source-library/trans/history-of-gender.md

History of Gender

We didn’t always hold the same attitudes or use the same terminology for genders that we do now.

• History Extra: BBC
  • Interesting origins of gendered terms and raising children
  • “Nor have boys always even been called boys. Until the late 15th century the word ‘girl’ simply means a child of either sex. Boys, where they had to be differentiated, were referred to as ‘knave girls’ and girls in the female sense were called ‘gay girls’. Equally a boy could be a ‘knave child’ and a girl a ‘maiden child’. The term ‘boy’ was reserved for servants or ‘churls’, the meaning ‘young man’ probably deriving from the latter as a pejorative term but not occurring before 1440.”