Hi Denise,
you were referring to the sex of those Accipiters, not their gender. Cutting a sociolinguistic explanation short: as fas as ornithology is concerned, birds have a sex, but no gender.
Cheers, Jonny
Jonny Schoenjahn Perth WA jonnybird@bigpond.com
Denise wrote on 12 January 2013: “In the Top End size range for male Brown Goshawk is 33-42 cm while for Collared Sparrowhawk it’s 30-40 cm (both genders).” ===============================
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The last comment from me on this subject (I promise):
Philip states:
” As far as the ideas of the sexism in human society, there is no shortage of other mammal species that run a similar system of males taking a domineering role over females.”
That is true. While there are anatomical, physiological and natural environmental influences to human sexism (i.e. sexist attitudes), a significant proportion is culturally- and/or religiously-based. Religion is a cerebral concept that, as far as I know, is unique to the human species. The gender roles of humans are “inventions” based on culture and religion and are additional to the roles of sexes that nature defines for each species.
Stephen Ambrose Ryde NSW
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Philip,
Without going into this any further, well said – I couldn’t agree with you more!
Let’s leave this discussion at that, shall we!!??
Cheers, Martin Cachard, Cairns 0428 782 808
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Indeed, this has been a most tedious string. If I said I saw a golden bowerbird, and someone asked “what sex was it?”, they’d get the same answer as if they asked “what gender was it?” and then we’d move onto something interesting about the bird….
Eric
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That is the point I would have made if I was in the thread at the time – social scientists talk in terms of gender roles and gender identities.
Regards, Laurie.
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Below is an email that I sent privately to Philip late this afternoon. In light of Merrilyn’s latest contribution to the discussion, I thought it was appropriate to share it on Birding-aus. It supports the argument that Merrilyn has put forward.
Stephen
Philip,
With respect, I think you are the one that is missing the point.
The term “gender” came into effect in the English language in the 1700s when it was introduced by patriarchal Christians (after the completion of the King James’ version of the Bible) to define the roles of men and women in human society. The theory postulated in the link to the paper that I posted to Birding-aus earlier today is that women in the Middle Ages were becoming more powerful and outspoken. So the male-dominated Christian church hierarchy defined gender roles for men (masculinity) and women (femininity), according to their interpretation of the St James Bible. “Gender” is a derivation of the word “genesis”, a word first used by Aristotle in Ancient Greece to describe the origin of life or a living being. Use of the term “gender” by the Christian Church of the Middle Ages promoted the concept that God created woman to obey (be subservient to) man. Hence, according to the Christian Church, a woman must behave a certain way towards a man, and a man must behave a certain way towards a woman. These gender rules are religious/cultural rules, not due to differences in anatomy, physiology or biological behaviour that define the “sex” of a species.
As a biologist and an atheist, I also object to Christian values or terms being applied to science. Even if I was religious (Christian or another faith), there is no role for religion in biological studies.
Cheers, Stephen
Dr Stephen Ambrose Ryde, NSW
An interesting couple of additions to this discussion;
1. If you do a journal article search for “gender” amongst zoological journals, there are actually quite a lot (although it’s difficult to find a non biased metric in order to compare with “sex” as a synonym, but that does appear to be a lot more common.) Not that this in anyway indicates that using “gender” to talk about the sex of animals is correct, but it’s interesting to note that it gets through in some cases.
2. A Google Books Ngram search of “gender” and “sex” together is really interesting (to me at least :P). Basically this searches through virtually everybook printed since 1800 and gives a word count for “sex” and for “gender”.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sex%2C+gender&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=
As you can see, the word “gender” was virtually never used at all until 1970, and has very recently entered published language after that. “Sex” has been used in the printed world for a lot longer, but also increased dramatically from about 1960-1980, and has been steady since then (while use of “gender” continued to grow, before beginning to peak in the late 90s).
Jeremy
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Hi Philip, The characteristics that you mention in your second paragraph and the start of the third are physical, sexual, biological features. This goes for humans as well as the other animals. You describe sexual differences, not gender differences. Bulls are male (not masculine) and cows are female (not feminine). The term ‘gender’ in this context is not relevant. Cheers, Merrilyn
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I didn’t want to get into this and no doubt some will wish I hadn’t, but as I see it semantics shouldn’t come into it. Quite simply organisms and plants have gender, people have sex – at least the lucky ones do.
Tony
I agree with previous people contributing to this discussion. The term “sex”, rather than “gender”, is used in a biological context.
Merrilyn, you may have a point about “gender” being a euphemism. According to this university graduate student paper (which I found on the internet after a brief search), although the term probably originated in Ancient Greece, it’s largely a product of Christianity (the Bible) to define roles of men and women.
http://josselyncrane.com/written/samples/Gender,%20Qualitative%20Research%20 Methods.pdf
Stephen Ambrose Ryde, NSW
“Cutting a sociolinguistic explanation short: as far as ornithology is concerned, birds have a sex, but no gender.”
If Jonny had said ‘as far as English based western ornithology is concerned,’ I would not have thought to enter the discussion and still hesitated. Now that it has hotted up I’ll add my two cents worth. Beyond or as an example of what Phillip said I want to tell you about cranes on Cape York Peninsula.
In the Wik languages there are two words used for cranes. One of these is just a name word and the other a contraction of ‘red legs’ (which is why my family did not accept that the Sarus arrived here recently). A bit like with us, the crane word could be used for both but the red legs word applied to Sarus. If pushing an informant on the difference I would be told that the red legs were males. This was definitely [the spell checker changed a misspelling of mine into ‘defiantly’ and it almost escaped my attention] a gender thing and not a sex thing. They would have seen and noted family groups of the “males.” There are ascribed that gender because of their greater size; everyone knows that males are bigger.
Sex clearly does not equal gender. It is interesting the way people are so proscribed by social restrictions and norms. This is one of the things which makes ethnobiology so fascinating a subject.
Regards, Alan
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The word “gender” is relevant in biology, but only in the technical sense to which Philip Veerman refers. Because scientific names are formed in Latin, which is a language where nouns have gender, the name of each genus is masculine, feminine or neuter. The species and race should be the same gender (although as it’s not real Latin and the names have been assigned by scientists, not linguists, this is far from being universally true).
All accipiters (which is where we came in) are masculine in gender, while all aquilas are feminine. Neuter genera (the word genus is itself neuter) are relatively rare, but the flowerpecker genus to which mistletoebird belongs, dicaeum, is an example.
Kevin Stracey
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‘Sex’ is the correct term in biology. The word ‘gender’ won’t be found in biological texts or biological dictionaries. I wonder if some non-biologists who use the term ‘gender’ in biological contexts use it as a euphemism because they are uncomfortable with the word ‘sex’. Just a thought. Cheers, Merrilyn
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So it’s just a convention, nothing to do with correct or incorrect application of the current definition?
Peter Shute
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In biology, the correct term to describe the sex of an animal is ‘sex’. ‘Gender’ is not used. In particular, the term ‘sex’ is used in sexual dimorphism, sex characteristics, sex chromosomes, etc. Cheers, Merrilyn (wearing my biologist hat)
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I would disagree. Unless, that is, you specifically designate ‘gender’ only to refer to humans, which no dictionary to which I have referred, does so.
In fact, even using the distinction as given in the Monash University reference, unless you can get up close and personal to determine primary sexual characteristics or structures, or have access to tissue to determine whether it has a ZZ or ZW chromosome complement, then in many species you can only determine the gender of a bird. From that you have to infer its sex.
However, as Eric Jeffrey has mentioned, most English dictionaries accept the word ‘gender’ as a synonym for sex in informal useage.
Andrew
That is no longer true, at least in the U.S. While I was taught that words have gender, people have sex, the advent of gender studies at universities (they couldn’t really call it sex studies) and increasing popular use of gender has made it a proper usage , and it is now accepted in the major dictionaries.
Eric Jeffrey Falls Church, VA 22043
In a message dated 1/21/2013 6:36:16 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, ian.reid@adelaide.edu.au writes:
Good explanation here:
http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html
Ian
Good explanation here:
http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html
Ian
How come?
Peter Shute
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