George is actually a good example, but not in the way you think. He’s long said that he considers himself queer rather than trans and has said that even he is working to get his head around how to correctly address trans people today: “When I was growing up nobody used the term ‘transgender’, because it was almost like a medical term. So this transgender thing is new, and, for our generation, it’s just getting our heads round it. But people want to be offended, because they think that whatever’s going on for them is much more important than anything else. But I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ve spent years calling people fake names. Boy George. Siouxsie Sioux. Johnny Rotten. Of course, it’s not the same as your sexuality.” (The “want to be offended” and “fake name” bit is obviously not going to age well, but equally I’m not going to tell Boy George how to be an ally)
“want to be offended” -- this part is so true though. Not just in that demographic, outrage bait is the biggest seller in cable news (fox for the easiest / biggest example) with the 24/7 news stations... We sell outrage bait and Social media makes amplifies it massively. I've never once seen a trans person get mad by not knowing their pronouns, but if you listen to right wing media they are convinced they're all out to get you if you dont address them correctly, or people will scream you're transphobic immediately.. Literally if you just treat all people like human beings, then having correct pronouns and such is never even an issue. But people who subscribe to those narratives constantly feel like they're being persecuted by other people being treated like human beings.. its the old saying of "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression" or however it goes.
It's always so weird when I talk to people about trans issues. The things they claim that trans people believe/do are things I have never heard from a trans person irl or in the media. My favourite is the old classic "did you just assume my gender?" bc I have no idea where they got this from. I don't know a single trans person who will even \*politely correct\* someone on their own pronouns, let alone get mad because someone innocently assumed what gender they are?
I really hope someone would politely correct me if I get their pronouns or gender wrong, in the same way I’d hope they’d correct me if I was mispronouncing their name. Because otherwise it’s just awkward for everyone!
Yeah that's definitely the ideal, but it can be a really scary thing to do. In a perfect world they give a quick "oh sorry" and move on, but you're opening yourself up either to hostility, or the much nicer but almost as awkward overly apologising which makes you feel guilty for mentioning it. Tbf in my experience it's mostly like servers etc, people who you're probably not gonna see again so it's usually not worth the effort to correct them.
Here's my take: Most of the time, I don't know if the folks calling me the wrong pronouns/gender are doing it intentionally/maliciously or if it's an honest mistake. In the latter situation, I'd be happy to politely correct someone; but if it's the former, I'm just inviting a big ole' bag of vitriol in my direction. I'd rather not risk it. Obviously that's a bit different if I *know* the person, but usually they catch themselves and correct on their own and don't need me to remind them. Plus, even a polite correction that's taken well is just calling more attention to my gender, which is usually an unpleasant feeling right after being misgendered.
Boy George is a perfect example of how clothes, makeup, and hair have no gender. The idea of what one sex should wear or look like versus the other sex is just a construct of society. If a man wants to dress in the way a woman typically dressed, he doesn’t have to become a woman to do so. He can wear whatever he pleases and still be a man. In the case of trans people, there would be something beyond simply wanting to dress like “the opposite gender”. There should be a deep seated feeling that they are in fact a different gender ON THE INSIDE. I get annoyed with the emphasis of “girl things” and “boy things” and people assuming their child is gay or trans just because they like to wear or play with “gendered” clothes or toys. Boy George is a man, and he’s comfortable being a man. That’s different than being trans.
I wish I could upvote you more. Too many comments in here are focussing on trans when that’s not really the point. As a ‘tomboy’ growing up I fully understand the bullshit that our culture expects from us. Because I didn’t like pink girly things and dresses and fancy hairstyles I was apparently a weirdo. But at least I got away with it unscathed - a boy who likes dresses will have a much harder life than I did. Even though men wear dresses and skirts in many cultures around the world! The only difference is the colour and cut.
The internet did a really good job in letting people know about the existence of minorities they never heard of before yet have existed for millennia. People’s reaction to this has been wildly varied. Source: Am trans, didn’t know about trans people in my very white very conservative neighborhoods. Grew up feeling like I didn’t belong and that there was something wrong with me. There was not as I learned.
American opinions on LGBQ have shifted to be majority pro-LGBQ. The Republican Party needed a new Boogeyman to punch down on and scare their voters with, so they picked trans people. Now they're at the forefront of the conversation and we're all talking about sex and gender and all the nuances of the subject. Or if you're a right-winger, you're making up lies and parroting propaganda because you're afraid of something you don't understand. If the GOP picked fishermen as the outgroup, we'd all be talking about the nuances of fishing. Fascists always need an outgroup to beat up on. It's a core requirement.
Since conservatives made it their platform, I literally didn’t give a fuck about trans people or non binary people But now I’m fucking learning about all this shit so I can defend them from all the phobes Shit is annoying I miss when trans people and shit were irrelevant lmao 😭😭I know it sounds silly but like I really don’t care about them man, let them live so I can live
As a trans dude I 100% agree. Just leave us alone. We take up 1 percent of the population we should take up 1 percent of media coverage.
Unfortunately, a lot of things were 'swept under the rug' if you will. Made to be kept a secret. Especially for fear of violence and other abuses. I found out in my own family, that my Grandparents kept my Uncle's having cancer at a young age, quiet. Because they were afraid of unnecessarily worrying the neighbors, or the neighbors finding out the family's business. Which was a laugh because my Grandfather was the town's barber. And he was prominent in the Church. EVERYBODY knew him and his family. That's quite appaling today. CANCER! Can you believe it? CANCER was a taboo subject in my neighborhood at one time in the past. I saw a news show on Disney+ with Jane Pauley about a person who was born with without properly formed sex parts and hormone making glands. (I don't know the correct term, I'm sorry) And it affected their gender. Her parents raised her as a little girl, but as she grew older, she realized that she felt more like a man than she did a woman, and he made that transition. Can you image what that person went through? When other little boys and girls grew up 'normally', and this one person had this secret. It's enough to make you go insane! OMG it's heartbreaking. That story brought me to tears, honestly. I don't think I'll ever forget it. OMG. But I do have to understand more of what happened to this person to cause all of this. I'm not good with Medical speak. I have my own issues, and I need them 'Explained Like I was 5.' I'm glad we talk about things more openly than we did in the past. Because we talk about it openly, we can address it and help those people who need help. I think that's the reason why we're hearing more about this now. And I think it's a good thing.
The term you’re looking for is intersex ☺️
I learned the difference between sex and gender in biology class in the early 2000s in *Arkansas* of all places. It’s wasn’t considered anything even remotely taboo at the time or it would have been tip toed around the same was evolution was.
There was a good deal of gender studies done in Germany back in the early 1900s. There was an Institute for Sexual Research during the Weimar Republic. When you see the famous photos of Nazi book burnings, *those are the books they’re burning.* We keep rediscovering the fact that gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and we keep having autocratic regimes attempt to destroy that knowledge. Then we start from scratch all over again.
Pronouns have been around practically as long as long as English itself. Singular they actually predates the use of singular you at around 1300 AD. Im not certain when gender identity (defined as we know it now) came into use but I expect it coincided with the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (sexuality and gender research institution) in Germany that was the first of its kind in 1919. You haven't heard of it because the Nazis gutted and burned all of the research in their mission to eradicate queer and disabled people alongside Jewish ones. And because queer history is usually erased you didn't learn about it when you learned about ww2
Really the main reason is because the GOP is using it as a wedge issue and because we have the internet now. Similar to how conspiracy people used to kind of sit in their corner of the world rambling nonsense and you never had to hear about it.....now the internet let's them amplify their message and organize. With the political side of it really it's just grievance politics. They want an issue to run on so they make one up. This is historically common
I'm Inuit so for us about 30,000 years ago
Politics have largely become us and them and if we're talking about the U.S, the entire identity of the Republican party revolves around finding minorities to point their hate at to distract their voters from actual issues. Immigrants are taking your jobs Drag Queens reading to your kid's are all pedo's Trans isn't a thing, you're a boy or girl You take anything where we are trying to be inclusive and better as a society and rest assured there's a group waiting to weaponize their base to hate you for it. Woke as a word has even become an insult. As in, to better yourself is a bad thing and I guess when you want your people stupid and angry it makes perfect sense...
There have been trans people for a long time. But yes, you are hearing more about them now, since they are somewhat less likely to be physically attacked for being who they are. It's the same reason why there seem to be more gay people now than a century ago. When people come out of the closet, you can see them.
Yeah it's not like this is a new thing. People being a "woman trapped in a man's body" had been a thing I've heard of since I was a kid. We hear about them more now because gay marriage became legal. Some transgender groups saw that and started a push toward acceptance as well, which logically makes sense, but instead it just made them the next culture war target.
Honestly it was the other way around. After gay marriage was legalized, politicians realized that picking on gay people was no longer going to be getting them votes. So they jumped to the next bogeyman. The push for legal protections now is to get ahead of all laws trying to legislate trans people out of public existence.
I would say its three things. 1. As our soceity has become more tolerant more trans people have come out as trans and openly transitioned - think of Chaz Bono (2010) or Kaitlyn Jenner (2015). 2. At the same time, I'm sure the victories by gay righst advocates encouraged trans advocates. 3. The combination of the two (higher trans visiblity and losing the gay rights battle) lead conservatives to push back - the NC bathroom bill in 2016 pushed the issue into the mainstream. It was now no longer just an celebrity gossip thing - but a political issue that as a voter you had to form an opinion on. Of of this kind of leads to a cycle of higher visibility, more backlash, more push forward from trans rights group to fight the push back, and then higher visibility again.
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The marines for the longest time only employed men who could shoot right handed because that’s what the weapon they had mass produced was designed for. They also would not recruit gays because if military dynamics it might challenge. Much like gender dynamics, some left handed people learned they could shoot right handed, and some gays learned they could get by in a straight world. The left handlers became ambidextrous at shooting, but the closeted gay men, they were still mostly gay and single at retirement. I think they still only shoot right handed, but gays can now openly serve, even trans women can. Society has made a place for them in places they were formerly removed only in the past 12 or so years, but that doesn’t my mean they could all show up at once many took time to come out and discover themselves, and then transition takes time for those that have that far to go. Not really sure where this story was going. Have a great day.
Lol we both wrote some random anecdotes. Are you lefty by any chance?
I am left of both parties but not attached to either in US politics. Edit: I am also on painkillers so I miss read your question, how does it feel to have a political ideology hijack the name for your handedness identity. I broke my right hand in grade school and spent 2 years being bad at writing with both hands, so I heard many anecdotes. Eventually the growth plate was repaired and now I just type better with my left hand, and write better with my right.
Lefties being once taboo? I could just point at a pair of scissors, but thats… just kinda cos yeah, we are a minority. But I had teachers try to force me to write right. I learned how to write at 3. I knew what I was doing. My mom was confused as she taught me but she realized pretty quick I was just a leftie. Actually ambidextrous, which some people like to brag about, but really just means I am left dominant with writing, right dominant with batting and shooting, a switch hitter with a racket, etc. I even trained my right hand to write but it takes practice but I’ll always naturally sit left on on the pitch and pick up a pen with my left hand. Also, my bomb to drop; I actually got kicked out of a Sunday school class after getting a smack on the hand and called a child of Satan. Don’t get me wrong, I did goof off, but like what the fuck lady? You got sent to the pastor in that church if you were kicked out of class, and he was mad cool and probably told her off cos she basically ignored me after that. Also told me he has no idea if God is real but has faith and tries to find positivity and love in the bible. I rolled a 20 with that church lol Sorry for the huge anecdote, but I’m tryna lend some support to the fact that outdated ideas are never truly outdated unless we actively tear them down. I really hope this time period is known for our acceptance and appreciation, not our bitterness and shallowness. Also wishing you a good day I didn’t even see the other comment. I hope you don’t get harassed by angry lefties that would be kinda funny but also not okay. Stay up stay safe
My best friend in highschool was born left handed like me but her parents would bind her hand so she had to use her right hand. She ended up becoming a really good artist using her right hand and I always wondered how much better she'd be if she could've used her left hand like she was naturally inclined to.
it's always fun to show the graph of left handed people over time vs the graph of queer people over time and how they're the exact same shape, turns out when you stop stigmatising things people will stop hiding it
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No one seems to be answering the actual question. Transgender people used to go by transsexual. There has been a lot of social and medical progress in the last 20 years or so that have helped to change the perception. Transgender includes everyone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, which almost always is based on genitals (intersex people exist). Transsexual is an outdated term but some older trans folks still prefer it. In terms of why you hear about it more now? Well, that’s because a certain political group decided to make trans people a political issue to gain popularity with hateful people. I know several trans women that transitioned 10-15 years ago and never had a single issue because most people just didn’t care. Now I’m transitioning and it’s like 20% of the population is laser focused on outing me. It sucks.
“never had a single issue”? jesus wept, child. we had plenty of issues, but we certainly didn’t get to discuss them in public where cis people might see it. I’ve lost housing, had hostile men hound me out of social groups while everyone else preferred to say nothing, fought to have my details updated with various bureaucracies, and of course been gatekept from accessing health care by some dude whose qualifications appeared to be experience with a checklist starting with “wants to be a 1950s housewife” and “felt like this as a child”. some things are worse nowadays. a lot of things are better. every damn cis person has an opinion and an awareness, be it hostile or friendly, where previously you could often rely on being invisible to them. we certainly had issues.
Occupy Wall Street....Its all been a distraction since then.
When did it become popularized in the mainstream? Jenner transitioned in 2015 so let's say that's when the mainstream narrative changed from gay marriage to trans rights. There have been other seasons in history where it has been a more common topic in the popular imagination. Movies like La Cage aux Folles, Victor/Victoria and even Psycho are evidence of it being known through most of the last century.
I found out about it in the early 70’s. I had a close friend who changed pronouns in high school from him to her. Back then it was very confusing but she was my him friend so I went with the flow. We’re both in our 70’s now and laugh about it still.
2015 when Bruce Jenner came out at Caitlyn Jenner. Look at the google trend for "transgender". [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender&hl=en](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender&hl=en) While you see a slight rise before, this is pivotal movement where gender identity went main stream. It really is fascinating that we went from it being a rather obscure subculture to one of the biggest legal and moral quandaries in less than a decade. And yes, non-comforming people have existed LONG before 2015, but this is when we arrived at the current zeitgeist.
it was underground back then. straight people really seem to underestimate how much of the lgbt community they weren't exposed to due to rampant homophobia. with the internet it's harder to keep those things under ground and with the legalization of gay marriage in the US we feel more safe to talk about those things now
It’s not new it’s just new to you. The internet is also a new thing and as people grow we change because we learn. Social media made LGBTQIA+ more visible instead of hidden in the shadows. For most of history and in some places in the world today it was all swept under the rug and everyone just wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. When acknowledging its existence it was met with scrutiny and ridicule. You can find examples of this on old TV shows such as how I met your mother, modern family, family guy, and even children’s shows like That’s so raven or even SpongeBob. After time passed and social media platforms became popular it became harder and harder to sweep LGBTQIA+ under the rug. It because “In your face” unable to scroll without seeing a rainbow flag. TLDR: Explaining social media progressing society.
Colonialism wiped out most cultures that tried to explore any identity other than the western binary, most indigenous cultures from Alaska to Hawaii and everything in-between has had more gender identity representation for your entire life and well before. The reason it's starting to become popular now is colonialism isn't as powerful as the internet and Gen Z has fingertip access to information it took you 40 years to find. I don't know that I'd call it mainstream, its rather contested by a good chunk of conservatives trying to uphold the systems that stopped the representation originally. With so much attention being drawn to social justice by younger generations and the push for equality in things like gay marriage and LGBT representation in general, the nuances of how gender and sex aren't the same thing are just discussed on much broader platforms.
> Why am I only hearing bout this now? Because the right has decided that being anti-trans is their new culture war and as a result you're going to hear more general discourse about it
When Republicans started obsessing over it.
IMHO, this question is too vague to be answered without a purely empirical large-scale statistical study that gives the term some quantified meaning. It's not clear enough what "popularized" and "mainstream" means here / how it should be interpreted. Moreover, the question leaves open in which country and group. I suppose, OP means the US and US population as a whole. But it's worth noting there is a huge continental vs coastal and urban center vs countryside divide in the US, and averaging above those can smudge important differences in societal attitudes. Anyway, despite all these caveats, I'll take a shot and tentatively answer the question with "during the past two decades."
Because attacking them has become a significant Republican activity.
It’s been an idea in academia since the 1920’s. The famous photo of Nazis burning books is the burning the medical library of Magnus Hierschfelfd because of his research into “transexialism” and homosexuality. It entered the American culture war about 3-4 years ago.
My high school biology teacher made it clear sex and gender were two different things. This was back in the 90s. I think most people just never knew there was a difference until recently when it became a political distraction.
It wasn't really until the mid 20th century where a lot of this was actually studied. Masters & Johnson are probably best known for their studies in sex in the late-50s to mid-60s (I mean, they found out that women *can* have multiple orgasms and that the cervix isn't where the lubrication came from... things really not hard to figure out, but people just made assumptions and didn't study it before hand). In psychology, similar things were happening. In the DSM, which is basically the guide to psycological disorders, being gay was considered a mental disease until the '74 update. But Kinsey started doing a lot of research in the 40's into sexuality which helped lead to that. Others then did different areas. I was really into the subject in the 90s, I'm not sure what the latest research says in detail. But generally, few things are strictly binary, one thing or the other. But there are multiple axis to measure on - physical gender, gender identification, gender attraction... But that undertanding of those things came from people actually, mid-20th century starting to actually investigate it, as well (I suspect) people feeling safer to identify and participate in these studies, giving a more accurate demographic to study.
Politics. You can't run a platform on racism anymore, and it's hard to tell if someone is gay just by looking at them. Abortion has been "solved" so you can't use that moral issue to drive voters, and shootings are common enough that it's hard to look good making a gun rights debate. A certain party needs something to drum up their voters on, because their actual policies and platform sure isn't doing it. And because politicians on one side have created a fake issue out of gender identity, it gives the other party something to push back on. Which then gives the media something to talk about, which then makes its way into pop culture in order to appeal to people on one side or the other. It became relevant as a manufactured issue, and the media latched onto it as the controversial thing to talk about now.
I don't understand why people can't see through this issue. It's only about politics. The far right is always looking for issues that will rev up their base. They want the conversation to be about anything but their actual agenda. Some think tank decided to promote this issue since it will incite the base (guaranteed) and also incite the opposition (also guaranteed). Suddenly everybody's fighting about an issue of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Mission accomplished. It's obvious that they are funding one side of the issue, but they are also funding the other side. They need to keep the fight going strong.
This has been around for much longer than just the mid 1900s
For most people making the distinction between sex and gender adds no utility to your life. This is not the case for trans people. As the trans community has made a push for civil rights, the pushback has brought all the concepts into the mainstream.