Word.ws English Dictionary

genderisms

genderisms is the plural of genderism.

Meaning of genderism

Noun

genderism (countable and uncountable, plural genderisms)

  1. (uncountable, usually) A belief that gender is rigid, usually a belief that it is binary, comprising male and female, and that the aspects of a person's gender are inherently linked to their sex at birth.
    • Genderism is the ideology that there are, and should be, only two genders and that all or most aspects of one's gender are inevitably tied to the gender assigned at birth. Genderism reinforces negative attitudes toward gender nonconformity,[…]2011, Genny Beemyn, Susan Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 89
  2. Belief that one gender is superior; discrimination on the basis of gender. (Compare sexism.)
    • He [Keat] points out that attacks on sexism in philosophy are often tacitly genderist, for example in denying the claim that men are more rational than women, one is likely to be accepting the claim that rationality (which is commonly regarded as the male alternative) is superior to its...1990, Andrew Collier, Socialist Reasoning: An Inquiry in the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism, page 167
  3. (derogatory) Opposition to traditional gender roles; belief that gender exists separate from sex; "gender ideology"; a variously-defined catch-all for things like transgender rights and feminism to which antigenderism is opposed.
    • [pages 108-109:] Virtually all networks and platforms mobilizing against more pluralistic and non-heteronormative (and less biologistic), sexual education at schools systematically equal gender with "genderism", that is with "gender ideology".
    • [page 183:] [...] in Poland examples of women made famous by their opposition to "genderism" include [...]2017, Roman Kuhar, David Paternotte, Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN
  4. (countable) A gendered or gender-stereotyped behaviour, activity or statement.
    • Cross-cultural studies of sex-differences, sex roles, and genderisms have long been recognized as a method of identifying women in traditional roles.1980, Carol Esparza Champion, “Face-ism in Texas and Mexico”, in The Borderlands Journal

Questions about genderisms

What is genderisms the plural of?
Genderisms is the plural of genderism.

Words near genderisms in the dictionary

  1. genderise
  2. genderised
  3. genderises
  4. genderising
  5. genderism
  6. genderisms
  7. genderist
  8. genderists
  9. genderization
  10. genderizations
  11. genderize

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: genderisms (page history and authors); genderism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “genderisms.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/genderisms. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.