Etymology of Sex, Gender, and Trans

The term “gender” has historically been associated with grammar and only started being understood as a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s.¹

1300-1800s: Medieval to Early Modern periods

• 14th century: “Gender” entered English, derived from Old French gendre/genre and Latin genus, originally meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “class,” and primarily used in grammatical contexts to classify nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Pre-20th Century: Classical and Pre-Scientific Era

• Sex: Used broadly and uncritically to distinguish “male” and “female.” Considered both physical and social—there was no meaningful distinction between anatomical features and expected roles. The body was assumed to express one’s essential sexed nature.
• Gender: Used only in grammatical contexts (e.g., masculine/feminine nouns).
• Biological Sex: Not in use. Assumed as biological since no need to disambiguate from gender.
• Transsexual / Transgender / Intersex / Assigned Sex: These concepts were not yet codified.
  • Intersex individuals were typically described as “hermaphrodites,” often handled through social adaptation or secrecy, rather than medicine or law.

1900–1950s: Rise of Medicalization and Classification

• Sex: Became formalized in bureaucratic legal and medical systems, with sex assigned at birth via visual inspection and recorded on birth certificates.

• Gender: Still rare in general use.

• Sex Assignment: Introduced by John Money in 1955.

• Biological Sex: Still virtually unused. “Sex” was still considered sufficient and biological by default.

• Intersex: Intersex formalized in medicine, replacing the older term “hermaphrodite.”

• Transsexual: Became central in early medical literature and diagnosis.

• Transgender: Not yet in use as a term.

• 1910: German Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” to describe individuals who wore clothing associated with the opposite male/female sex.

• 1923: Hirschfeld coined “seelischer Transsexualismus”, or “mental/psychological transsexuality,” to denote an extreme form of transvestitism involving desire for physical sex change.

  • This is the earliest known usage of a term analogous to “transsexual,” reflecting a European, spectrum-based model of sex and gender.
  • The German term was largely forgotten, so David Cauldwell (1949) and Harry Benjamin (1960s) are often credited in English contexts.

• 1935: Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, observing three New-Guinea cultures with differing gender expectations and popularizing the ideas of cultural relativism and social constructionism over biological essentialism.

  • Mead doesn’t explicitly use “gender” in any of her work (including the later 1949 Male and Female), instead using “sex role,” but does lay the empirical groundwork for understanding the sex/gender distinction.

• 1949: Simone de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex, laying the philosophical foundation for distinguishing sex from socially constructed gender roles but not yet explicitly using the terminology “gender.”

• 1949: “Trans-sexual” used in its contemporary meaning by sexologist David Cauldwell in his essay Psychopathia Transexualis to describe those who wished to change their physiological sex. Cauldwell distinguished “biological sex” from “psychological sex,” seeing the latter as socially conditioned. He regarded sex reassignment surgery as unacceptable and treated transsexuality as a mental disorder.

  • Transsexual was previously used to mean applying to both men and women, and as a rarer synonym for homosexuality, and “Transsexualismus,” an analogous term, was coined by Hirschfeld in 1931.

• 1952: Christine Jorgensen’s story is published, announcing her “sex change” and immediately becoming a media sensation and cast as a glamorous, Hollywood starlet.²

  • Jorgenson made “sex change” a household term and sparked debates over the definition of sex and its mutability.²
  • Jorgenson espoused a early 20th-century European model of bisexuality, that individuals occupy varying levels of both maleness and femaleness.²

• 1954: “Transsexual” was popularized among the medical community by Harry Benjamin after publishing Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes, describing the treatment of trans people through surgical and endocrinological means.

• 1955: Sexologist John Money pioneered understanding biological sex versus gender identity, introducing the term “gender role” as the set of behaviors that socially signal a person’s gender and something you learned in childhood.³

  • “The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticism.”³ (Note: gender role includes sexuality.)
  • “Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.”
  • Infamous doctor in the David Reimer, or John/Joan, case.
  • Introduce “sex assignment” to describe decisions made by doctors when assigning a sex to intersex infants, with assignments reflecting cultural biases more than biology.

1960s–1970s: Emergence of Gender Theory and Medical Terminology

• Sex: Remained a biological term, but increasingly questioned in feminist theory and transgender discourse.

• Gender: Became prominent in psychology and saw initial adoption in feminist thought, distinguishing gender from sex.⁴

  • Feminist theorists began to distinguish sex (biology) from gender (social roles), a foundational innovation in second-wave feminism seeking to highlight how gendered expectations were culturally imposed rather than biologically determined.

• Biological Sex: Appeared for the first time in legal contexts, especially in anti-trans rulings to assert immutability of sex. Rarely used in scientific literature.

• Sex Assigned at Birth: Still confined to intersex medical literature. Medical professionals believed it was critical to assign a clear sex early to prevent gender confusion.

• Transsexual: Gained broader currency in medical circles. Defined narrowly: someone who undergoes medical transition, as distinct from “transvestites” (cross-dressers). Featured in early versions of the DSM (e.g., “Transsexualism” in DSM-III, 1980).

• Sex Reassignment: Adopted in transgender medical care, paralleling its use in intersex contexts. Described hormonal and surgical interventions.

• Transgender: Begins appearing in activist circles as a non-medical identity, distinct from “transsexual.”

• 1963: Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson co-coined “gender identity,” first presented at the 23rd International Psycho-Analytic Congress and published it in 1964. This formulation of gender identity signified one’s internal sense of their sex.³

  • “Gender identity is the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female’”⁵
  • “‘Sexual identity’ is ambiguous, since it may refer to one’s sexual activities or fantasies, etc. The advantage of the phrase ‘gender identity’ lies in the fact that it clearly refers to one’s self-image as regards belonging to a specific sex.”⁵
  • “Almost everyone starts to develop from birth on a fundamental sense of belonging to one sex. The child’s awareness–“I am a male” or “I am a female”–is visible to an observer in the first year or so of life. This aspect of one’s over-all sense of identity can be conceptualized as a core gender identity…”³
  • (Stoller is usually credited over Greenson because his later work was more relevant and seminal regarding gender identity.)

• 1965: Transgenderism is coined by psychiatrist John F. Oliven in his 1965 book Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, although differing from contemporary definition.⁶

  • “Where the compulsive urge reaches beyond female vestments, and becomes an urge for gender (‘sex’) change, transvestism becomes ‘transexualism.’ The term is misleading; actually, ‘transgenderism’ is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism.”⁷

• 1966: The Transsexual Phenomenon (Harry Benjamin) was the first medical textbook to seriously consider trans people to successfully live as the sex they identify with, legitimizing transsexual medicine. The book kicked off institutional support for transsexual medical care and became known as the “transsexuals’ Bible.”⁸

  • Singlehandedly popularized the term transsexual in American discourse.⁹
  • Stone criticizes the work for forcing trans people to repeat the “being in the wrong body” narrative.¹⁰
  • Endorsed cisheteronormativity and passing.⁹
  • Describes ‘true transsexuals’: “True transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex…not only to appear as such. For them, their sex organs…are disgusting deformities that must be changed by the surgeon’s knife. This attitude appears to be the [main difference] between … transvestism and transsexualism.”¹¹

• 1969: Virginia Prince used “transgenderal” in the 1969 issue of Transvestia, a cross to distinguish herself from transsexuals. (“I … know the difference between sex and gender, and have simply elected to change the latter and not the former…“) ¹²

  • It is debated whether Prince coined “transgender.” However, she was certainly a major force in popularizing transgender during the 1970s.

• 1970: Corbett v. Corbett (UK): Influential English court ruling that a transgender woman, April Ashley, was not legally a woman because her “true sex” was fixed male at birth.

  • Ashley argued that, despite being born with a penis, her psychological sex was female and she “should be classified medically as a case of inter-sex” and assigned female.¹³

• 1972: “Homosexuality” removed as mental illness from American Psychological Association DSM.

• 1972: British sociologist Ann Oakley publishes Sex, Gender and Society, he explicitly defining sex as biology/physiology and gender as socially constructed.¹⁴

  • Biology plays a minimal role in gender identity: “The consensus of opinion seems to be that its role is a minimal one, in that the biological predisposition to a male or female gender identity (if such a condition exists) may be decisively and ineradicably overridden by cultural learning. Those who have worked in the field of hermaphroditic disorders and problems of gender identity seem very impressed by the power of culture to ignore biology altogether,”¹⁵

• 1975: Anthropologist Gayle Rubin developed the “sex/gender system” in her essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex to describe the systemic cultural transformation of biological sex into gendered roles.

  • “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied”¹⁶

1980s–1990s: Expansion of Activism and Identity Politics

• Sex: Increasingly seen as problematic and inadequate due to its conflation with gender. Legal usage still treated sex as immutable, even as social theorists critiqued it.

• Gender: Became central in legal and political discourse. Saw an explosive growth of usage in feminist scholarship, after consolidating around a consensus definition contrasting socially constructed gender and biologically determined sex.¹⁴

• Biological Sex: Still used almost exclusively in anti-trans legal arguments. Not yet widely used in scientific literature.

• Sex Assigned at Birth: Starts appearing in activist contexts—especially by transgender and intersex advocates—to emphasize that birth sex is a social judgment, not a biological truth.

  • “Assigned sex” increasing usage in medical community beginning in the 1980s to replace anatomical sex in discussion of transgender patients.¹³

• Sex Reassignment: Institutionalized as the clinical term for medical transition. Required for legal sex marker changes in most jurisdictions.

• Transsexual: Still dominant in clinical and legal contexts, but increasingly critiqued by activists for being pathologizing, reductive, and tied to medical gatekeeping.

• Transgender: Bt the late 1980s and early 1990s, grows as an umbrella term, including transsexuals, gender non-conforming people, nonbinary identities, and others.

• Gender Identity: Gains traction in psychology, advocacy, and eventually law, referring to one’s internal sense of gender, distinct from sex.

• 1980: The American Psychological Association’s DSM began to classify transgender conditions as disorders.¹³

  • 1987: A revised version of the DSM-III defined gender identity disorders as “an incongruence between assigned sex (i.e., the sex that is recorded on the birth certificate) and gender identity.”¹³

• 1984: Ulane v. Eastern Airlines held that Title VII only protects discrimination based on “biological sex” and excludes transgender people.

• 1990s: The contemporary transgender movement arrived “in force,” uniting transsexuals, crossdressers, intersex people, and other gender boundary crossers. They pressured medical institutions, formed radical and professional organizations, published an array of literature, and took on the task of redefining sex, gender, and sexuality.²

• 1990: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble critiques the gender binary and introduces the theory of gender performativity.

• 1991: Sandy Stone publishes The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto (written 1987, published 1991), considered to be the founding text of transgender studies. Stone argues against the medicalized narratives (e.g. “wrong-body”) that pressures trans individuals to assimilate into rigid binary gender roles. Instead, Stone encourages embracing the complex authenticity of their experiences.¹⁰

• 1992: Leslie Feinberg publishes hir pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, arguing that genuine freedom requires dismantling of rigid gender categories and solidarity across all oppressed groups, including racism, sexism, and classism.¹⁷

  • Uses the term “transgender” as an inclusive label for all gender-variant people.¹⁷
  • Feinberg used a Marxist analysis, arguing that transgender oppression arose with the development of class societies.¹⁷

2000s–2010s: Mainstreaming, Legal Debates, and Politicization

• Sex: Declines in use as a standalone term in precise legal or scientific contexts due to ambiguity with gender.
• Biological Sex: Begins rising sharply in both legal and biomedical literature, with two main drivers: 1) “Biological sex” invoked in anti-trans legislation. 2) Scientific research explicitly specifying sex-based physiological variables.
• Sex Assigned at Birth: Adopted widely in transgender rights advocacy and increasingly in legal and medical documents as more accurate and respectful term.
• Transsexual: Still used by some older individuals and in certain clinical settings, but largely replaced by “transgender.”
• Transgender: Fully mainstreamed. Used in policy, education, media, and medicine as the inclusive and affirming umbrella term.
• Nonbinary: Enters public awareness in late 2000s; by the 2010s, appears in legal, academic, and media contexts.
• Gender-Affirming Care: Emerges to replace “sex reassignment,” reflecting a shift toward affirming identity rather than correcting pathology.

2016: NIH SABV policy required explicit consideration of sex as a biological variable in research in order to improve research rigor, reproducibility, and outcomes for both men and women.

2020s–Present: Explicit Political Contestation and Linguistic Clarity

• Sex: Frequently too ambiguous to use alone in most legal/scientific/policy contexts without “biological.”
• Biological Sex: Used primarily by anti-trans activists and policies to assert fixed, essentialist claims and by scientists to disambiguate from social categories.
• Sex Assigned at Birth: Widespread in medicine, academia, journalism, and advocacy as a more trans-affirming term.
• Transgender: Universally recognized term, but subject to increasing political attacks.
• Transsexual: Now seen as an outdated or personal identity term rather than a universal category.
• Gender Identity: Has drifted from its originally clear sex-based definition (i.e., internal sense of belonging to a sex category) to a broader, ambiguous definition.¹⁸

Final Summary Table

Term	Coined / Emerged	Peak Usage	Primary Use / Function
Sex	Antiquity	Always used; declining now	Binary classification; increasingly ambiguous
Gender	1950s (Money)	1970s onward	Social roles, identity; distinguished from sex
Biological Sex	1970s (law), 2010s (science)	2010s–now	Politicized in law; clarified in science
Sex Assignment	1950s (intersex care)	Ongoing	Medical/legal designation at birth
Sex Assigned at Birth	1990s (activist use)	2010s–now	Emphasizes social imposition of sex labels
Transsexual	1949–1950s	1960s–1990s	Medically transitioning individual; now outdated
Transgender	1970s (coined); 1990s+	2000s–present	Inclusive identity umbrella; now dominant term
Gender Identity	1960s–1980s	1990s–present	Internal sense of gender; central to law and healthcare
Sex Reassignment	1960s	1970s–2000s	Clinical term for surgeries; replaced by “gender affirmation”
Gender-Affirming Care	2010s–present	2020s	Respectful, affirming language for medical transition
Nonbinary	2000s–present	2010s–now	Identity outside male/female binary

Footnotes

1. Holmes, Brooke (2012). “Introduction”. Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford University Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 978-0195380828. “For as it turns out, what we call gender is a fairly recent concept. It’s not that people in Ancient Greece and Rome didn’t talk and think and argue about the categories of male and female, masculine and feminine and the nature and extent of sexual difference. They did in [ways] both similar to and very different from our own. The problem is that they didn’t have the concept of gender that has grown so influential in the humanities and the social sciences over the past four decades.” ↩

2. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2004). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Alex Byrne, “The Origin of ‘Gender Identity,’” Archives of Sexual Behavior 52, no. 7 (October 1, 2023): 2709–11, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02628-0. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Sam Dresser, “The Meaning of Margaret Mead,” Aeon, (January 21, 2020). https://aeon.co/essays/how-margaret-mead-became-a-hate-figure-for-conservatives. ↩

5. Stoller, R. J. (1964). A contribution to the study of gender identity. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, 220–226. ↩ ↩²

6. Simon, Ray (2017). “Stirring up the origin of the ‘alphabet soup’“. Erie Gay News. ↩

7. Oliven, John F. (1965). Sexual hygiene and pathology: a manual for the physician and the professions. Lippincott. ↩

8. Ekins, Richard (July 1, 2005). “Science, Politics and Clinical Intervention: Harry Benjamin, Transsexualism and the Problem of Heteronormativity”. Sexualities. 8 (3): 306–328. doi:10.1177/1363460705049578. ↩

9. Wikipedia contributors, “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Transsexual_Phenomenon&oldid=1281494190 (accessed May 16, 2025). ↩ ↩²

10. Stone, Sandy (1992). “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”. Camera Obscura. 10 (2): 150–176. doi: 10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150. ↩ ↩²

11. Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (New York: Julian Press, 1966). ↩

12. Prince, Virginia (1969). “Change of Sex or Gender”. Transvestia. IX (60). Chevalier Publications: 65. ↩

13. Jessica A. Clarke, “Sex Assigned at Birth,” Columbia Law Review 122, no. 7 (November 2022): 1821–98. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

14. David Haig, “The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 33, no. 2 (April 2004): 87–96, https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ASEB.0000014323.56281.0d. ↩ ↩²

15. Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, gender, and society. New York: Harper Colophon. ↩

16. Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 157–210). New York: Monthly Review Press. ↩

17. Hackford-Peer, Kim. 2022. “Feinberg Publishes Transgender Liberation.” EBSCO. 2022. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/feinberg-publishes-transgender-liberation. ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. Alex Byrne, “The Origin of ‘Gender Identity,’” Archives of Sexual Behavior 52, no. 7 (October 1, 2023): 2709–11, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02628-0. WPATH does not clearly define gender. WPATH’s glossary for “gender” gives three options: “gender may reference gender identity, gender expression, and/or social gender role…” WPATH does not specify which of these is the operative meaning in the definition of “gender identity.” Here, “gender” cannot mean “gender identity,” since that would be circular. Additionally, the definition for “transgender” uses both “gender” and “gender identity,” introducing a circularity yet again.³ ↩