In 1926 Fowler called using 'gender' for people a joke or a blunder
For most of its history in English, gender was a grammar word, sorting nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter. The usage authority Henry Watson Fowler insisted in 1926 that applying it to men and women was either a jocularity or a mistake. Within a lifetime, the word had taken over whole academic fields.
The word descends through Middle English and Anglo-Norman gendre from Latin genus, meaning kind or sort, and ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to beget, which also gave English kin, kind and king. Its Greek relative gen- lives on in gene, genesis and oxygen. The idea of grammatical gender itself, according to Aristotle, came from the philosopher Protagoras. By 1900 the first Oxford English Dictionary already marked the original sense of kind as obsolete.
How rare was the modern meaning? A bibliography of 12,000 works on marriage and family published between 1900 and 1964 never uses the word once. The shift began mid-century. Madison Bentley in 1945 called gender the socialized obverse of sex. John Money, a sexologist whose career drew controversy, invented the phrase gender role and put it into print in a scientific journal in 1955, and the psychiatrist Robert Stoller formalised the distinction between sex and gender in a 1968 book. Feminist theory took up the idea in the 1970s.
An analysis of over 30 million academic article titles from 1945 to 2001 shows the reversal: gender started as the rarer term and ended up outnumbering sex across the social sciences, arts and humanities. Part of the appeal was that sex itself was drifting toward meaning intercourse, so gender served as a euphemism. The biologist David Haig reported in 2003 that some scientists chose it to avoid the connotation of copulation.
Official usage has wobbled. The US Food and Drug Administration switched to gender in 1993 to avoid confusion with intercourse, then in 2011 reverted to sex for biological classification and kept gender for self-representation. Many dictionaries still list 'synonym for sex' among the word's meanings.
Source: Gender
