ABSTRACT
In May 1995 there was a brief correspondence in The Times over the appointment of a Professor of Gender Relations at the University of Dundee, or rather, over the title, one reader regretting that ‘a great university’ was not aware that only words have gender-living beings are of different sexes. In the social sciences, this was in fact true until about twenty-five years ago. Udry (1994) refers to a bibliography of 12,000 titles for marriage and family literature from 1900 to 1964, in which the form ‘gender’ does not appear once. The current usage seems to stem from Money and Ehrhardt (1972). Udry suggests that most commonly
‘gender’ is now used as a synonym for biological sex. But not all writers agree. Diamond (1977) for example distinguishes ‘sexual identity’, defined as ‘the individual’s personal and private assessment of his or her gender’ from ‘gender role’ which is ‘stipulated by society’. Deaux (1985) uses ‘sex’ to refer to ‘the biologically based categories of male and female’, and ‘gender’ for ‘the psychological features frequently associated with these biological states, assigned either by an observer or by the individual subject’. This is more or less the same usage as Leonard Holdstock adopts in this volume, closely following that of Halpern (1992). Hoyenga and Hoyenga (1993) on the other hand object to the use of two separate terms at all, on the grounds that this establishes ‘an arbitrary and undesirable dichotomy’—we are products of both biology and environment. Another Times reader suggested that ‘gender’ was only used at Dundee because the University felt unable to appoint a Professor of Sex Relations. In bookshops, ‘gender’ is almost a synonym for ‘feminist’.
