verb

• Deprive of gender, sexuality, or the characteristic attributes or qualities of one or other sex.

  ‘these creatures were vaguely female but unsexed by their drab greasy overalls and trousers’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Her delivery of the scene in which Lady Macbeth unsexes herself to conspire with Macbeth in his becoming king was anti-climatic.’
  • ‘She had the vocal range and presence that allow for a powerful delivery of the famous (and often studied to death in high school) ‘unsex me now’ soliloquy.’
  • ‘She was hugely reviled as a ‘prostitute’ and ‘unsex'd female’.’
  • ‘In his official report, Mills turned the speed at which women worked into a moral story about the dehumanizing, and unsexing, aspects of industry.’
  • ‘Irish judges and juries did not insist on conformity to a feminine ideal of domestic submissiveness; a woman who fought back was not treated as having forfeited her right to legal recourse by ‘unsexing’ herself.’
  • ‘Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.’
  • ‘Lady Macbeth uses alcohol and Satan to ‘unsex’ her and make her strong.’
  • ‘Not even the Red Queen gets much of an opportunity to ‘unsex’ herself.’
  • ‘As Pat Griffen once asked, ‘Why is it that men are unsexed by failure and women by success?’’

  Synonyms

  sexless, asexual, neuter, unsexed