A person might have suggested, with Simone de Beauvoir, that gender was a social construct, and had little (if any) correlation to sex, but almost everyone could utter, as she did, the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, or ‘male’ and ‘female’, without needing to stop and consider (as one must do now) whether one’s audience would know what one meant, or whether that audience would find one’s rhetoric ‘exclusionary’, and take offense at it.