I know, I was saying that in English there is one meaning of sex that corresponds with the word gender. If I had to translate the word 'sex' from a foreign language in this case I wouldn't find it improper to use either the word gender or sex, especially if the language I'm translating from doesn't make a distinction between the two words. I was trying to make the point that sex and gender are synonyms as long as you aren't taking sex to mean 'sexual intercourse' but 'sexual characteristics'.

@duo, I'm in the legal profession, so it's not nitpicky for me. It makes a huge difference for 14th Amendment jurisprudence here in the US, for example. "Sex" is a quasi-suspect class that causes sex discriminatory laws to get an intermediate scrutiny, while the Supreme Court has never classified "gender," but it very well could be classified as non-suspect and thus gender discriminatory laws would be a lot easier to pass.

And chryop, we're dealing with how to translate 性 into English, so it does not matter how Italian treats the sex/gender distinction. It matters how Japanese and English do. Depending on context, both languages treat them differently. My Japanese dictionary explains the usage of the neologism ジェンダー as a social construct and points out that it's different from the sexual characteristic.

But the dictionary does also translate 性 as both gender and sex. Although I'd be pretty surprised, based on past and current popular usage, if English dictionaries didn't do the same.

However, I wasn't arguing that you can't translate 性 as gender. I was arguing with kirakira's equating sex and gender in the English langauge. Sometimes it's important to be technical about distinctions, and with the rampant discrimination against women and homosexuals in the US, I'm very careful to point out the distinction between gender and sex in the English langauge.

When read as "SAGA", 性 means "by nature" or "what it was designed to be".

女の性(On-na no Saga) means female characteristics by nature.

株屋の性(kabu-ya no Saga) means stock trader's characteristics by nature.

性 is also read as "さが=saga=nature".

This character contains 生(life,born).

So it means inborn traits that you cannot change.

examples,

性別(せいべつ,seibetsu)=sex,gender

性質(せいしつ,seishitsu)=nature,traits

性格(せいかく,seikaku)=personality

Don't play the lawyer here and get too attached to words.
I just stated that some language don't make a difference between the 2 words to explain what to people might lookso weird since it works differently in English.

And just to point out no, here what matters is not Italian, Spanish or English. We are on a Japanese forum where most of us are studying Japanese, so Japanese matters. In case you didn't notice there is people in here studying Japanese from all over the world, so I guess many people are more interested in what a Japanese word means and how it works in a phrase instead of its English translation. If you can't study Japanese without translating into English I would say it is merely your problem and not mine.

chryuop, you raise a very good point. I just assumed that OP was a native English speaker. This is, upon reflection, not necessarily a safe assumption.

We are not talking about English, we are talking about Japanese (read the question). Sei means sex, it CAN mean gender ONLY as a COMPOUND, but by itself it means sex, the R18+ type.

Who cares if English has ambiguous meaning for sex, the person asked what a character means, if you have no idea (clearly the case), then listen!

I deleted original response I sent...it was duplicate, excuse me.