At 09:10 PM 22/04/99 -0500, Jocelyn Brown wrote:
>I was speaking of gender when it comes to primary sexual characteristics,
>i.e. male and female.
`Gender' is primarily a linguistic marker term, in many languages only loosely coupled to sex. For the last decade or two, especially in feminist discourse, it is usefully distinguished from `sex' which is the biological, reproductive or morphological category. `Male or female' is sex; `feminine, masculine, ambi, neuter, lifeless, chiral, washed-on-Tuesdays-while-wearing-an-emblematic-parrot (etc)' is gender.
Damien Broderick