What Do Sex and Gender Even Mean Now?

In her first argument as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who said, “I ask no favor for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” At some point, however, Ginsburg was encouraged to use an alternative to the term sex .

“I’m typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word sex, sex, sex is on every page,” her secretary at Columbia Law School told her.

“Don’t you know that those nine men”—that era’s Supreme Court justices—“they hear that word, and their first association is not the way you want them to be thinking?” The secretary suggested substituting gender to “ward off distracting associations.” But sex and gender don’t mean the same thing.

The two terms have never been stable.

Still, I recall a time when, among educated people, sex was typically understood to refer to matters of biology, such as a person’s reproductive organs, and gender to refer to matters that are socially constructed, such as the norm of dressing little boys in blue pants and little girls in pink dresses.

Today, there seems to be no standard usage.

Parents throw gender-reveal parties to disclose the sex of their baby.

President Trump said in his 2025 inaugural address, “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female”—but “male” and “female” are sexes.

A statute in California defines sex (in part) as follows: “‘Sex’ also includes, but is not limited to, a person’s gender. ‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression.” The confusion that results from this lost distinction causes problems in academia––see the recent kerfuffle in anthropology ––as well as in medicine, law, public policy, and more.

People mistake meanings and talk past one another about matters that are fraught even when definitions are clear.

How did we get into this semantic mess? The concept of a “gender role” was introduced in a 1955 paper by the researcher John Money to signify “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.” He believed that people born with ambiguous or atypical genitals, whom he called “hermaphrodites or intersexes,” contributed to “this new meaning of gender.” Would such individuals operate in society as men or women? He thought that rearing would better predict a person’s “gender role” than biology.

The term gender identity , first defined as “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex,” dates back to at least the early 1960s.