Same here. My support for Palin has absolutely nothing to do with her appearance or gender. As Martin Luther King said; judge people by the content of their character. Outward appearances are a non-issue with me. What Palin brings to the scene is exactly what Washington DC culture of corruption is missing and she is willing to do something about it. While the other contenders may not be in the corrupt category, they surely are trapped by that system.
There. Fixed it for you.
You don't mean gender, you mean SEX. It's okay to use the word SEX. Sex. Mighty proud to say it -- shout it to the rooftops -- Palin has a SEX! So does Obama, and so does nearly every other living thing on this planet. Even mules and jennys have a sex, I'm pretty sure; it's just that they can't reproduce!
Gender and sex are NOT interchangeable; they do not mean the same thing. However, recently (as within the last ten years) dictionaries have changed the definition of the word "gender" to keep with the current politically-correct tendency of people using it in place of the word "sex." I believe that it is one of those insidious, subtle perversions of language, like going from "bum" to "homeless person" or "secretary" to "administrative assitant," that is a thing that should make one pause and resist.
The word "gender" refers to a grammatical concept; English speakers have a hard time grasping it because very few words in English have gender, and in the ones that do, that I can think of, any way, that gender happens to correlate with the subject's biological sex. In Spanish, French, German, etc., gender has ZERO correlation with sex. Big fat donut hole. Please, hear me out.
"The doe shook his head."
THAT is an example of GENDER misused. The word "doe" has a feminine gender, which tells you that in the sentence, you refer to the doe as a "she." GENDER of the word "doe" tells you to say "The doe shook her head." I know, the doe has a female sex, but that's because the English language reserves gender for words in which the subject has a biological sex, at least, as far as I can recall.
In Spanish, "La casa es roja," means the house is red. "Casa" has a feminine gender. It does not mean that the house is a female, or is of the female sex. It means that the word has a feminine gender, and THEREFORE you would correctly say, "La casa es roja," not "El casa es rojo." "Vestido" is Spanish for dress, as in a woman's dress. The word has a masculine gender, therefore you know that if the dress is red, you say, "El vestido es rojo" because the gender of the word -- not the sex of the dress, but the GENDER of the word -- instructs you.
I'm on a crusade to try to get conservatives to stop using the word "gender" in place of the word "sex." Like the term "sanitary engineer" instead of the word "janitor," (mis)use of the word "gender" for the real word "sex" is a way of euphemizing and downplaying reality.
Thanks for indulging my rant! :^)
:^)