- published: 13 Mar 2015
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Gender is a range of characteristics of femininity, masculinity and others described as third gender. Depending on the context, the describing characteristics vary from sex to social roles (gender roles) to gender identity. The academic interdisciplinary field gender studies focuses on gender. 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 distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like medicine,social sciences, feminist literature, documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and in some dictionaries, but in many contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word. Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use "gender" instead of "sex" in 1993. "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.
Ivan Elizabeth Coyote (born Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada in 1969) is a Canadian spoken word performer and writer.
Coyote began performing spoken word in 1992. They joined Arsenal Pulp Press in 2000 and has since had seven books published with them. They regularly combine story telling and music, and have worked with a number of musicians including Veda Hille, Dan Mangan and Rae Spoon. They have been a columnist for the gay magazines Xtra! and Xtra! West for a number of years.
Coyote has been Writer-in-Residence of a number of organisations, including Carleton University in 2007,Vancouver Public Library in 2009, and in 2011 will take up the post at the University of Winnipeg.
Coyote does not believe in the gender binary and uses gender neutral pronouns.