This week's confirmation hearings on the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court have been a veritable love feast. But, although no senator is likely to bring it up, Ginsburg has one nearly unforgivable mistake in her past. According to one of her former students, it was Ginsburg who coined the terminology "gender discrimination," because "she can't say the word \o7 sex.\f7 "

The result of the incoming justice's squeamishness is that we have reached the point where it now seems permissible to use \o7 sex \f7 only in the secondary meaning that gave her pause (intercourse), not in its primary meaning (the condition of being female or male).

Misuses of \o7 gender \f7 can be found almost daily in the media. "Women in India are at monumental risk to gender violence," one recent article declared, because husbands burn them to death in order to get another dowry from a second wife. Gender violence? These people are killed because they are biologically women, not because they have been made "feminine" by culture. At last month's U.N. Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, petitions signed by half a million people around the world declared: "We demand gender violence to be recognized as a violation of human rights." The violence complained of is all too real, but it is violence against a sex, not a gender. Then, there is my personal favorite, a recent headline: "Gender of Blue Crabs Easy to Tell."

Part of the reason that \o7 sex \f7 has been all but banished in its basic meaning is a reluctance on the part of some people to utter the word. But the far more important reason for the nearly ubiquitous misuse of \o7 gender \f7 is that \o7 sex \f7 implies that there are biological differences between males and females, a heresy that one faction of feminists calls "essentialism." Most often, those who insist on speaking of \o7 gender \f7 contend that sex identity is entirely a product of culture. They say that any differences between the "genders" are learned--"constructed" is the currently accepted terminology. The old one-liner, "Susan is of the female persuasion," is now taken seriously in many quarters.

But being female or male is not merely a matter of persuasion.

To contend that men and women are the same except for "different plumbing" is to adopt the most extreme form of John Locke's \o7 tabula rasa \f7 concept. It is to say that all humans at birth are slates that are completely blank except for a few parts that are of no particular significance except for mating and urination; otherwise, females and males are identical until culture constructs different genders.