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Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity. Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word ''gender'' to refer to anything but grammatical categories.〔〔 However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=GENDER )〕 and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).〔 However, in many other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, ''gender'' includes ''sex'' or replaces it.〔〔 Although this change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed in 1993 when the USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use ''gender'' instead of ''sex''.〔(Guideline for the Study and Evaluation of Gender Differences in the Clinical Evaluation of Drugs )〕 In 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using ''sex ''as the biological classification and ''gender'' as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation." In non-human animal research, ''gender'' is also commonly used to refer to the physiology of the animals.〔 In the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social gender role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978.〔 Some cultures have specific gender-related social roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra (chhaka) of India and Pakistan. The social sciences have a branch devoted to gender studies. Other sciences, such as sexology and neuroscience, are also interested in the subject. While the social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly do, research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in males and females influence the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence the formation of gender identity. ==Etymology and usage== The modern English word ''gender'' comes from the Middle English ''gender'' (also ''gendere'', ''gendir'' ''gendyr'', ''gendre''), a loanword from Anglo-Norman and Middle French ''gendre''. This, in turn, came from Latin ''genus''. Both words mean "kind", "type", or "sort". They derive ultimately from a widely attested Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root ''gen-'',〔 Pokorny, Julius (1959, reprinted in 1989) ('gen' ), in ''Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch'', Bern: Francke, pp. 373–75.〕〔 ('genə-' ), in 'Appendix I: Indo-European Roots', to ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).〕 which is also the source of ''kin'', ''kind'', ''king'', and many other English words.〔 ('Gen' ). Your Dictionary.com〕 It appears in Modern French in the word ''genre'' (type, kind, also ''genre sexuel'') and is related to the Greek root ''gen-'' (to produce), appearing in ''gene'', ''genesis'', and ''oxygen''. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of ''gender'' as "kind" had already become obsolete. The word was still widely attested, however, in the specific sense of grammatical gender (the assignment of nouns to categories such as ''masculine'', ''feminine'' and ''neuter''). According to Aristotle, this concept was introduced by the Greek philosopher Protagoras. In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler stated that the definition of the word pertains to this grammar-related meaning: However, examples of the use of ''gender'' to refer to masculinity and femininity as types are found throughout the history of Modern English (from about the 14th century). The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates from the work of John Money (1955), and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards (see below). The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of ''gender''. The popular use of ''gender'' simply as an alternative to ''sex'' (as a biological category) is also widespread, although attempts are still made to preserve the distinction. The American Heritage Dictionary (2000) uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference, noting that the distinction "is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels."〔(Usage note: ''Gender'', ) ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition, (2000).〕 In the last two decades of the 20th century, the use of ''gender'' in academia increased greatly, outnumbering uses of ''sex'' in the social sciences. While the spread of the word in science publications can be attributed to the influence of feminism, its use as a euphemism for sex is attributed to the failure to grasp the distinction made in feminist theory, and the distinction has sometimes become blurred with the theory itself: "Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation".〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gender」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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