• DOI:10.1007/s10508-018-1300-x
• Corpus ID: 52156765

Know Thy Gender: Etymological Primer

@article{Janssen2018KnowTG,
  title={Know Thy Gender: Etymological Primer},
  author={Diederik F. Janssen},
  journal={Archives of Sexual Behavior},
  year={2018},
  volume={47},
  pages={2149-2154}
}

• Diederik F. Janssen
• Published 4 September 2018
• Psychology
• Archives of Sexual Behavior

Use of the word gender in the post-WW2 Anglophone world has been evermore ubiquitous though not always unambiguous (e.g., Haig, 2004; Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2011). The seminal phrase gender role and orientation is well-known to have debuted in mid-1950s work by John Money (1921–2006) and colleagues, seemingly first in a book of abstracts pertinent to the 13th M. and R. Pediatric Research Conference1 of November 3–4, 1954 (Hampson, 1954; Money, 1954). Gender identity followed about a decade onward, here as a seeming synonym of psychosexual identity (Money, 1963, passim; Money himself dated the terms back to 1955 and 1966, respectively: Money, 1994). Gender identity silently replaced the more confusing gender orientation which had meant “gender role as subjectively experienced” (Green & Money, 1961, p. 286n). Money traces the need for gender role’s definition back to “a seminar in 1949 conducted by George Gardner at Harvard in which he presented a case of hermaphroditism” (Money, 1973, pp. 397–398) which led Money to a graduate paper (on Freud) and eventually his 1952 dissertation. Gender had been a grammatical term, hence the sporadic use of “sexual gender” in reference to sex before the 1950s. Sex and gender had been contrasted terms already in eighteenthcentury grammar textbooks, and, marginally, in early twentieth-century phytology.2 Indulging a career-long preoccupation with “present-day psychological vocabulary” (Money, 1955, p. 264), Money (1973) settled on gender, awkwardly, “so as not to confuse the sex of the genitalia and their activities with nonerotic and nongenital sex roles and activities that are prescribed culturally and historically” (p. 398). This is awkward given his self-admittedly “all-inclusive” (p. 398) definition of it. “Gender role and orientation” aggregated a host of socially correlated variables (an “ivory-tower ideal,” in his own reassessment: p. 398): “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively” (Money, 1954, p. 15), or, when a child “assimilates the parents’ assuredness of having a son or a daughter” (Hampson, 1954, p. 18). “Due consideration” was given to “general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; play preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment; content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; replies to oblique inquiries and projective tests; evidence of erotic practices, and, finally, the person’s own replies to direct inquiry” (p. 17). Gender role indeed seemed to echo the older sociological concept of sex role (or sexual role, or social-sex role, or sociosexual role, or social sexual role). Haig (2004) briefly picked up on this, tracing the latter term back to 1940s uses by Talcott Parsons and others. The phrase is actually attested in English as early as 1915 (in reference to Adler; see below), and earlier still, with reference to active (male or masculine, intromissive) and passive (female or feminine, submissive) “roles” in the sex act (e.g., Ellis & Symonds, 1897, p. 63, who also speak of masculine diathesis and homosexual diathesis in this context). Its German equivalent, Geschlechtsrolle or Geschlechterrolle, is in fact of sporadic mid-nineteenth-century attestation (with reference to fatherhood; compare Vaterrolle and Gattenrolle [spousal role]).3 Fröbel (1878) takes an anti-suffrage position where stating: “In healthy national life [Nationalleben], aspirations of twisted spirits of both sexes will never gain space, which, if they reach decisive influence, would reverse