When taste - and common sense - took a vacation

Yeah, call me a prude. But when I see a lede on a story like this, it makes me cringe, even if it is in the college paper:

South Carolina scores 2.21 GPA on annual Trojan report card

When it comes to safe sex, USC is not on top like it was two years ago.

 (Not to mention that there apparently was an explosion in the brackets factory and they managed to embed themselves -- many improperly -- into all those quotes.)

And then, of course, there was this editorial headline:

I know. College is a fun, frivolous time. But if they're not using common sense here, will they suddenly be able to turn it on in the "real world"?

Getting the language right about transgendered

We in the media seem to really get flummoxed when it comes to talking about sex and gender (mine from a few years ago) -- and transgender.

So it's worth letting your eyes wander over to a post on Feministe today in which an exasperated writer takes to task the media's misuse of what a person's transgender is.

Time to learn it. We live in an ever-diverse society. There will be a test.

Sex. vs. Gender - more

In the never-ending (and admittedly futile) battle to get journalists to use the terms sex and gender correctly --and not as synonyms, I offer this "cheat sheet" on Sex vs. Gender from a course on gender and language at Indiana University. (Update December 2011 - thanks to the commenter below who reminded me that the Wayback Machine would probably have a copy, so I have updated the link. In addition, you might find this set of 1993 posts from a women's studies discussion group useful.)

Simply put: Sex is biologically based. Generally just male or female.

Gender: A social construct of what it means to be male or female. So we generally are not looking to determine a crime victim's "gender," as some reporter on TV said the other day. And while a case could be made that it's "gender discrimination" if it's based on a judgment that a person is too feminine or masculine (or not enough) -- generally we're talking about discrimination based on physical attributes. In other words, biologically based, or sex discrimination.