Limits of Language

Just a brief word or two, before I leave off beating the dead (or if not dead, then dying) horse also known as the subject of gender.

I find it difficult to discuss gender, because our language for it is so limited, so bound up in the established, old ways of think about gender. Woolf had to coin new terms with man-womanly and woman-manly to even begin to talk about gender in a new and understandable way. The words man, woman, masculine, feminine, sex and gender have such heavy, ancient connotations to them--we can't use them without dragging the culturally established meaning along with them. We're still in the beginning of the Conversation on how sex and gender are two different things (or may be, since the discussion has not yet finished). And since we're still at the beginning, still using terms such as man and woman, and masculine and feminine, still hindered in our ability to discuss the issues due to the restrictions of our language.

Even now I feel myself spinning in circles because I don't know of a better way to state my point, but perhaps in admitting that I am making my point: that I am not shaping language to illustrate my point, language is shaping my point.