Friday, April 20, 2007

Sex and Gender: An introduction.


How do you tell the gender of a goldfish?

Or more charmingly,


And even

Is my goldfish a lady fish or a gentleman fish?
























flipreversal said...

Wow, profound post :) Gender and language is a particularly interesting issue; for example in German, a girl is das Maedchen which is neuter and therefore has to be described using the neuter personal pronoun es = it. Lemonade (die Limonade) is, to pull a word out of thin air, feminine, and thus described via the feminine personal pronoun sie (her/she). So a sentence like "Das Maedchen trinkt die Limonade" (The girl drinks the lemonade) can easily become "Es trinkt sie" (It drinks her) which can initially be difficult to get your head around. In an essay called something like "The Really Awful German Language" (I'm too lazy to google it, but it's all over the net), Mark Twain gets a lot of humorous mileage out of this quirk of grammar and questions how masculine a man is, when half his body parts are defined as feminine...

Genderless languages are the way forward i feel. Although one wonders if there are any truly genderless languages. The international language Esperanto, to get on my personal hobby horse, was constructed to exclude grammatical genders for simplicity's sake. And yet in some ways it is the most sexist language i know; the word for man is "viro". The word for woman is "virino", formed by adding the feminine affix -in to the male root. Similarly patro (father) and patrino (mother); filo (son) and filino (daughter); bovo (ox) and bovino (cow)....

Okay, me go know before comment becomes longer than post! *blushes*

sly civilian said...


Lmao. And i needed to laugh. Thank you. :) said...

A blog directory listing on goldfish gender Add your blog site to the collection.

Charlesdawson said...

Although I agree with the Goldfish about the profound effect of early social conditioning, can I just remind everyone of the case given publicity because of the victim's suicide: that of a young boy whose genitalia were mutilated by accident very early in babyhood; the paediatrician advised the parents to complete the castration and also remove the penis entirely and bring the child up as a girl, reckoning that social conditioning would take over.

Even before puberty the child (who was not aware of his history) began to feel that there was something badly wrong or unnatural about his situation.

Eventually when old enough, and in possession of the truth, he obtained reconstructive surgery and went on, in fact, to marry.

But, sadly, that didn't work out either, and he killed himself.

The general feeling is, now, that some aspects of gender are hard-wired into our makeup and cannot be changed by any circumstances.

Smiffy said...

Thank you for a very interesting post. I have to confess that I was unaware of the distinction between terms and have tended to use the words interchangeably, in those rare times that I use either.

So, gender is just another way of saying "you are different from me", which seems to be a key theme in society, rather than looking at our common humanity. Or pisceanity, whatever.

The Goldfish said...

Flipreversal, it's interesting what you say about Esperanto - I was aware that it was gendered, which as an English-speaker, seemed a bit daft for a brand new language that was going to aim to simplify things. But I didn't realise it was that bad.

The essay you mention is The Awful German Language by Mark Twain, so you were very close.

Charles, I think you've missed the point slightly. For one thing, that chap's example is of someone who did not grow up in the absence of gender-conditioning - on the contrary, he would have received more emphatic conditioning that most little girls.

However, in any case, this is not an example which suggests that gender is innate, but that his sex, his maleness and sexuality was innate. Which of course it is - it may manifest in different ways in all of us, but that is to do with that wiring and hormone levels, brain architecture and all the rest of it, independant of conditioning.

If this wasn't the case, nobody would be gay in a homophobic world, because we would have all been conditioned not to be.

Smiffy, yes, most people use these words interchangably, and most of the time it doesn't matter a great deal. But yeah, you're right, gender is a way of instantly pigeon-holing people.

Marcelle Proust said...

Er, actually, Spanish doesn't have neuter nouns. Same two choices as in French. I believe this is the case for all Romance languages, despite the presence of neuter nouns in their common source, Latin. (But I don't know Romanian or Romansch, so can't actually be sure of them.)

Queen_Mum said...

The book "Middlesex" fictionalizes this subject but lacks Goldfish references. Pity. But it did win the Pulitzer Prize.

Charlesdawson said...

Sorry, Goldfish, my fault for being obscure. What intersted me about that case was precisely what you say - the chap, despite presumably intensive conditioning, ended up totally confused because of a war between his innate and implanted reactions (reactions isn't the right word but can't think of a better). He was not able to reject either.

Although it appears that sex is innate and gender is a construct, it's far more subtle than that.

flipreversal said...

i think Marcelle Proust is right re neuter nouns in Romance languages. I don't know Romanian but once took a basic course in Romansch and don't remember any. have only ever seen them in Germanic or Slavic languages.

Re Esperanto, it doesnt have grammatical gender as such. The idea is just for simplicity's sake there should be as few words as possible. Thus there is a word for man and woman is derived from this by the addition of the feminine affix. From a linguistic point of view this is probably quite clever, it's just whether psychologically women mind being defined as female men. In the interests of fairness, the word for female is ina with the word for male being malina where mal is an affix which gives the opposite of the root to which it is attached. Hence the state of being male is defined as being un-female.

The Goldfish said...

Apologies about the misinformation about Spanish and thanks for the correction - I did attempt to check that before I posted, as I am not a Spanish-speaker. I would edit it but then the comments wouldn't make sense.

Queen Mum - Hello there and thank you.

Charles - yes, no doubt it is immensely subtle - it is, as I say impossible to comprehensively dissect nature from nurture.

Flipreversal - thanks for the information. It is very interesting the way these things are handled in different languages.

I know some feminists who blog write "womyn" as opposed to "women" which I find mildly amusing (sorry), because you really would have to rewrite the entire language to elliminate anything which could be construed as upholding patriarchy. And that's English which doesn't have nearly so much gender in it as many others.

andrea said...

goldfish gender! reading this was the highlight of my day; thanks for such a fun post.

And, you're quite right about the differences between sex and gender.

As far as I can tell, the main differences between male and female sexes (of any species of animal or plant) is that the male's gametes are in small, frequently mobile packages (sperm) whereas the females gametes are in large, frequently immobile packages (eggs). Then you get to weird stuff like some fungi, and even in the sexual stages of their life cycles we can't even distinguish males and females, so we just call them + and - .

As for languages, I'm still trying to figure out why the f--- the vagina is masculine in French: le vagin. Too passing strange to make sense of.

Anonymous said...

Sitting here in Europe and wondering about the gender of the words I'm learning here and came up with a system that gives me a better than 50 50 chance of getting it right, closer to 80% right, and it's this: I judge if the the word is for something Important - or Not Important. If it's important, I gave it the masculine gender. If less so, I give it the feminine. It works a lot, sad but true.

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RYand avis said...

wow i looked up the fishes butt and i say i saw a penis lokking thing so i said female and a vagina looking thing and i said male sweet. htmak uyo diary

rachel said...

.... i totally learned alot from reading this, but as you mentioned at the begining i ended up here by googling "what gender is my fish." and i still dont know how to tell if my 2 gold fish have xx or xy chromosomes, which is why i read the whole thing.

To all of you who are obviously good with grammer, sorry. I am not.

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