ABSTRACT
The purpose of the distinction between sex and gender has been to distinguish between those human characteristics which are rooted in biology and those which humans acquire through social and cultural influence. But the main reason for querying the sex/gender binary is humanitarian, or personal. There are strong reasons for abandoning all talk of sexual difference, both in the Church and in the Academy, and speaking instead of sexual similarity. There is one obvious place, in fact a trio of shared discourses, where the one-sex theory survives more or less intact, down to the present day. These are the linguistic practices of Christianity in liturgy, hymnody and proclamation. Many theological students and their teachers in the 1970s and 1980s utilized the new and disparaging term 'sexism' to declare war on the use of terms like 'man', 'men', 'mankind', when these same terms were intended to include women and children, but without saying so.
