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I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid c
by collectedparts 4y ago
I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid confusion given the alternate meaning.
- nateb2022 4y agoSex is a biological property of an organism, whereas gender is a social construct.
- Gigachad 4y agoProblem is "sex" is an ambiguous word with multiple meanings and "gender" has been redefined to be useless. We probably need a new word that specifically refers to this one usage of "sex"
- oldstrangers 4y agoIt's not remotely ambiguous? It has two meanings, the biological sex of an organism and the biological reproduction of that organism.
- Gigachad 4y agoYou just provided the example of how its ambiguous. It makes titles confusing when you don't know exactly which meaning is meant. While using "gender" in the title would have been clearer, especially as mice don't have social constructs that we associate with the term.
- ghidle 4y agoIn this context, "experimenters' sex" can only reasonably mean whether the experimenter was female or male. The other alternative would have been them doing some experimental fucking next to the mice to see what happens. Such a paper would undoubtedly have been titled differently.
- irrational 4y agoSo… what does happen? Surely someone has already done that experiment.
- oldstrangers 4y agoIt's not though. Literally at all. "Experimenters' (possessive) sex" : so, their biological sex is the only thing they can posses in this sentence. They can't "possess" sexual reproduction in this context, that would not make any sense. This is just simple grammar. Gender would also make zero sense because this is not an article about gender. I can understand the confusion if English isn't your first language but outside of that it's very clear.
- drewcoo 4y agoambiguous 2: capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ambiguous https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ambiguous
- oldstrangers 4y ago"capable" Thanks to grammar, we are literally incapable of understanding "sex" in this context to mean anything other than biological sex. I can't believe I'm having to explain this multiple times. The only argument people are making is that they lack the reading comprehension to understand the sentence correctly.
- IncRnd 4y agoThe word "senses" from your definition can be understood multiple ways. Yet, the meaning is absolutely clear from the context, just as the word sex is in the article. You are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 4y agoScientific usage of many words often is very specific and unambiguous to scientists regardless of a vague or shifting common usage. Unless you’re publishing papers that have to do with such things, you’re not included in “we” and scientific usage will mostly ignore common usage. Science does not need to adopt a whole new language because the rest of popular culture is ambiguous.
- yarg 4y agoIsn't the common use of the word "sex" just short for "sexual intercourse"? And unless there's the possibility that people are fucking in front of the mice, there's no ambiguity here.
- the_third_wave 4y agoYes, it is correct to use a biological term - sex - in an article related to biology instead of a linguistical one - gender. Organisms have sexes, words have genders.
- dymk 4y agoSex is a set of physical characteristics, gender is a set of social norms. Indeed scientific articles will distinguish between the two. A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.
- umvi 4y agoIt should be noted this is a very recent development though. I'm pretty sure if you looked in dictionaries made pre-2000, gender is synonymous with sex and was often the preferred term for biological sex since as GP points out, "sex" also means intercourse. Only in the last 10 years or so has the definition of gender been usurped to have a new distinct meaning to accommodate new social developments.
- dymk 4y agoBiologists and sociologists have distinguished between sex and gender for far longer than a decade.
- wahern 4y agoNot just biologists and sociologists, but pretty much all of academia. As a college student in the 1990s it was my understanding this distinction came about from 2nd wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, but since then I've come to learn that they goes back even further, into the 19th century at least. Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.
- userbinator 4y agoIt would be interesting if they had some trans experimenters to compare with.
- smegsicle 4y ago
- dymk 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boxmonster 4y agoAn interesting question. Do transwomen have a male scent or a female scent and do mice respond to transwomen like a male or female? How about transmen? A fascinating area of research.
- Latty 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- delecti 4y agoHormones influence your scent. So a trans woman would have male scent before starting hormones, and then would (over the course of weeks to months) gradually develop a female scent, and vice versa with trans men.
- ghidle 4y agoIn the context of how rodents respond to such scents, I think it is currently unknown whether a male on a long-term feminising hormone treatment would still produce a sufficiently male-type scent, or a female-type scent.
- delecti 4y agoBased on personal and anecdotal experience, I would be very confident in my assumption. There are plenty of things that hormones only change very gradually (body hair takes years), or which they can't "undo" (bones are pretty static after age 20-25), but body scent is one of the first and strongest changes when starting cross-sex hormones.
- ghidle 4y agoYes but this has not yet been experimentally tested, so it's currently unknown.
- groby_b 4y agoThis distinction is made at least since 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13260820/ - distinguishing between sex as physical/physiological characteristics and gender as psychological ones. I'd assume it's quite unlikely mice care about psychological characteristics of researchers, but it'd be an interesting piece of research to read :)
- ksaj 4y agoIn Botany for example, I've never heard reference to a plant's gender. It is always sex. Even for plants that can change sex, either on their own accord, or induced by human processes. Even in animal husbandry, determining one from the other is called sexing and not gendering. Some fish and other aquatic animals change sex over the course of their lives - never a mention of gender. Gender is a human social construct, albeit closely connected to sex. Loosely you could perhaps say that gender is the cultural and societal presentation of one's sex.
- fennecfoxen 4y agoThe word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”). If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.
- basicplus2 4y agoBut gender never means sexual union.. hense the misreading
- ksaj 4y agoAgreed. Nobody would confuse sex play with gender play. Both terms exist, and are well understood.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 4y agoSex is biological and social. Gender is about grammar and pronouns. It is a lot more important in other languages than English, and often has nothing to do with sex. There are languages where the genders are "alive" and "dead", or "adult" and "child or animal".
- basicplus2 4y agoI could not understand the heading even after multiple reads! Only until I started to read the article
- robwwilliams 4y agoNo, it is a weird usage of “sex” in this context, but at least they are explicit. It should read “gender”. May have been an IRB issue. Had they used the word “gender” then this MAY have made the research design approval process twice as complicated. I wonder if this study was exempt from IRB human subjects research oversight and approval?
- worthless-trash 4y agoBoth terms are loaded these days, no matter what is written, some group will cry offense with crippling emotional damage.
- bobkazamakis 4y agoI'm just glad you and I found a way to feel superior - by complaining about the complainers.
- worthless-trash 4y agoK.
- raffraffraff 4y agoSurely sex is the only one with a clear meaning? There is no alternate meaning. Gender, on the other hand, isn't very well defined.