Ewww, Dad; Don't Say That Word!

Wha-a-at, 'se-e-e-ex'? I-I-I had se-e-e-ex!
                                                        —Abraham "Grampa" Simpson

In "Body Swap" (New Scientist 2004, 194[2600]:40-43), about transsexual teenagers, we are informed that

our physical gender is determined by our genes early on in the womb.

Did you know that the English language has, and has had since at least A.D. 1382 (according to the OED), a word whose actual definition is essentially "physical gender"? It's true: the word is 'sex.'

'Gender' started out as a non-sex-related grammatical/philological term for distinguishing classes of nouns with different grammatical constructions, and was recently (in the last half-century) adopted by social scientists to differentiate (biological) sex from cultural constructions of and social attitudes about it. The points of the distinction are that (1) gender, being primarily semiotic, is vastly more variable than sex; and (2) sex and gender, while strongly correlated, are not isomorphic. This is reflected in the name Gender Identity Disorder, in which one's gender identity and sex identity are mis-matched. Thus all transsexual persons are transgendered, but not all transgendered persons are transsexual.

It is interesting to me that the biological identity is considered to be the more fundamental, given that human biological affairs are mediated so strongly by our (biologically arbitrary) cultural and social arrangements. I suspect this assumption is homologous to the fundamental primacy accorded to economics over other aspects of social life (e.g., legal freedoms) in authoritarian politics (such as the U.S.'s Republican party): it seems that way through force of habit, but is no more the 'natural' condition of so cultural an animal as Homo sapiens than any of the alternatives.

I can only assume that Anglophonic prudishness is responsible for the even-more-recent, and (surely unintentionally) ironical, preference of 'gender' to 'sex' in English [mis]usage. I have observed this to be rampant in the biomedical literature, whose contributors, it seems to me, really should know better.