Snooki announces baby’s gender

Snooki has released the information we were all dying to know: the gender of her baby!

Snooki said in this week’s issue of In Touch: “Everyone said I was going to have a boy, and they were right!”

Snooks is currently still filming her spin-off show with Jwoww, and will film Season 6 of Jersey Shore this summer, though she won’t be staying in the house with the rest of the crew. Her pregnancy is giving her dibs on different digs, but she IS estimated to be due this August, while Jersey Shore will still be filming. Snooki in labor? RATINGS!!!!!

** There’s quite a debate below if “gender” is the correct term to use when talking about discovering the physical sex organs of your baby while still in the womb. One meaning of gender is synonymous with sex (sexual organs indicating male or female,) which was popularized in the ’90s by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who used the words are interchangeably in her legal briefs about sex/gender related matters. In the 1990s biologists also began using gender and sex synonymously in their published papers, and it is still used prominently in this way by biologists. Substituting the word “gender” for sex is often thought to be started to avoid the “sexual intercourse” connotation of the word sex, and to be more prudish, or politically correct. Now it’s turning out to be less politically correct to use the world “gender” to mean sex because it can be thought to imply that possessing male and female sexual organs and chromosomes requires the individual to have masculine and feminine traits as deemed by society.

Another meaning of gender is the stereotypical traits and characteristics associated with a particular sex, which are determined by a person’s culture and society.

As Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg also aptly put it: “gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”

We meant the first meaning in the title above, and feel no need to change it because the first meaning is an acceptable and common use of the word when talking about the sex of a baby. People (including RHOC’s Brianna Culberson) often have “gender-reveal” parties, where the sex of the baby is revealed when a cake is cut, or through some other creative measure like releasing balloons.

The difference between sex and gender can be traced back to the origins of both words:

Sex comes form the Latin word “sexus,” which means a division, and came to mean the division between males and females.

Gender (noun) is from the Latin word “genus” which means “birth, origin, a race, sort, kind,” which has a more social context than sex.

Ultimately, no one meant to be insensitive to someone, but words can have different meanings when used in different contexts. By using this word we in no way meant to imply to know that an unborn baby (or a born baby, for that matter) would have culturally accepted masculine or feminine characteristics.

The origin, or etymology of words is incredibly fascinating, especially since words are constantly evolving and may mean one thing one decade, and something completely different the next, or have layered meanings.