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Sex, together with social class, age, and ethnicity, is one of the most widely used social demographic categories, and so categorizing individuals into “females” and “males” has long been standard practice in the social sciences. In most variationist research carried out during the 1960s and 1970s the demographic categories were taken for granted, as they were in the social sciences generally. All these categories are now recognized as more complex than their labels would suggest, and as more complex than many sociolinguistic analyses give them credit for (Eckert 1989: 265). None, however, has become so highly charged, politicized, and problematized as sex. To a large extent this reflects the impact of feminism and feminist theory in virtually all the humanities and social science disciplines. Research on language and gender has tended to follow the general development of feminist thought, moving from an …