HUZZAH! Banned from Rentech.com!
ZephyrZodiac:
Quote from: laeshanin on 2005 August 21, 09:58:11
Quote from: rainbow on 2005 August 21, 09:38:32
I read on a British-American dictionary website that the British do not put a period after titles such as Mr. and Mrs. as Americans do. I was reading a book that was British once, and I thought it was a misprint because there were no periods after those titles. Perhaps there are other things as well.
We do place a full stop after titles as they are a contraction, so still not clear what's going on there. Enlightenment is realy needed, please.
I think in modern business English, it's now normal practice to miss out the full stop, also the commas at the end of lines of an address, and this is what is now taught in school. However, since we don't have the equivalent of the Academie Francaise which can change grammar and spelling rules and has the full backing of the French government, these changes are always arbitrary and very much a matter of personal taste.
Inge:
I would think therefore that it is gender that should be considered in social speech, not sex. If someone with a biological sex of male considers themselves to be of female gender, then it would be appropriate to refer to them as "she" - so that's gender, not sex.
veilchen:
According to Dr. Bruce Kind, a biopsychologist, the concept of gender was adopted to distinguish culturally specific characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity from biological features, and thus was used to repudiate biological determinism. Meaning, that gender is not a natural category, but instead is the social construction of femininity and masculinity (King, 2002).
Gender = from latin genus and the Old French gendre, meaning "kind" or "sort".
There is no direct relationship between sex and gender. There are individuals with ambiguous genitalia, and there are individuals with unambiguous genitalia but whose gender identity dos not match their anatomy.
Consider: A person goes to a gynecologist because of health concerns. The doctor discovers that this person - whose outward appearance (including no penis) and sense of self are both female- has no uterus or ovaries, but instead has male (XY) chromosomes. Is this person male or female?
Inge:
Apparently it's a legal requirement to assign a sex to a baby soon after birth. It can be *changed* but cannot be blank. I was reading a few sites about ambiguous birth sex babies and there were so many werid combinations of chromosome and genitalia etc etc that often it just comes down to throwing a dice. Having made the decision, they are then forced to grow up with it unless a big fuss is gone through later to get it changed.
And apparently many of us so-called "normal" men and women are going through life never knowing that we have chromosomes different to our apparent sex! Influences in the womb can set about the entire sex differentiation process in a direction other than that suggested by the chromosomes! That was really new to me.
veilchen:
Yes, and that is, in my opinion, just not right.
The dichotomy in biological determinism identifies people by their genitals. However, there are cases in which the birth assignment went haywire (by western standards of dichotomy). For example, in the Dominican Republic in 1974, they found 38 boys who displayed a type of androgen insensitivity. The chromosome combination was male (XY), and the internal structure was also male. Because of the inherited syndrome deficiency, the testosterone was not converted into dihydrotestosterone (necessary for the proper function of the external genitalia). Their genitalia looked like the female genitalia, the testicles did not descend, and they had a short, closed vaginal cavity.
Eighteen of these children were raised as girls, but at puberty everything changed. Suddenly the organs started secreting large amounts of testosterone, the voices deepened, muscles developed, and the testicles descended. What was thought of as being the female genitalia (labia), suddenly grew into the male genitalia (penis). Sperm production began. Luckily for those children, their culture recognises all three sexes; in the western culture they would have been freaks, or worse, their parents might have tried to "set things right" by sexual re-assignment at birth; surgery in the name of cultural bias.
During the first few weeks of pregnancy, embryos can't even be distinguished anatomically as 'male' or 'female'. During the 5th and 6th week, the embryo develops two duct systems, the male and the female ones. If both were removed at this stage, the sex would always default to female, even with the XY combination. Unless there are high levels of the male hormones at a critical stage of fetal development, nature has programmed everyone for female development.
There is some excellent literature out about all this. The APA (American Psychological Association) web-site has some great articles about this as well
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