Being accommodative of small minorities seems to be a kind, and thoughtful thing to do.
However having large majorities(95%+ of the population) make concessions in order to accommodate a small group imposes a cost (however small) born by many to the benefit of a few. My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off? What’s the cost benefit analysis? At some point where do people say the cost of accommodating this 1/100k/1m people by another 300m+ people is not a worthwhile use of societal resources?
Political data would suggest that we aren't actually being more empathic or accommodating, actually, the exact opposite!
Online communities are extremely disproportionally composed of people who fall into the Cluster B/emotionally dysregulated/CPTSD spectrum.
Internet addiction or "Internet Use Disorder" is nearly entirely composed of people in this camp. Same goes for trans people - this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!
Leadership should not use Internet communities as the north star for guiding the culture shifts of wider society, it will obviously lead to (to use a British understatement) social friction. We risk crumbling the institution of science and higher education due to catering to the wants of Cluster B, all just so these people can move on to the next subject to split into good and evil parts.
The focus should be on providing help to Cluster B, NOT about letting them take control of society and crumble all of our institutions to pieces over dissociative morality plays, making everyone's health worse in the process.
> this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!
What exactly are you saying here? That all the trans kids had cluster B personality disorders? You said and/or but the rest of you post seems to be implying that all trans people have cluster B personality disorders. There are lots of other reasons to be a psychiatric inpatient that are not cluster B personality disorders, and CPTSD is also not a personality disorder of any type.
It's not particularly suprising that trans kids end up as inpatients in psychiatric wards. My experience with them is that they know that the vast majority of the world absolutely hates them. I mean, I heard about this one internet comment that implied that they all have cluster B personality disorders. Absolutely shocking.
Your whole thesis reads weird. There are estimated to be about a million trans people in the US. You really think that many are "extremely online?" Do they all have cluster B personality disorders? Are none of them living quiet lives?
Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together. We are, after all, in a thread about making sense of how a population the size of a rounding error got to rewrite the literature on birth.
No judgement, I don't judge people on mental health. Unless someone is calling to make institutional changes that undermine the public's trust in it, then I will exert my right to judge these people's character.
> Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together.
You didn't do this though. You just said that your ex-girlfriend worked in a psychiatric ward and there were lots of people with cluster B and lots of trans kids. It was honestly just a mess of associations.
Psychiatric comorbidities in transgender people are reasonably well studied so you don't have to guess here. There are a number of small studies involving presentations to psychiatrists, but this is no longer the way that most trans people seek care, so the results are biased to complicated cases. Here is a large study comparing gender-minority coded files in a group of 53M patients:
As you'd expect, depression and anxiety are extremely common. Cluster B personality disorders are at a prevalence of 3.4%, though again, attention must be paid to the limitations of the study which fails to capture transgender people seeking care outside of this system. While it's certainly elevated of the general population, please internalize the fact that 96-97% of transgender people do not have a cluster B personality disorder.
As I've pointed out above, minorities are medicine's business. We absolutely write things in a way to include everyone, because we definitely want to get the most at-risk people out there. I don't care what you think about transgender men, you should want them to seek reproductive care if they are pregnant, because there is potentially another person involved or not, depending on what they choose to do.
Like I said above. There are about 40,000 people living with cystic fibrosis in the USA, about 1/3200 live births. It's really expensive to keep these people alive, with replacement enzymes, biologics, very, very frequent hospital admissions to the point where pediatrics calls them "CF tune-ups" and eventually lung or possibly multi-organ transplants. They do, however, have intrinsic human value, so we like to keep them alive. I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here, especially given that in a care context we still say "pregnant woman" when it's specifically a woman that I'm talking about, even though we say "pregnant people" in the abstract.
Politicians, like many performers, are addicted to attention. Perhaps as much as they're addicted to power. The Internet is irresistible catnip for them and part of the reason why the chronically online are able to have so much impact on our 'leaders'.
I agree with everything here but the presumption that "Leadership" is taking its cues from "internet communities" does not compute for me.
I for one am not so sure this so-called "leadership" cares for family, as a social unit. Accordingly, there is (for me at least) the possibility that this "leadership" is using a pretext to achieve related but orthogonal goals, since purely on rational, moral, and ethical basis, causing this much social division and disruption over this niche issue does not make any sense.
Yeah trying to label all trans people and most other minorities you don't like as a hyper-online cabal mentally-ill secretly controlling the world really says more about you than anything.
The 'our enemy is soooo weak, but also too strong' dillusion is very much on display
> ...hyper-online cabal mentally-ill secretly controlling the world really says more about you than anything.
I didn't read that comment as saying that they "secretly control the world," but rather that the combination of changes in communication technology and those mental disorders leads those people to have a wildly disproportionate voice and impact.
I mean: elections are often won or lost based on which candidate can run the most ads. It's not too hard to believe that a disorders associated with excessive internet use would have an undue impact on society right now, due to something like having disproportionate share of social media posts and/or a greater ability to mob and bully.
>"Most social movements nowadays are disproportionally led by psychopaths (primary or secondary), people with Borderline Personality Disorder or narcissism (in short, people with Cluster B personality disorders), studies show."
POST
>"It is impossible (yes, really, there have been studies) for healthy, normal people to understand the motivations of the mentally ill, including mild and severe Cluster B."
THE
>"so, studies suggest that the confusion of the state of affairs and the inability to form a mentalizing theory of mind for the mild or severely mentally ill portion of leaders in social movements is actually a sign of health and intelligence :)"
STUDIES.
Considering you refer to no less than three amorphous groups of "studies", please post them. Otherwise it really only points towards you using the term because you think it gives you intellectual credibility.
The red political establishment loves things that make people recoil at the complexity of the real world. Even twenty years ago it was the prospect of artificial wombs and men having babies. Today it's humans with penises using the same bathroom as your daughter, amongst many other tempests in teapots.
Similarly, the blue political establishment loves vibrant examples of injustice, doubly so when that addressing that injustice doesn't rock the corporate order. So someone having what is essentially a rare medical/social condition, getting singled out and dumped on by the red team for political purposes, resonates strongly.
And thus is our hyper partisan world. It's not enough to ignore the topic because you don't actually know anyone who is transitioning, have it be fine to make some faux pas like when any cultures mingle, and rely on the general good faith of shared humanity to come to an understanding.
Rather, you've got to proactively stake your stance as some obtuse pro/anti, reject or "accept" an entire abstract group, and then conspicuously demonstrate your stance to the rest of your tribe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=238zU5UOreY is a conference talk from a Cluster B expert about the topic, highly regarded at least by his peers. For better or for worse, the speaker is actually a diagnosed Narcissist and Psychopath who previously went to prison for his crimes he committed during his employment as a high ranking official in the Israeli government, but I argue that makes him the best person to listen to, at least on this exact topic; sort of an insider view.
It's not even accommodation to small minorities, it's accommodation to an ideology. Activists push this conflation to make it appear about minorities and not their ideology. They present it as though minorities all have the same opinion and then weaponize your compassion to get compliance.
"Oh, this is what minorities want. Ok, I'm a good person, I want to respect their wishes."
What you may not realize is that many gay and trans people strongly disagree with gender ideology and do not want this.
Indeed, they don't all have the same opinion!
The loud, aggressive, too online activists do not speak for everyone.
I’m involved with several gay organizations - one professional and one centered around gay athletics.
In both cases there are a small group of activists that are trying to erase gay and lesbian identity, and all mentions of gender, from the org to be more trans- and non-binary-inclusive.
In one case a trans board member didn’t feel represented by the organization name (which includes “gay”) because they now identify as straight with their new gender identity. And for this they demanded the org with thousands of gay members should be renamed.
People were afraid to push back out of fear of being labeled transphobic.
I would think ideological minority is a kind of thing that is worth considering accommodating too, but the problem is the relevant activists actively want to harm people with opposing ideology (the chosen method of enforcement is trying to get people fired and otherwise ruined). So they have no interest in ideological accommodation themselves.
Great point. In other words, we are experiencing the usual failure mode to liberalism: it can be taken advantage of by non liberal actors. Not sure what the restoring force is to prevent this.
The reason that this is considered a failure mode is that these systems are set up so that you can't just ignore activists who speak for, or claim to be speaking for, an approved minority. Just saying "no, I'm going to ignore your demands" gets you hurt, because you are required to take positive action.
True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate whether women have penises or if men can get pregnant.
It's possible that this becomes something that is no longer an academic question.
> True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate...
But for instance, journalists are often "way too online," and people in general seem to have a bad habit of seeing social media activity as some kind of representation of society as a whole (because it's easy). It doesn't matter what "normal people" think or do, if the media as a whole starts saying something different.
Also true, journalists (the people who literally know nothing) have outsized power and influence in controlling what these "normal" people see as, well, normal.
I don't want to get in a flame war, but I guess my comments are meant to convey a perspective that is optimistic that these "normals" will reject and ignore the machinations of the way too online tech people who, again, are the only ones that want to debate basic biology for some reason. About half of my life has been on a farm or in the military, so it's amusing seeing all of this debate about "gender" and "sex". Again, normal people don't think about this.
I find it curious that the dems chose to run this renaming experiment on latinos. They could've tried to push "blax" - at least you wouldn't need to break your tongue to pronounce it. My theory is they wanted to see how much they can bend the public opinion, and an awkward word would better test compliance.
The word "black" does not have a gender connotation. "Latino" is a masculine word, the feminine equivalent being "Latina". That's the problem (if you consider that a problem)
It's also wildly unpopular among many Latinos, because there are hundreds of millions of them and they don't all have the same opinions. On the whole it seems to be a flop. But let's at least credit Latinos as a group with the agency to come up with their own ideas, good or bad, hey?
Do you have any evidence you can share about who invented “Latinx”? I’ve lived in Central America for a few years now, and the only time I’ve heard this term, or related ones, here, is when someone was mocking it. Of course that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t invented by some Latinos. But I only encounter it used with pride when I’m reading NPR articles in English.
Who exactly used it first appears to be lost to history, but the first known published academic appearance seems to have been in the Fall 2004 volume of a bilingual journal called Feministas Unidas. It was used there is passing, without explanation, apparently assuming the readers were already familiar with it. https://people.wku.edu/inma.pertusa/encuentros/FemUn/newslet...
There are reports of online usage of both "Latinx" and "Latin@" going back to the late '90s. There are other references to academic uses that I haven't been able to track to original sources after a brief search.
Mainstream media (in English or Spanish) only appears to have discovered it in the last few years. I do get the impression that a lot of early adoption was from English-speaking Latinos in the US, which might explain the apparent incompatibility with actual Spanish. I don't read Spanish myself, so there's only so far I can pursue this. But it's not a recent invention of clueless white people.
On “Latine”: at a recent gathering of friends I mistakenly said «miembre» for “member” instead of «miembro» (I’m still learning Spanish). This led to a certain amount of hilarity and jokes aimed at the progressive gender-neutralizing crowd, that likes to use «e» endings instead of the correct ones. It’s a small extremist minority, and a general butt of jokes here. So «Latine» would be seen as just as ridiculous as «Latinx».
"Latinx" is a germanic language construction grafted onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and is non-pronounceable in Spanish. "Latine" is, perhaps, pronounceable, but is a confusing suffix. My recommendation is to drop this silliness. Germanic languages (English is one) and Romantic languages (like Spanish, French etc) have rules and trying to bleed rules from one into the other leads to the hilarity that you describe in your comment.
(I speak conversational German, a little Spanish, native English)
No actual evidence, but I get the impression that it was invented by the tiny fraction of Latino people who are at liberal arts colleges in the US, or involved in ultra-niche politics.
“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though. The former has the advantage that it is straightforward to pronounce in Spanish (I assume for “Latin@s” you’d use the cumbersome “Latinas y Latinos”, and “LatinX” is just impossible).
>“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though.
"Latrine", " Latin@", and "Latinx" are almost entirely unheard of in actual Latin American countries, though.
The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language is the governing body that defines what official Spanish is. If you can find a single academy that lists "Latinx" or "Latin@" as official Spanish, I'll eat my hat.
These neologisms are nothing more than US leftist linguistic imperialism.
It's not something that "the dems" made up. It seems to have started as a self-descriptive term for nonbinary Latinos, although the history's not 100% clear. But as the source article describes, there's a large and influential segment of the populace who believes that in order to be inclusive they should use trans-focused language as much as possible. So people started saying "Latinx" for precisely the same reasons as they stopped saying "pregnant women".
Whenever people make this big deal about undermining the meaning of biology by using gender identity as the center of everyday language, all I can think is it's literally no different to adoption, which we all accept.
An adoptive parent is a parent. We don't specify "adoptive" all the time, and it'd be rude to refuse to refer to adoptive parents as parents because they aren't biologically related to their children in the same way.
We have done exactly this kind of language change in schools over that issue too, teachers often prefer "guardians" to "parents" in some contexts these days because some children won't live with parents, things like that. To pretend this hurts people is just counter to these examples we see in reality, it's just trying to use the words that apply to everyone, not just the most common case. The cost is so small, the attempts to push back on it seem actively spiteful, because there is no reason to contest it generally. The thing it brings to mind is the "but marriage means a man and a woman" argument from the attempts to stop marriage equality.
> Why does their opinion about what they want to be called not matter?
I mean it does, but it doesn't override everyone else's. Consider people with with albinism. A medical text should not refer to people with albinism as albino men, even if some men might prefer to be called "men" instead of albinos. That'd mean calling albino women "men" which they clearly are not.
In the same way, assuming you accept that trans men are men (which the author purports to) calling people who menstruate women is calling these men something that they are not. So you need to use something that actually describes what you are trying to describe. This is also true since not all biological women menstruate, so even there if you use the term "women" instead of "people who menstruate" when discussing something medical that has to do with menstruating, you've now used an inaccurate term that describes a larger group of people than you are discussing.
>>I mean it does, but it doesn't override everyone else's.
That same logic should apply to people who claim to be the opposite gender from what they were born.
"Women" as a term is incredibly useful and descriptive when referring to females. It's strongly correlated with multiple important traits. When its definition is changed to mean any one who assigns the word 'woman' to themselves, the word conveys no meaningful information.
>> When its definition is changed to mean any one who assigns the word 'woman' to themselves, the word conveys no meaningful information.
This is the heart of the matter, and they even admit as much when they have to use terms like AFAB or ciswoman. These distinctions were not needed until they intentionally made the term "woman" meaningless.
That's what's a social construct is, and unless you make everyone you meet drop pants and show off their genitals, which you then inspect for surgical scars etc then run a DNA test to make sure they aren't intersex - you make a quick guess based on limited information that alligns with your previous experiences with people who also shared those traits.
We do often make a quick guess about a person's gender, but that doesn't invalidate anything I said. The two genders themselves once referred strictly to biological sex so when we said someone is a "woman", everyone knew what traits would be highly likely to be associated with that person.
> unless you make everyone you meet drop pants and show off their genitals
What's the obsession with this phrase, as if everyone is going to say "Oh no, we can't try to prevent rape anymore because we'd have to look at people's genitals to accomplish it. haha, silly us."
For one, we had a solution to this. It was your ID which listed your sex.
And two, if people screw with ID laws enough that it can't be trusted then you will be required to go to a doctor and drop your pants down to have your biology categorized as a requirement to enter female spaces and events.
> if you wanted to prevent rape you'd do better to ban politicians and priests
We already had banned all male politicians and priests from female spaces simply by virtue of their being male. You're weakening that protection by letting them claim to be female to avoid being removed.
And yet trans women (and males by any other ID) are the risk.
> Repackaged homophobic rehtoric
Wow, no. What's homophobic is you trying to use homosexuality to defend men in women's spaces. This is why the LGB Alliance is fighting for homosexual and sex-based rights and separation from the trans-queer movement.
There is a clear biological definition of the sexes (down to the genetic level if you want). Rather than changing definitions in language, wouldn’t it make more sense to add to our current definitions and language to accommodate the social flavours of sexuality?
A more adaptive definition of gender might be more suitable: social gender, body gender and biological gender.
Keep in mind it's easy to break down the adoption argument.
In many situations, the adoptive parent is considered the parent, if the parent and child are OK with it, so is society in general. But at a doctor appointment, it is imperative to distinguish between biological and civil parenthood.
But apart from that: I (and many others nowadays) are OK with considering male to female trans as women. If you want to be a woman and act like a woman, I'll consider you a woman regardless of your biological sex.
But I'm not OK with referring to people as menstruators and semen donors: I think that's humiliating.
I guess I draw the line there: I respect trans identity, but I don't want that every single text must think about every single minority and accommodate them at all costs.
I have a friend with 1 arm but I wouldn't be outraged if someone said "people have two arms". I wouldn't even think about it, and neither would he: it's generally true, and if it's not said in bad faith, who cares?
Talk about walking on egg shells! Let's drop the thought police act, which some people like way to much, and let's fucking try to live together.
> apart from that: I (and many others nowadays) are OK with considering male to female trans as women. If you want to be a woman and act like a woman, I'll consider you a woman regardless of your biological sex.
I'm fine to let trans men into male spaces around me because that's my decision, as a man, to waive some of my rights temporarily.
But for us to declare that a man can be a woman is giving away women's rights, and that's not okay.
On the other hand, adoptive parents don't insist that there is literally no difference between them and a bio parent. In fact, if you take adoption home studies and do the training (in california at least) to adopt a child, you will learn the many ways in which you are not like biological family. My wife and I went through most of the process, but never ended up going through with the adoption (open to it in the future). We were told in no uncertain terms that pretending you are basically a family like everyone else and not being truthful with your child about their origins is bad for the child.
Thus, it should not be offensive to say things like 'trans women are biologically male, thus have biological male advantages in things like sports'. This is a controversial statement. However, there is a section of the trans community who will insist that trans women are actually literally women like all other women.
I don’t think the fact is controversial, it’s just that the fact lacks context of being directed at a harassed minority. “There are higher crime statistics in majority black communities” is also a true but if you constantly go around screaming it we will wonder what your intentions are, education of facts?
Agreed but scale has to be a factor. Millions of American children are in the custody of grandparents or the foster system at any given time.
Secondly, there is way more friction here than with a term like guardian, which represents a situation that is universal thoughtout humanity, and always has been. The common language only changed because of the need for accuracy and inclusiveness in things like school handbooks, not because it wasn't fully understood and accepted by the population as being an inevitable element of human populations for anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 children.
I agree but I also see low hanging fruit with real data backing it that I'd like to see addressed with more urgency than this. My buddy who is a lefty factory worker complains that it is more dangerous for him to operate certain equipment. And indeed studies seem to suggest this. But the talking heads don't get into this much.
There is absolutely no discrimination or data pointing the bigotry and hatred towards LGBTQ people, absolutely zero.
In case it wasn't obvious, I was being sarcastic.
Look each and every one of those people up, and tell me they are not real, tell me they didn't die as a consequence of people like you; unempathetic, ignorant, and full of bigotry for people who drew a bad card at birth.
I am somehow more interested in people who commit suicide, face work and housing discrimination over some OSHA violations, on the other hand, and unlike you, I can't see why those orthogonal issues can not be tackled in parallel. Care to enlighten me?
"Parent -> Guardian" or "adoptive parent -> parent" hardly matter because there's very little chance of being surprised by the change, the terms are nearly equivalent and the differences are unimportant in almost all contexts.
In contrast the differences between "man" and "woman" are stark and matter in all kinds of contexts.
Online pregnancy literature is part of medicine. Including marginalized groups is absolutely crucial and is done or should be done in virtually all aspects of medicine. Your intake forms for a child shouldn't have spaces labelled "mother" and "father" because same sex couples exist. You don't ask a woman "what does your husband do" or a man "what does your wife do" because you never know if they're in a same sex relationship, and there is a significant history of medicine treating queer people poorly and you're at risk of ruining rapport with your patient before you even get a chance to develop it. We don't call people struggling with addiction "addicts" or "junkies" because they still deserve help, and we don't want them walking out the door because they're already suspicious that you're going to abuse them.
Even outside of social denigrated groups, medicine is all about accommodating that 10% or 1% or 0.01%. I spent quite a bit of time on lectures about cystic fibrosis patients considering there are only about 40,000 people living with CF in all of the US, about 1/3200 live births. It costs real money to keep these people alive, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. Somehow "pregnant people" is an absolute deal breaker though, where we start talking about "is it worth to accommodate them?"
All of this boils down to people saying "you can't say woman anymore." Except you absolutely can, if you're talking about a pregnant woman, just like you can say "husband and wife" if that applies to a married couple, because those are specific situations. But when medicine speaks, it has to speak to everyone, especially those most at risk.
I regularly consume parenting advice for mothers. It has never hurt me, as a man. Not once. To pretend that gendered words are harmful in such a way is really ludicrous to me
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an interesting take on these type of controversies that is hard to argue with in his essay titled, "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority."
Basically, if a small percentage of the population is motivated enough and the rest of the population is mainly indifferent to the cause then the minority will get their way.
Most people have other things to do than to expend any energy on this. Plus, the magnification afforded by the internet leads to what we have.
But in an interesting way, the argument has turned into minority view vs minority view. I think we'll be reading about this argument for a very very long time since no single side has an advantage over the other.
Sometimes there are ways to be inclusive without undertaking a cost... E.g. talk about "health issues that arise during pregnancy".
But those zero or low cost mechanisms don't achieve the advocacy goals that some are chasing. For advocacy purposes it needs to be visible, not silently accommodating.
And then you end up with the crude, objectifying and biologically reductive alternatives to "women" like calling them "menstruators" or "breeders".
One doesn't need to abandon politely accommodating to reject being made a tool of someone's disruptive advocacy.
Keep reducing and they’re just people. Why the insistence on being a “woman” at all? What’s wrong with just being trans? Or you know, just an effeminate male or butch woman?
When I admitted I was gay I didn’t want to still be called a straight male.
I have a friend whose ovaries were removed when she was a child, and, as a result, she was never fertile. She's not trans, an effeminate male or a butch woman. This would be the case even if she did not receive hormone therapy. She's a woman, and it's not 'reductive' to separate being a woman from reproductive function or hormones.
No but that’s a man made operation. Doesn’t change the origins biological sex. I think rather than trying to change gender from the original biological meaning, maybe (like someone else here said) treat it like a religious identity.
You can have a “personality” trait of masculine, feminine, etc.
I said women shouldn’t be defined by their fertility. This is inclusive of XX women. You blindly interpreted it as an argument to separate biological sex from gender.
The comment I responded to claimed that referring to someone by a biological function such as menstruating was objectifying. I don’t think that follows, because being fertile is not a requirement to be a woman.
Further, if all that matters to you to define biological sex is karyotype regardless of biological expression, that is like a religion.
That’s irrelevant to the point. We should not define women by their fertility, therefore it is not objectifying to refer to some women by their fertility.
The issue is that the costs of accomodating trans people are greatly exaggerated to push for discimination. This article is focused on language which is obviously of great importance to everyone involved. I support the writer's hurt feeling but you can't justify not accomodating people because it requires looking at words differently.
But the gender-inclusive language is not clear. It was downright confusing to be honest. If I were pregnant, anxious and trying to find info online, I wouldn’t want to wade through that either. The purpose of language is to communicate clearly, not to make you feel included.
My wife left her online breastfeeding support group after several incidents of obvious males (self identified trans women) would join, despite not even having children. They just wanted to observe the moms breastfeeding. It's just not a comfortable space anymore. Very sad.
That is disgusting, but sadly not unexpected these days. The elephant in the room is that many 'transwomen' identify as so because of sexual fetishism; these men want to become the pornified image they have of women.
It's easily witnessed in their forums, for example the 'MtF' subreddit, there are countless posts of men asking if it's normal to be sexually aroused while cross-dressing, fetishising their own breasts, talking about their longing to be a 'hot woman', and so on.
Deferring to how people want to be called seem like the non-asshole default.If you prefer to go by "Ty": people ought to call you Ty- it may be inconvenient looking you up in AD (is it Tyler, or Tyson?)
If someone who's pregnant wants me to address them as "sir" or "them", that's exactly what I'll do, even if the author of TFA may be offended.
> Deferring to how people want to be called seem like the non-asshole default.If you prefer to go by "Ty": people ought to call you Ty- it may be inconvenient looking you up in AD (is it Tyler, or Tyson?)
That only really makes sense on an individual basis. The OP article (which I can't read due to a paywall), appears to be talking about pregnancy literature, and your solution can't really apply to literature. If you have group of 1000 people, where 999 want to be called "pregnant women" and 1 who wants to be called a "person experiencing pregnancy," what term do you use in your literature to refer to the group? If you defer to the one, you fail to defer to the 999.
Weird. It wasn't paywalled when this first hit HN. They must have noticed the traffic.
Anyway, you're on the right track but the article was actually far worse than your example. There was a chart showing "recommended gender-neutral language" for pregnancy literature which had some real head-scratchers on it. For example, instead of "penis" you should say "erect erogenous zone." That's almost bad enough, as if I had encountered it in the wild it would take me a moment to figure out what they are talking about (erect penis? erect nipples?).
But it gets better! Guess what they recommended you replace "vagina" with? Also "erect erogenous zone"! (wtf?!) Now beyond the fact that its is anatomically wrong, I can't even know if they're talking about male or female genitalia. If I am on a medical website reading something about changes to my "erect erogenous zone", does it apply to me? Heck if I know!
That's part of what the article covered and what I was responding to in my above comment. This goes way, way beyond the relatively harmless change of "mother" -> "birthing person."
It's worth asking whether anyone is actually being excluded merely because the words aren't generic enough.
We can accept that a very small portion of the population doesn't fit into the definitions we commonly use without having to abandon them. It's obvious with good intentions but it seems like a silly hill to die on.
Why can't we just accept as a community that when you say male/female there will always be a little [*] attached to it for the exceptions?
I am deeply uncomfortable in gendered spaces. Many places offer gender neutral spaces (eg restrooms that are all genders).
I don't require everyone to make me comfortable, but I do positively notice when someone does. If I go to my office and there are men's rooms, women's rooms, and all gender rooms, I do feel much less excluded.
Not everyone is like me, but thousands or millions are. I do feel excluded by gendered language, and it does impact my ability to get work done, navigate social situations, etc.
I hear you, but please also consider that almost all people (trans or otherwise) experience social discomfort.
For example, there are many more people who experience severe social anxiety than would identify as trans. Those people can have literal panic attacks and experience terrible fear and we aren’t considering redesigning society or language to accommodate them. Nor should we.
I'm curious why you feel this way. If we could find ways to make people with social anxiety more comfortable, why shouldn't we try to accommodate them?
Anxiety comes from within. You cannot reorganize all of reality to be perfectly comfortable to you specifically, because reality is shared with others. Your safe space is a cost for everyone else.
If only it were so simple. We make adjustments for people with all manner of neuroatypical behaviors. While it may feel like we should be able to just "fix" a mental health issue, sometimes it's not so simple.
I'd prefer to live in a world where we support people in finding coping skills to work through their own anxieties AND we recognized some humans will always be outliers who would benefit from some affordances. We can do both.
I have what was once pretty serious social anxiety which is why I chose that example.
I view it as MY challenge, not everyone else’s.
Your emotions aren’t just these immutable, uncontrollable things that happen to you.
Discomfort very often is a signal that YOU need to make some internal change and grow as a person. It doesn’t mean that the world needs more bubble wrap so you feel safe.
It comes down to cost, and what costs society's are currently and consistently willing to bear. Would ADA laws have so much force if FDR were able bodied?
The cost that should be factored in is the people who seek external validation to feel happy with never be satisfied with just the first thing. They'll be constantly seeking new external places to become content again once the initial emotional wave passes.
I'm not trans or any of that sort - I'm generally uncomfortable around people. What I don't understand is, why impose upon others? To me, that's my cross to bear.
I literally said I don't impose it on others. Others make attempts to accommodate me and I feel more included as a result.
If your workplace said, "we've got some private rooms to work if it would make you more comfortable, it'd be something you positively regard and would make you feel more included, right?
Ah, but the whole genesis of this discussion is that many people are trying to impose it on others.
I have absolutely no problem with gender neutral bathrooms. But I have a big problem with the name calling (“transphobe”), bullying, and shaming in some attempt to push an agenda where the upside is only fewer hurt feelings.
If I choose to say "pregnant people" and I explain that I'm choosing that word to intentionally include both pregnant women and pregnant non-women, is that shaming or bullying?
If I then go to my peers and say, "heads up, the phrase 'pregnant women' might not include everyone who is pregnant", and they say, "oh, that makes sense, let me adjust my own language!", I think that's probably not shaming or bullying either.
If, over time, those conversations spread and we see a general public movement to use "pregnant person", this again seems like good intentions without any particular agenda besides, "oh, of course. If we recognize trans men, then we should probably make sure we say pregnant people".
I don't think changing the language is bullying, shaming, or pushing an agenda - it's people making changes that are logically consistent with how they experience the world. Again: if trans men exist, then pregnancy must occur in men and women.
The reason you hear people react strongly is because they believe they have a simple logic, and people come in and say, "I deny that trans men exist, or I deny trans men are men."
That's a pretty strong thing to say and a pretty strong thing to hear.
> If I choose to say "pregnant people" and I explain that I'm choosing that word to intentionally include both pregnant women and pregnant non-women, is that shaming or bullying?
Are you really just talking about yourself? You don't also expect everyone else to use the same language? You don't want every corporate website, school newsletter, teacher's curriculum, every Tweet from a public person, random Reddit comments, etc to also use your preferred language?
Because that's what it's meant IRL.
I've heard 100 people on Reddit/Twitter saying "they just want to be left alone to do what they want" and "why do you care what people do with their own private lives (or in their bedroom)?". Then they spend all of their time gatekeeping and purity-testing the language and actions of every person they come into contact with.
I want to use language that makes trans parents feel included. That's it.
I'd encourage others to use that language and explain my reasoning (which is what I did above.) If they don't, I'm bummed out but I move on. I may think more negatively of that person in the future.
You’re absolutely free to do use whatever language you want, but your expectation that I do the same, implicit or otherwise, is where I draw the line.
I get it. You’re super hip.
But words are indeed meaningful and you don’t get to choose how I use them or what they mean to me. I have a wife, not a “partner”. She is a woman, not a “birthing person”.
Make up whatever new words of definitions you wish. Hell, create a new language if you want. But stop trying to make everyone else conform to your vocabulary that primarily exists to virtue signal and for attention seeking.
Well, she's both a pregnant person and a pregnant woman.
I don't believe I've ever said you couldn't choose the words you prefer to use for yourself. The most I'd say is, "here is the reasoning for why this might make some people feel excluded" and let you make your own choices.
You've responded quite aggressively to me, attacking positions I don't hold while also insulting me. (Ironically calling me super hip, virtue signaling, and attention seeking.)
I'm non-binary, it has nothing to do with any of the reasons you mentioned, it's just the language I use with my community, and explaining to others calmly and rationally why it helps some people feel included.
Trans people face brutal violence, social stigma, workplace discrimination, homelessness, and healthcare systems not knowing how to provide care at a rate that far exceeds other groups.
It's not just "bored people", and I suggest you read up on their struggles.
> If I go to my office and there are men's rooms, women's rooms, and all gender rooms, I do feel much less excluded.
I'm not against gender neutral spaces. There's often no need to segregate by gender, and it makes no sense to do so if there is no need. What I don't understand is why you feel excluded.
I don't feel an affinity to a gender either, but I understand that bathrooms labelled "mens" are generally intended to apply to people with penises, and bathrooms labelled "womens" a generally intended to apply to people with vaginas. That has nothing to do with any feelings I might or might not have about gender, and it's literally just a room. Why does it matter which one I/you use?
It's not something that can be rationally explained. Sorta like trying to explain why you don't like a taste. The mix of cultural history and labeling myself by entering a "men's" space is ... stressful. Same with people using "he".
It's a automatic response I don't have much control over, but I've adapted to fairly well. Brains are wired to find different stimuli impacting or not.
I've wondered if I am high functioning autistic at times, for a number of reasons unrelated to gender. Some of the "fight or flight" responses to, eg, the sounds of someone eating are very similar to the fight or flight response I have in a men's room.
Ultimately, it's fairly textbook dysphoria and I've built up a lot of strategies so it's not super impactful day to day. But when I don't have to expend any of the energy employing those strategies, it's better.
I think society at large can and should be much more inclusive to people who don't fall cleanly into man and woman, but in the specific case of pregnancy, it seems trying remove all references to gender is challenging.
The problem with changing words is that women, females, who are more at risk of attack than males, lose their ability to have their own spaces and identities and to organize for their own safety. As we see they actually face attack for continuing to fight for their sex-based rights. That's identity appropriation.
> I don't think changing the language is bullying, shaming, or pushing an agenda
It doesn't have to be but it is. Look at the three-year long hate mob attacking Maya Forstater and JK Rowling because they objected to losing sex-based language. They both receive many credible death threats. That's bullying to push an agenda.
Even when this is sugar coated it's a poison pill. Accepting that males could be "trans women" immediately requires you to accept that they should use the women's washroom despite being the wrong sex and that sex being the large dangerous one. (Females in male spaces isn't a safety issue so I'm ignoring it for now.)
> people making changes that are logically consistent with how they experience the world. Again: if trans men exist, then pregnancy must occur in men and women.
Occam's razor would suggest that if a person is pregnant they probably aren't a man. Being that man basically means "the people who don't get pregnant". That is the difference between sexes.
> The reason you hear people react strongly is because they believe they have a simple logic, and people come in and say, "I deny that trans men exist, or I deny trans men are men." That's a pretty strong thing to say and a pretty strong thing to hear.
You say that as if your trans man friend will vanish in a puff of logic. Nobody is denying that they exist or threatening to make it happen and it's emotional blackmail to exaggerate like that.
There's a middle ground we could shoot for. These people would probably agree your TM friend was Masc (/Femme), because as a newly created word it doesn't have an existing meaning and isn't used to gate access to single-sex spaces like prisons.
You use words like "comfort", "support", "included" and say that you feel uncomfortable entering "gendered" spaces.
I submit that women are not supported, not included, are uncomfortable, and actually are unsafe when men enter women's spaces.
When it comes to medicine, people not realising something applies to them can have negative health outcomes. Trying to produce the language that ensures everyone can understand if something applies to them is valuable.
To be clear: I don't think that just means using inclusive language, you may need to specify more to help people understand that language if it isn't in common use, or whatever. I don't think there is a simple one-size-fits-all solution, but I think just assuming gendered language is good enough is clearly sub-optimal, and best terms that clarify the specific group in question are the best starting point.
Yes, why it is important to use clear words referring to biological sex, as that has far more important ramifications for medical treatment than gender identity.
I'm not sure what the best words to use are, as if many cis women find these gender neutral terms offensive, they have a right to complain and push back. However, trans men have a right not to be ignored, for their view in what they're called to be taken into account by the medical literature and for their existence and needs to be reflected in the medical literature.
Those things don’t trade off against each other. What trades off is accommodating some people’s feelings about words vs accommodating other people’s feelings about words. Since these different feelings are about the same words both sets of feelings can’t be accommodated. When we as a society make our choice between two incompatible options we express our values.
> I support the writer's hurt feeling but you can't justify not accomodating people because it requires looking at words differently.
Why does that only apply to trans people and how they want to be addressed? What about cis-women that want to be addressed as women, but now the medical profession is refusing to grant them that basic request for dignity?
I never said that cis women don't deserve this right. If you look my other responses in this thread you'll see that I have expressed that they do multiple times.
I also don't just mean accomodation in terms of words: if trans men have any needs different to cis women, then medical literature on pregancy must include this when in circumstances where it's appropriate.
They might find they have increased problems with gender dysphoria as their body changes during pregnancy. It might cause a number of problems that should be considered/monitored/treated by their doctors.
I'm not familiar with the topic so I don't know, but it seems reasonable that the question at a minimum needs to be asked.
That said, if they've transitioned they (I think) need to stop taking testosterone, which points out that hormone stuff could perhaps be different. There's also the social aspect of a man attending/needing typically women only support.
If you can just look at words differently... then the people being "accommodated" can just do exactly the same thing, in this case, and there is no reason to waste time energy or resources doing any of this.
In what way is this language accomodating trans people?
English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women. You seem to want a new word that means, "i want people to treat me the way society treats women/men". This is not a problem with the language, you might argue that its a problem with society, but consider exactly what it is that you're asking for.
Do you really have a right to be treated differently from other people? Its pretty easy to argue that men and women should be treated more equitably, but theres also a fair amount of structure in place to treat men and women differently to further that aim. Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?
It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.
Can get pregnant => woman is not the same thing as woman => can get pregnant. I think you will find I did not claim more than that, mainly beacuse I don't want to deal with this incredibly stupid, bad faith argument.
Yet, I bet you'd have problem with: "English has a right to a word that means 'a plane figure with four equal straight sides and four right angles' and that word is "rhombus."
Calling genuine questions about your statement 'bad faith' or a 'stupid argument' is a bad look when you communicated incorrectly. I am here out of curiosity and to learn, not to foster any agenda.
Women who can get pregnant is not a vanishingly small subset of women. Moreover, it can be derived from context in pregnancy literature that this is the subset of interest. Using a different word here carries no additional information, unlike specifying a square.
Wrt bad faith, are you really curious about how language works? Or are you just looking for short arguments with long counterarguments. Aka technical knockouts on twitter. It seems like making spurious analogies to mathematical language, or just generally arguing that english words are complicated intersections of unions of properties, and therefore no argument about what words mean can ever be valid, are just intrinsically arguments made in bad faith, and with no regard to what these additional assumptions would do to your own arguments.
Women who cannot get pregnant is not a vanishingly small subset of women. There are many XX women who cannot get pregnant who are subject to a cruel assessment that their value and identity as women is severely impacted. There are several such women in my life, and they are important to me. This is a very real thing and you are eliding it with a clumsy and goofy spew about the rights a language has or the suggestion that concern about it is bad faith twitter argument. Honestly, that sounds like projection.
I didn't realize I had to say this so explicitly. The way you wrote your comment indicated that the definition of 'woman' is someone who can get pregnant. If this is not what you intended to communicate, then your wording is at fault.
I responded by questioning the argument. I asked, based on what you wrote, what that meant to you as far as 'biological' women who are not able to get pregnant. There was no trap of logic, no pedantry, no counterargument. I asked questions about what you meant. And yes, I am genuinely curious how someone who argues that women=fertile person would categorize my friend who had her reproductive organs removed as a child.
The "spurious analogy to mathematical language" was an attempt to efficiently illustrate the meaning of your own words as written based on an understanding I assumed you would have.
Further, it genuinely reads to me that you're claiming no argument can ever be valid unless you cannot be questioned when saying "the English word for 'roasted bird' is 'chicken.'"
> English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women.
Yes, but language has to evolve with new information. We discovered and are now socially recognizing the existence of a different kind of human. We now have XX women, XY women, XX men, and XY men. So now XX women, XX men (and in the future potentially XY women) can get pregnant so there’s a desire to adapt to this new information and genericise the term.
> Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?
If that’s how it worked that would be a good point but it isn’t. Trans folks didn’t choose to be trans. A trans woman is and always has been a woman and can’t just opt in to being a man. If you’ve ever talked to one you would know most of them try and fail because it destroys their mental health.
And this should be intuitively obvious because if a gay trans woman could just choose to be a straight man they probably would without hesitation. No hormones, expensive surgeries, no extreme difficulty dating, being the political punching bag de jour, don’t have to worry about being hatecrimed or discriminated against.
> It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.
No, in fact it’s the opposite. Trans people are some of the biggest proponents of abolishing gender roles and pointlessly gendered stuff. Trans people are all about breaking down those social divisions.
Wanting to be seen and treated as the gender you are is not the same thing as reinforcing or valuing the divisions between genders. Again, it really comes down to that not being able to choose thing. If people could choose and trans men were really just masculine women then you would have a point.
This also should be intuitive because there are feminine trans men and masculine trans women. If they could choose and it was based on presentation wouldn’t it have been a heck of a lot easier for them to not be trans?
What studies or science is there that trans isn’t just a mental condition? I don’t get just accepting the sex you’re born as.
It certainly seems to me, that rather than be a more effeminate male, instead they want to be in the gender roles and be the “role” of a woman (or vice versa).
You won’t find such studies because it is! Or more accurately gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. Just because it’s in the mind doesn’t make it not a real thing. Since we’re on a programming forum maybe a good metaphor would be it’s something that’s in your firmware.
Aside: Since in real life people use sex and gender interchangeably I’m gonna do that too and just refer to chromosomes directly when needed.
> I don’t get just accepting the sex you’re born as.
When you actually survey trans people they do try really really hard to be the sex that usually goes with their chromosomes. But empirically it doesn’t work out. The distress caused by trying drives a worryingly high percentage of them to attempt suicide.
I know you didn’t mean it this way but what you said was right. Trans people need to accept the sex they were
born as and transition if they want to live happier healthier lives. People in the lgbt community call this acceptance “coming out to yourself” or “your egg cracking.”
> It certainly seems to me, that rather than be a more effeminate male…
Okay so I think you’ve almost got it but have some wires crossed. So this is a bit simplistic but for the purposes of this lets classify people as either masculine or feminine and men or women.
You’re probably used to masculine women being called “tomboys” or “butches.” You can do the opposite too with “tomgirls” and “femboys.” These are expressions of gender. You can kind of think of them as aesthetics but more central and important to the individual. Like for example most men would typically feel not themselves or like they were wearing a costume if they dressed feminine.
Okay so gender roles! Men take out the trash, women do the cleaning, men are the breadwinners, women are the caregivers, boys like rockets, girls like dolls, yada yada. These are mostly, but not entirely, cultural. Lgbt folks are pretty darn anti gender roles in general because they stop making sense in same sex couples and trans people prior to transitioning feel put in a box, and not only that but the wrong box which triggers their dysphoria.
So trying to read between the lines here I think again you’re right. Trans women aren’t feminine men, and would like to be treated just like any other women.
But the difference is that this treatment is totally separate from the individual’s gender expression or the roles they wish to take on. Trans women can be feminine, masculine, both, or neither and they can take on traditional gender roles or completely ignore them.
But aren't preconceptions about gender stereotypes implicit in "coming out"? How would a man realize that he is, in fact, a woman, without the idea that there are certain feelings only a woman can feel?
Right. Like what I mean to say is it seems you are implicitly trying to fulfill a man-made role and changing your biological body in the process. That seems a bit overboard. Just act how you want.
>Trans people are some of the biggest proponents of abolishing gender roles and pointlessly gendered stuff.
I couldn't disagree more, and this is precisely what i am arguing. The argument that the biological and social categories of men and women are different is fundamentally predicated on the existence of the social category, otherwise known as gender. This is regressive, and we should absolutely not accomodate it.
It's growing up being told that men play with trucks and women play with dolls, and instead of casting this obvious bullshit aside, you acquiesce and now argue that men who play with dolls are women, and that's ok.
This is an extremely misguided attempt at constructing justice fron the premises of religious fundamentalism.
Note that the benefits of using the new language and terms are also greatly exaggerated. Only the most fragile of people are going to commit suicide because of talk of "women" in pregnancy resources. And frankly with that level of fragility they probably weren't long for this world anyway.
We're talking about trans men getting pregnant, not trans women. While trans men are a minority, those percentages are multiple orders of magnitude too small.
This feels like it proves the point, I believe this is true, but yet, for all situations that aren't very specific and technical, the earth is round, and saying otherwise will cause more confusion->harm than good.
It's like one day you decided to build a company that needs a website. The first task you come up with is accessibility and i18n. Good luck with that. My heuristics is, are we serving the main audience, are we serving them well, can we expand the audience, can we expand the audience without harming the main audience.
There is another comment mentioned about ramp. I think it is a good example where serving the extended audience (wheel chair user) is not harming the experience of main audience (non-wheel chair user). On the other hand, OP's article is about using gender neutral term on parenting/pregnancy websites where the main audience should be, well, women women and men men, that the article should lay its focus on.
A related concept is the paradox of tolerance [1]. We demand ourselves to be ever inclusive like the dodo [2]. All the dodos got eaten at last.
Nassim Taleb has an article about this but I can't remember the name. Something like tyranny of the minority. Worth a read. The main idea is the most vocal, intolerant minority runs the world.
A woman is someone who sees in herself at least one attribute, which she regards as a sufficient condition for her own membership in that category. What that attribute is can vary from woman to woman.
The same definition applies mutatis mutandis to men.
> A woman is someone who sees in herself at least one attribute, which she regards as a sufficient condition for her own membership in that category. What that attribute is can vary from woman to woman. Now what is the concession that's being made?
If we had to limit ourselves to that entirely unclear definition we'd be giving up a lot, including the ability to recognize anyone as either man or woman (or even male or female) in cases where they aren't able to communicate to us whatever they've decided using made up attributes they (entirely on their own) deem sufficient to place them in one group or another.
This would include every single non-living person and anyone whose physical or mental limitations prevent them from communicating or inventing that list of arbitrary attributes and then classifying each one themselves according to some unspecified process in order to determine which term should apply to them.
Even just changing the definition from something that was nearly always entirely clear, easy to define objectively, and immutable, to something that is not defined, where the determining criteria can differ from one person to the next, and where the classification for a single person can change from one moment to the next is a major concession that has wide ranging implications.
The concession is that the word "woman" becomes utterly meaningless and thus terms like AFAB or ciswoman are then needed to serve the function woman used to.
The only reason that redefinitions such as this are being proposed (and in many places, accepted) is so that some men can claim to be women, and to twist law and policy around such claims.
So, as a consequence of this, we now have men in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men in women's shelters, and so on. Is this really a beneficial concession to be made?
„Woman“ in your mind is the only societal category which is completely devoid of external attributes.
I can not be a baseball player without playing baseball. I can not be German without being born in Germany. I can not be of color without the needed heritage or a certain amount of melanin in my skin. I can not choose to be tall. I can not choose to be male without being male.
It just doesn‘t make sense. If the category is that loose, then why have it at all?
>My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off?
If I were dictator the first step would be to round up and deport to labor camps all the people who misrepresent "small, diffuse and hard to quantify" as zero. So much BS in modern society in all areas and subject matters is predicated on this fallacy.
Second step would be to go about making an attempt at quantifying the cost.
At exactly 0. To not be racist or transphobic costs me nothing. I can do it without effort.
To pretend it‘s fair for them to partake in sports or to disadvantage women in favor of trans people upsets that equilibrium when it happens to the first woman. Trans people need to be accepted, not advantaged.
Using language that includes a group isn't a cost that is born by those not in the group. Notably, many people not in the group may OK or even encouraging of the changes.
I'm not terribly pleased by extremely vague bureaucratic language. But the arguments that try to turn such into an actual harm or cost to those not in the group being protected here are engaging in language that's far more deceptively vague.
My point is that inclusion isn't like a check written out to an excluded group. Inclusion benefits society by making things run more smoothly, it benefits various bureaucracy since the bureaucracies can deal with more people and so-forth.
And the cost is a small amount of understandability, yes. But even that isn't necessary paid by those outside the exclude group.
No, this is equivalent of removing all stairs and talk about stairs because some people need the ramps. No one is arguing against removal of accomodations.
The question was what is the framework to do the cost benefit analysis? (I’d say giving access to essential services, basic social participation for >10% of the population is pretty easy to justify, but very expensive).
Wheelchair ramps are important. They serve an obvious physical function, kinda like the bits that allow pregnancy, and clear language that means things to people with the necessary biology to utilize that information safely.
The people in favor of a lot of the erasures would want the wheelchair ramps removed, if people with functioning legs were the minority. It should not be entertained.
It's asking for the removal of accommodations for women.
Hermaphrodites aren't suffering from a disorder. They're just born different than most. If you took the time to get to know some you'll see they are just as deserving of consideration as you.
Are there actual hermaphrodites these days? Some literature about religions mentions in passing that humans were hermaphrodites eons ago, they are strongly dimorphic now, because that's the midpoint of our evolution, and we will be hermaphrodites in the far future.
(Separately from the topic of this thread:) It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological and political battle. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what ideology they favor or disfavor, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it:
I saw this article posted earlier and was going to comment but thought “you know what, this is obviously not HN material, I’ll just flag it”. 12 hours later, loads of upvotes and hundreds of comments. Fine.
HN news is discussion about technology, start ups, and creating stupid moral panics to stir up hatred against groups you want to oppress.
In this case I actually have first hand experience of this topic, my wife is currently pregnant. Not once have I seen any price of advice or information that in any way has been less useful because of inclusive language. This whole article is attacking a problem - using inclusive language - that only exists if you hate the people being included and don’t want them included. Which apart from being obviously morally repugnant is also something that seems like an odd discussion to have on a tech website. I guess we’re interested in ethics in game journalism again…
Why would or should men be included in something they are excluded from by nature, by biology, and by logic? Especially when it's regarding medical information.
For example, you're not included in my family, not legally, not biologically. If you ask/demand to be in my family simply because you say you feel like you are I'll say no but it will not mean I hate you, you're just not one of my family. My saying you're not is not anti-you or you-phobic. Your saying it wouldn't harm anyone to allow you and/or others to identify as being part of my family is simply nonsense, especially if my family disagree.
Thus, I'd like to see some justification for your claims.
And yet adoption exists. When a parent comes with their adopted child to the doctor, we don't expect the doctor to say "No, this person is not your dad, he's your guardian. You don't have the same chromosomes, you can't make me deny this biological reality." If the doctor insisted on saying that and on refusing to use the word "parent" or "dad" when referring to the father, we might indeed infer that the doctor is adoption-phobic.
> Why would or should men be included in something they are excluded from by nature, by biology, and by logic?
If we're including "trans men" in the category of "men" (and I think there are good reasons to do so, the same way we accept adoption as real parentage), then there indeed exists an edge case of people in the category of "men" getting pregnant.
I included legally so the whole bit about adoption is moot, and hence the rest of your argument based on it. That’s a child, that’s an adult male, he’s the legal guardian therefore he’s dad. There’s a pregnant adult female, she’s not dad. Why? Because men can’t get pregnant, for one.
> I included legally so the whole bit about adoption is moot, and hence the rest of your argument based on it.
Oh, my mistake. I thought we were trying to exchange arguments in good faith to better understand other people's perspective, but we were actually playing the "my argument destroys yours with facts and logic" game.
Here, let me adjust.
> Because men can’t get pregnant, for one.
Except trans men can get pregnant, so your point is moot, and hence the rest of your argumentation based on it.
If you were arguing in good faith then surely you’d use the argument I’d presented already, and not ignore it for your convenience.
Since we’re playing the logic game (and it would be strange if we were playing some game without logic - I fear that you may be), trans-men are a sub-category of women, not men, so you’ll need to expand on which part of my argument is moot.
> Why would or should men be included in something they are excluded from by nature, by biology, and by logic? Especially when it's regarding medical information
I think you made the classic mistake of assuming that terms such as “birthing parent” are a way of including trans women. They aren’t. They’re for the benefit of trans men and non-binary individuals who are able to give birth. This isn’t about including people incapable of giving birth. It’s about including people who ARE.
Thanks for pointing out the mistake, but since the people giving birth are women and only women can give birth then what is the need to change the terms? They're included.
That’s a nice tautology you’ve got there. Regardless, looking at people who explicitly say “we are not women” and then saying “they’re women” seems a bit rude and dismissive of their life experience if you ask me. Personally, if a person with a full beard, an imposing physique, and a deep voice says “I’m a man”, I take them at their word. I guess you might ask them to drop their pants to see if they’re really a “woman”, though.
The only reason it can be a tautology is because of the fact that women are the only ones who can get pregnant, it’s an observation that accords with reality.
I’m willing to go along with a lot of things an individual wants, calling them a name of their choosing, not bringing up the obvious incongruities in their appearance etc all out of respect, so much of it is simply breaking gender norms that why wouldn’t I? But I’m not the one breaking the spell here, they are, men can’t get pregnant, that’s not breaking a gender norm, that is an impossibility and I’m not willing to go along with such clear nonsense. If they want to continue the charade then don’t get pregnant. That’s not on me or anyone else.
My point was that transmen aren’t men but it was easier to continue the subsequent posts as if it was a mistake because I wanted to hear that person’s point instead of get caught up in something they probably wanted to avoid.
The fact is, it works either way as my position adheres to biological reality. Is there some reason I should not speak the truth? Really, I’d like to hear your reasoning for that.
I think it's interesting that Lewis Carroll described this battle over language many years ago
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
"to protect transgender men and women, a class of people who are supposedly more “oppressed” than biological women. Even if this were true (and I’m deeply skeptical)"
I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous. I am surprised at her skepticism. Are the statistics not clear? One can quibble over causality, but my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression, and so a group that would likely benefit from support.
The author also states that she never "felt constrained by being a woman".
A bit further down, it becomes clear that the article isn't really about erasure of women in pregnancy literature, it's just another pamphlet against trans people. It begins with a link to a news story to a press release of a university about babies being able to distinguish female faces from male faces, labelled as scientific proof that "polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them." That's the highest level of scientific rigour demonstrated in the article: a cherry-picked news article that's not completely off-topic. The perspective of people identifying as trans or what scientists have to say on the topic is completely ignored, instead there are simply assertions that any other view is obvious "nonsense".
I'm also not a huge fan of many of the new terms referred to in this article. However, here they are only a pretext for spilling hate against trans people. If the point of the article was to criticize PC language, there would have been no need to insult some random trans-woman. Not even a trans-man, the people who the inclusive birthing language is intended for; no, the author just casually throws in some hate against trans-women because that's what she actually wants to talk about.
I think you've really nailed it. It's very hard to take her views seriously if you've done the slightest bit of reading on this topic at all. The fact that it's receiving so much attention here is embarrassing, and in my humble opinion, very telling.
Just in case it isn't clear, virtually no one in the literature takes the idea of a "adult biological woman" as a useful distinction, no matter how intuitive it may seem to most engineers. There's no real daylight between claiming that being "gender-critical" is "biologically based" as this author does, and outright rejection of transgender identities, which the author claims not to do. Virtually everyone with any philosophical training or background whatsoever thinks Quillette is a joke of a publication, not because of "ideology" or "social enforcement" but because, well, they publish embarrassing shit like this.
Add that to the fact that there have been almost 600 comments here on this joke of an article that doesn't manage to get past screed and offer a single coherent argument, and the result is frankly pretty infuriating. Half of it is just misdirection, to be clear. Abortion is absolutely a women's rights issue, everyone involved agrees on that I think. It is nonetheless false that everyone who gets an abortion is a woman.
>Just in case it isn't clear, virtually no one in the literature takes the idea of a "adult biological woman" as a useful distinction, no matter how intuitive it may seem to most engineers.
Try this at a bar in rural (red) Ohio. See how it works out. One of the most annoying things about this extremely online debate is the holier than thou attitude that people take about it. If only you've read the right books, and the right essays, and follow the right twitter accounts ... then you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas.
I don't think anyone should be asking bars in Ohio, or anywhere, about this. No more than I would ask a bar in Ohio what they think of climate change. Or a group of theologians in the 16th century about how they felt about astronomy. Or computer science majors about the ethics of vegetarianism. This is just a crass appeal to common sense, where common sense is defined by what mostly white low-education blue collar workers supposedly think.
> you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas
No, you misunderstood. (First of all, that's not even the correct claim, you should have said some of them do.) But even with that, you misunderstood. The point isn't that you have to accept that transgender people exist. It's that inserting concepts like "adult biological woman" does not show that transgender people do not exist. Nothing interesting whatever can be shown with this distinction. The "biological" part of it doesn't hang together in the way you want it to. More generally, the problem is that critiques of concepts around transgenderism tend not to be well thought out at all (that includes both sides); if you want a proper critique you need to be reading people who have been trained to think consistently about difficult topics around gender, sex, social behavior, etc.
But my interest here is more that we're now up to 634 comments on an article that makes no real argument whatsoever. The author is just here to complain that transgender people have stolen her vocabulary word. Is there really any plausible explanation for why so many people have gathered here other than that a bunch of anti-trans people smelled blood in the water?
My point is that activists generally are not content with merely seeking acknowledgement that gender dysphoria exists, they have to force people to redefine basic biology and change their language. You can call it "crass" all you want, and derisively referring to anyone that doesn't agree with the new ideology "white low-education blue collar" is exactly the kind of elitist navel gazing that I'm talking about. "These people who don't agree with my new religion are stupid" is, while rude, an extremely effective tactic so I expect this to continue.
"Humans are either male or female" is not "basic biology", it's kindergarten biology. It's strictly false, even if we ignore transgender or transsexual topics completely.
It is sometimes an abstraction that is good enough. It's a bit like Newtonian physics in that way.
> Is there really any plausible explanation for why so many people have gathered here
Is it gathering if we were already here? We're concerned that sex-based rights can't exist if sex-related words are redefined. We're doubly concerned that this seems intentional.
> bunch of anti-trans people smelled blood in the water?
Are you anti-trans if you see someone's sex as the primary factor in who you let shower with your young children? Are you anti-trans if you feel that female rape-relief shelters should be allowed to exclude males?
The problem is that anyone talking about any sex-based rights, no matter how important or how much they're willing to concede, is immediately called transphobic or anti-trans.
As far as I can tell you're the first person here to comment about the actual article without stopping after the beginning. While I'm guilty of this too, almost everyone here hasn't clarified what we're actually arguing about.
Your's is the best response in this entire thread.
"at a time in my life when I have never felt more essentially female, more debilitated by a physical condition directly attributable to my biological sex, more in need of clear, informative language describing what I’m going through, journalists and medical authorities are hard at work seeking to obfuscate the differences between male and female bodies."
I found "chestfeeding" to be pretty confusing. If you put me on the spot I'd assume it was a reference to the movie Alien before I guessed it referred to milking mammaries.
I can also see how being called a menstrator would feel objectifying (kinda like how in some contexts calling someone a breeder or a bleeder is derogatory)
I have met our species and I’m confident that if not taught carefully, there will be individuals who are confused to find that they do not produce milk.
To be clear, I’m not talking about gender identity, but that unless we speak in clear, non-riddles, we’d be shocked by how many people don’t understand some things that we think are obvious, like how about 50% of human nipples/chests/breasts will never naturally produce milk.
Genuinely, I am confused about what is confusing about that term. There seem to be only interpretation for me and it is not difficult to figure it out.
It is not like cis women would ever had boobs on any other place.
"I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous."
Oppression isn't something you can even give a clear and unambiguous definition for, let alone measure statistically.
"my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression"
This does not automatically imply they are oppressed. An obvious and common alternative interpretation is that choosing to surgically change your gender is at least sometimes caused by mental illness, which also causes depression and suicide, and/or that people who change gender discover that they don't actually like their new gender (for internal reasons, not due to the attitudes of others).
> After lugging around two fetuses that won’t stop kicking my bladder, I have no patience left for gender activists who pretend that men can give birth.
Why does this woman's personal experience of pregnancy make her so offended by how other people who can give birth think of their gender?
I do agree with the author that the existence of trans people shouldn't mean we can't use the word breastfeeding anymore. But I don't think that's the fault of people who want to say that men can give birth.
Here's an idea - why not have resources with different language for cis women and trans men? Just like pages come with different language versions and you can switch in the nav bar.
This would also be medically helpful, as I'm sure the birthing experience is not identical for the two populations.
I think the best way to understand the sentiment behind this is:
- This woman identifies as a woman on the basis of her physical body (giving birth being an example of an experience that she had in part due to the body she was born with)
- For this woman, that's what being a woman is: when she describes herself as a woman then she means someone who has breasts, gives birth, etc.
- If other people use "woman" to mean something different and more abstract/social, then it makes it difficult for this woman to describe herself as a "woman" and have it understood that by saying this she is talking about her body.
- It may even be the case, that if "woman" means what other people want it to mean then this woman would no longer identify as a woman.
In other words, she's offended because her own identity is being challenged.
Can you actually define what a woman is, without using a word woman then?
With bodies and genes and biology, we have a distinction between men and women (and some genetic outliers). This in no way affects if you like barbies or action men, what you wear, and how long your hair is. Excluding disabilities, this also defines your physical characteristics and possibilities, from being able to pee in a urinal (without special tools) to giving birth.
If we define women as "everyone who defines themselves as a woman", what exactly is a woman then?
> If we define women as "everyone who defines themselves as a woman", what exactly is a woman then?
I agree. If we open things up so widely, then terms like "man" and "woman" become meaningless. Nevertheless, it also doesn't seem right to be to disregard the experiences of trans people.
My preferred way out of this conundrum is to view gender as multi-dimensional. As such, there are multiple kinds of woman (and man). Three important kinds might be:
1. Biological women. Which we can define in different ways: it might include only people who were born women, or it might include people who have altered their physiology either through surgery or hormones. It might include some intersex people, or it might not.
2. People who "feel like" a woman
3. The political class of women: those are identified by others as women, and treated differently on that basis.
If one wants to define "woman", one then has to be clear about what kind of woman they mean. At which point it becomes relatively straightforward. As a linguistic convention, I would suggest:
- "man"/"woman" can be informally used for any of the above categories
- Where possible, or is asked to clarify, people should be specific about which kind of gender they mean.
- Nobody should claim that "man"/"woman" refer only to one kind of gender.
I would eventually like to get to the point where people have separate identities in each category, which is already how I approach my own gender identity. I identify as biologically male. I don't have feelings of gender, so I identify as non-binary or agender in that category. And I am usually but not always treated like a man, so I mostly identify as male in that category, but not entirely.
I feel like this is a lot more useful (and inclusive!) than a binary "are you a man or a woman".
> she's offended because her own identity is being challenged
After going through the list that you’ve given, would she be wrong for feeling like that? Or is it just a matter of her feelings [1] being rendered incompatible with the contemporary milieu?
[1]: Which per your list, sound legitimate irrespective of the tone of the article or her writing itself, I’m going to use your takeaways as a model for my questions.
I don't think so (although she might of course express her feelings in a way which is unhelpful/problematic/harmful).
I feel like if people realised that this was actually a consequence of self-identity centric models of gender, then they wouldn't advocate for them in the first place.
Every living thing is defined by their DNA. It produces the visible specimen with all its features and behaviors. DNA is a giant specification program, and when they're identical, they produce identical living beings. Could we group DNA according to some similarities?
We can observe DNA sometimes makes creatures that breath air, sometimes it makes creatures that breath water, others can fly, etc... surely we can group DNA into species EVEN IF some of the "edges" are fuzzy (the categories exist, but the borders blend together smoothly between categories). This classification of DNA is recursive, and can be done within a species. A great number of species consistently produces TWO main categories... the creature with eggs, and the creature with sperm. Again, this doesn't mean the borders are perfectly defined, but the main category is.
I'm illustrating this to show that in fact this duality in types of humans exists, and this duality is the main mechanism to keep the species alive. Maybe we'll soon reproduce in labs; maybe test tube babies will have DNA that is neither man or woman, and maybe we're in the process of transitioning there. Even if that's the case, it doesn't mean that up until now there was no such thing as a man or a woman, and we had it wrong all this time. I would have more respect for this gender movement if it was about transhumanism and moving beyond our evolution, but instead it's trying to shame everyone into believing contradicting ideas (i.e. by changing definition of words and undermining established science).
Sure, but that's not the only thing they're defined by. We might for example like to categorise people by their profession, and doing so is not in conflict with categorising them by their DNA.
That's the same except it's closer to the "ground" in terms of abstraction (DNA is the bird's eye view here).
You can't self-identify yourself as being of a certain profession because you first have to do it. I cannot declare "I am a nuclear scientist now, and you must address me as doctor", and then expect people to actually do it without questioning the veracity of the claim. Self-identifying as a species doesn't work because of DNA, self-ID as a sex doesn't work because of DNA, and self-ID of a profession doesn't work because it's based on knowledge, skill, and credentials (etc).
> You can't self-identify yourself as being of a certain profession
That's true, but there are identities where self-identity does make sense. Religious identity would be a good example. I think it's best to think of feelings-based gender identities as akin to religious identities. They don't replace the category of sex, but they are valid in their own right.
100%. Lawyers such as Candice Jackson believe that applying religious freedom laws to gender identity is the clearest path out of this mess. The true believers should get no more and no fewer rights than anyone else. It's important that law also protects "gender atheists", and their right to not believe or be forced to use the newspeak of the believers.
DNA can express with both genders organs in the same being. While they are rare, such organisms are still people, and their identity is certainly worthy of some consideration. We can argue about thresholds and terminology. But I don't think it's asking too much to address an individual in the way they prefer.
> DNA can express with both genders organs in the same being.
Again, those are edge cases of the category, which does not mean the category does not exist.
> But I don't think it's asking too much to address an individual in the way they prefer.
That is only a part of what is being asked. The real ask is to actually believe in this whole theory of self-identification, and if ANY objections are raised it's punished with shame.
>If other people use "woman" to mean something different and more ephemeral
I have not considered it on the context of time/ephemeral. I usually think of it as mutable, but your word choice brings up a point about stages of life I think is worth considering.
> I have not considered it on the context of time/ephemeral
Hmm... having looked up the definition of ephemeral, I don't think I meant ephemeral. I meant based more on the social aspects or a feeling of gender
> I usually think of it as mutable
I have increasingly come to think of it multi-dimensional (e.g. one can have physical sex, feelings of gender, norm conformity, political gender, etc, etc) all existing independently of one another. Whether those are mutable (and who has the power to mutate them) depends on the dimension.
She explains in the "possibly be a placental abruption—but could also just be a fart" paragraph - her argument is that she is having a risky-and-possibly-fatal biological experience and thinks that the best health outcome will be reached if literature explains the situation in clear, commonly used terms that most people understand.
It could just be rationalisation though. I'd expect people to be fired and/or called transphobic for making that sort of argument.
> They do however take issues with trans men existing and being acknowledged as such.
sigh
The arguments like “they are denying trans people exist!” and “this is causing violence!” are so over the top and tired.
No one is denying trans people exist. We simply think that instead of changing the way we use language to fit <1% of the population, maybe when a trans person goes to the Doctor they can simply say: “I was born a (wo)man”
The author does. She calls biology a "set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them." Then calls trans-exclusionary feminism "biology based".
And she literally denies the Dylan Mulvaney being a trans-woman, calling her an "adult biological man". Which is so revealing because trans-woman obviously aren't the reason why some push for gender-inclusive language in pregnancy literature. They don't have uteresus. Only trans-men have them. It's about trans-men.
You don't need to participate, but that doesn't make "biological male" any less exclusionary.
Especially since it's a nonsense phrase. And even if it wasn't, I sincerely doubt the author actually knows about the chromosomal or endocrinological status of that person Biden spoke with.
Right? She's a woman, which awesome... Women are cool. Some people who give birth aren't women. Those people are also cool, whether they are men, non binary, agender, or whatever else.
Can we not just let people be who they are and recognize gender minorities do exist? Acknowledging the existence of trans men doesn't reduce the incredible experiences of any woman who gives birth (or doesn't!)
> Some people who give birth aren't women. Those people are also cool, whether they are men, non binary, agender, or whatever else.
> Can we not just let people be who they are and recognize gender minorities do exist? Acknowledging the existence of trans men doesn't reduce the incredible experiences of any woman who gives birth (or doesn't!)
I understand both sides of this argument, I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to a different conclusion than you. Being a man or a woman is a brute fact. It has nothing to do with identity. Only women give birth.
What bothers me is not our disagreement but that my view has been labeled "hateful" or "problematic".
Personally I think you can believe whatever you want, it's just that if you call people something they don't want to be called, they could have a problem with you. And if you're in an organization where the leaders want everyone to get along (most orgs) it shouldn't be surprising if they see you as the cause of the disharmony.
I wouldn't say your view is "hateful" or "problematic" but trans men can give birth, and if they are ignored then their quality of care will be impaired. It's also important to note that it's necessary to be flexible about definitions or ackowledge that the words have different consequences in different circumstances.
Because you're conflating biological sex and gender. That has led to ignorance of the latter and a lot of hate, which is why people will argue with you over it.
I would posit that OP isn't conflating biological sex and gender, but rather the trend nowadays is to reuse words that have had static meanings for centuries, and then get unreasonably upset at folks who don't immediately agree with the new definitions.
My view is similar to yours, but I think slightly more neutral:
It seems to me that the words in question ("man", "woman", etc), were used to refer to both biological sex and gender for centuries under the assumption that they always co-occurred. The conflict has arisen now that we've realised they don't always co-occur because different people have taken different views on which of part was primary or definitional. Neither view is inherently wrong. But taken together they're hugely problematic because we're using the same words to mean different things, which is leading to lots of confusion.
(there is additional conflict as some people have decided that we ought to not talk about one or other of biological sex and gender at all - which one depends on who you ask of course)
Ultimately the solution will need to be a second (and perhaps a third) set of words that are clear in their meanings. I don't think it really matters too much which word means what, so long as we all agree on the meanings. Possibly it would be better to ditch "man" and "woman" entirely so nobody feels hard done by that other people can use them but they can't.
I would say I strongly believe in the new definitions, have I been unreasonably upset in my responses?
I think I've articulated my position and held it firmly, but at no point did I feel upset about people who disagreed.
I don't believe I called anyone a bigot or was any more rigid in my language than folks who hold a more traditional meaning of the word in their minds.
I think you’ve communicated your beliefs and experiences clearly and respectfully.
You ask questions rather than name call and finger point.
While I personally struggle with these new definitions and their potential cost to certain groups (someone pregnant like the post’s author), I feel like I can actually discuss and learn something new, and feel heard myself.
I suspect that what happens is that folks like me tend to get very tired. I'm happy to have good faith discussions all day, but in places like HN it can be difficult to maintain a conversation with all the anger directed at me.
Inevitably, patience wears thin and comments get more bitter, and the polarization continues.
I'm sure the reverse happens for folks who disagree with me. They get tired of everyone just assuming they are a bigot, and start just assuming that's what's coming from the other side.
I wish there were more forums to have small, moderated chats where anyone who makes sweeping generalizations about their opponents ("you lefties always..." "All your right wingers...") were clipped out.
You're arguing definitions, but ultimately language is use, and use is always changing.
You can carry on as you've always had, but some fraction of the public will assume ignorance, some stubbornness, and some malice. It's not really any different than terms for ethnic minorities or those with disabilities over time. How you approach it is up to you, but how people perceive you is up to them.
It's not quite as simple as arguing definitions. My argument is that the categories "man" and "woman" really exist, independent of language, and that they don't have anything to do with identity.
Some people (you, apparently) agree with that and just want to shift the definitions so "man" means "someone who identifies as a man" and will be replaced by "biological man". But other people don't agree, they don't believe that "man" and "woman" are immanent categories that exist outside language and culture.
As far as language changing, it certainly does, but it rarely changes by fiat. I don't believe changes referenced in this article represent organic change, I think they're a fad that will only catch on in a few enclaves. We'll see.
> Some people (you, apparently) agree with that and just want to shift the definitions so "man" means "someone who identifies as a man" and will be replaced by "biological man".
I don’t particularly care what the common use meanings are or if they shift over time, I’ll use what I think is most appropriate for the circumstances and audience, while trying to be as inclusive as I can.
Though I won’t be using “menstruators” any time soon for the same reason I won’t use “Latinx”, too many people I interact with find it derogatory and offensive.
> You can carry on as you've always had, but some fraction of the public will assume ignorance, some stubbornness, and some malice.
Among people who are Very Online this might be a sizable fraction. But if you look at the public at large it isn't. Language is about usage. It's not about usage by an elite minority. Reminds me of latinx, favored more by white college grads than by hispanics.
Maybe we should use words in a way that bests help the people they relate to? I'd wager the vast majority of women giving birth would rather the literature be clear and understandable rather than accommodating to an incredibly small group of individuals.
> ultimately language is use, and use is always changing
Maya Forstater was fired, and JK Rowling still receives death threats for their use of the word "woman" to signify adult human females. That's domestic terrorism, to present it as "the language is always changing" is Orwellian.
> It's not really any different than terms for ethnic minorities
What if the USA declared all citizens to be "black"? Blacks would now perfectly match all the USA's demographic averages, income, crime, lifespan, etc, etc.
Racism solved, right? Or the beginning of a vastly worse racism that must be endured in silence because the words to describe it have been taken away?
Either language expresses reality, or it becomes something else. Yes, meanings of utterances can change in the sense that in the sign "woman", the signifier can remain fixed while the signified changes. So what? That's banal. The gender position is not a mere question of signifier/signified correspondence shifting.
And that language changes doesn't mean all changes are equally good. When language loses its grip on reality, we've lost. We've become Orwellian.
I believe your view is not keeping up with the times.
I think as long as you acknowledge there are people who use language to disambiguate sex and gender, but you choose not to use that language, then you are just expressing your opinion.
I think it's fair for folks to probe why you choose the language you do, and even to suggest that the reasons you supply might be considered ignorant.
We only improve if we all try to understand the reasoning behind each other more.
That's the ultimate issue here. Different groups of people want to disambiguate some terms and conflate others, and there is not enough overlap between these groups to reach a common ground. At its core is a struggle for power with the meanings of words representing territory to be won or lost.
Orwell wrote extensively on this topic and left us with some pretty stern warnings which we as a society continue to ignore. And while everyone fights over this stuff we are ruining the planet and risking catastrophic consequences both environmental and political.
There's this strange perception that anything new must be good and right. Perhaps OPs language isn't keeping up with the times, or maybe the times are just...incorrect.
I didn't suggest that new was correct, I suggested new exists and we should acknowledge it.
I don't use "yeet" as a word, and I find it silly. But nonetheless I'm aware some people do use it, and so it's in my lexicon as a word that I just don't care for.
My point is that we cannot deny new usages. We can disagree with them or choose not to use them, but denying them is just never going to work.
This completely misses the point. No one here is unaware that people use these terms in new ways. Likewise they are not denying the usage. They are saying the usage is imprecise. It commandeers an existing word. Using that word in the conventional way is portrayed as archaic or bigoted.
This is not remotely the same as making up a new word like yeet.
I disagree, plenty of people have stated quite the opposite - that there exists one definition only and the other definitions are incorrect.
I believe language is descriptive, and therefore definitions follow usage. If there exists new usage in common enough use, then the definition follows that use.
And I don't believe the traditional use of a word makes one a bigot by default. I think that there are both bigots and non bigots that use the words traditionally.
But this thread is absolutely stock full of people refusing to acknowledge that there might be multiple correct definitions.
You disagree that a neologism is different from changing the definition of an existing word? Please elaborate on how those two things are not distinguishable.
No, I disagree that people understand there are two definitions in common use. The parent said that no one disagrees that people use the word in that way. I'd argue that several people in this thread have done so implicitly or explicitly by saying something to the effect of, "man means X and only X".
Actually, the comment does not talk about that. It just says:
> There's this strange perception that anything new must be good and right. Perhaps OPs language isn't keeping up with the times, or maybe the times are just...incorrect.
This asserts that newness does not equate with correctness. This implicitly recognizes that there are multiple uses.
I don't believe changing how we talk will help trans people suffer less. But even if it did, I think it's a bad idea to constantly modulate our use of language based on the small probability of offending a small part of the population. And I believe that if you take that view to its end, you'll arrive at a tortured, humorless, jargon-filled newspeak.
> I don't believe changing how we talk will help trans people suffer less.
Why don't you believe trans people when they ask you to do this? Apparently you think that you know better than trans people themselves, what will make them suffer. Just for the record (because you asked above): This is exactly what I consider problematic.
No trans person has ever asked me to change how I speak. It seems unlikely that trans people as a group would feel better if everyone changed how they speak. I don't believe gender dysphoria works that way.
Have you come to the same conclusion for parenthood? Are adopted children not real, and we must not refer to their adoptive parents as "parents"? You understand why that is hateful, right?
Biology may be a fact, but we can, and do, choose to value the link between parent and child socially as the most important part, not the biological link.
We can do the same with gender, referencing identity over biology in the general case. Why have you come to the opposite conclusion?
This is the argument that I circle back to over and over again as an adopted child, and like with your comment, people mostly choose not to engage with it or just flatly assert “that’s different and you know it.”
But it’s not different. All of the same arguments apply. One could argue that “father” has a deep-rooted, unambiguous, biological meaning. One could argue that the use of “father” to describe an adoptive guardian is distorting this fundamental biological truth. One could assert their right to never refer to your adoptive guardian as your “father” because it’s just untrue.
But nobody does that because obviously that would be extremely hurtful and rude to adopted children and adoptive parents.
I have never once seen a screed like “Their birth certificate might say you’re their father, and you might play catch with them and celebrate Father’s Day, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t change the fact that at the genetic level, this child is simply not yours. They are someone else’s.”
Few people will see an adoptive mother at a class for new mothers and say “This is really uncomfortable for me. Why is she here? She did not give birth to this child. She’s not even lactating at all. What made her choose to spend her time hanging around us real mothers? I’d rather be with a group of only birth-giving mothers. I would feel safer sharing my experiences.”
"There are several crucial differences between biological and adoptive parents, on the one hand, and transwomen and women, on the other hand. These include:
- that both biological and adoptive parents actually parent, whereas it’s not at all clear what transwomen and women have in common that is supposed to play this same role;
- that there is no historical power relationship between biological and adoptive parents, whereas there is between male and female people;
- that calling adoptive parents parents doesn’t undermine our understanding of what it is to be a parent because what is core to parenting — raising children — is done by both, whereas what is core to being a woman is being female, and that is not done by both;
- there is no established history of adoptive parental violence against biological parents, whereas there is an established history of male violence against women;
- that adoptive parents do have ‘similar enough concerns and interests’ to biological parents, but transwomen do not have these to women (especially considering the heterogeneity among transwomen);
- that there is no ‘oppressive ideological agenda of parenthood’ but there is of being a woman (namely being feminine); and finally,
- that there are many ways to be a bad parent, which we can probably agree on, but there are no ways to be a bad woman."
For me the difference is that the parental relationship is a wonderful thing. Whereas gender norms (which as far as I can see is all you are left with once you remove biology from gender) are pretty problematic and harmful in their own right.
Gender expression (the norms you talk of) is distinct from both gender identity and biological sex, and identity doesn't prescribe them. The difference is you are saying identity has to be prescribed by biological sex.
If you want to get rid of the words man/woman altogether socially, feel free to advocate for that, but until you succeed, don't dictate to trans people that live in a society with those words that they (and they alone) can't use the ones they identify with.
> If you want to get rid of the words man/woman altogether socially, feel free to advocate for that
I do somewhat think that this might need to be the solution. However, I think this goes both ways. If trans people don't want to me to use the words "man"/"woman" in the ways that I see fit, then they shouldn't use them either. I certainly don't appreciate what now seems to be a connotation of "man" (the identity I use), that I "feel like a man" (I have no such feeling).
> The difference is you are saying identity has to be prescribed by biological sex.
I'm not saying identity has to be prescribed by biological sex. I am saying that it is reasonable to identify someone on the basis of many gendered categories.
Three key ones would be:
- biological sex (physical characteristics)
- gender feeling (an internal feeling of gender)
- political gender (how other people gender you)
Importantly for me, identifying someone as a gender in one sense (say a man in the biological sense) does not contradict someone else identifying someone as a gender in another sense (say that person identifying themselves as a woman in the feeling sense). They can both be valid simultaneously.
We wouldn't say you shouldn't describe someone as black (race) because they're really a man (gender), because gender and race aren't equivalent. To me, it seems like the same applies to the different dimensions of gender. They exist independently of one another, and shouldn't be seen as equivalent. The only problem is that we use same words for both categories.
I would add that there are good reasons for people to want to identify others in ways other than that they self-identify. As an example:
I am exclusively attracted to biologically female people. If I can't identify people by their biological sex, then I cannot express my sexuality. I therefore think it's reasonable for me to want to talk about the class of biological females. And given that there is no socially accepted term for this other than "women", I think it is reasonable for me to use that term, even if not everyone in that groups identifies as a woman.
Adoptive parents are called such as a legal fiction with the necessary mental qualifications. The transgender activists aren't content with that solution. They insist on the terms in the full metaphysical sense.
Which on the face of it is not true -- trans men can give birth, and aren't women
The sense I get from the article is definitely that she thinks people who can't give birth are unworthy of the title "woman" and that follows with the comments about menstruation at the bottom. Aka, if somebody hasn't bled through their shorts in gym class, they are not a woman
The definition of woman is the "adult female human", and a someone who gives birth is by definition female. That's the female sex of mammals and other animals, including human. The other sex is male (who provides the sperm for procreating offspring). No third or fourth sex exists. BUT there are people who cannot be clearly assigned to either, but that doesn't change the definition. And unfortunately it doesn't go by personal choice. Life sucks, we must accept our biology.
Woman (and man) as terms are evolving in their use to mean "the roles we expect people to fill based on their sex".
You might disagree with this evolution of the language, by all means, I am not the arbiter of how language should change.
But I do believe saying a word has a fixed, unchanging definition (and adding that your definition is the only correct one) is not a useful position to hold. I believe that even if you disagree with the use, you should acknowledge that a significant number of people have different definitions from you.
I agree that you shouldn't treat word definitions as fixed. That being said, I believe that people who have been using "woman" to mean "adult female human" their entire lives but can no longer do this while having their meaning understood have a legitimate grievance.
> Woman (and man) as terms are evolving in their use to mean "the roles we expect people to fill based on their sex".
It is for example by no means universal that we do expect people of a certain sex to fulfil a certain role. And many people explicitly reject that definition of gender for themselves because they have no intention of fulfilling the role. For these people to then be told that it is the definitional meaning of their gender identity seems... no better than telling trans people they aren't the gender they identify as.
Of course, you are correct that this usage implies gender varies based on location, culture, context, time, etc.
In fact, this is why it's so useful to have a term for the idea that what's "feminine" in Saudi Arabia is not the same as what's feminine in Inuit culture.
I believe that people should be able to evaluate the gender roles of where they are and accept, reject, or define them. If a cis woman wants to shave her head, get buff, wear flannel, get into fights, and call herself a woman then awesome. She's rejected the "traditional" gender roles for herself and made her own way.
I would never tell someone the way they experience their own gender is wrong. But I think it's absolutely reasonable to discuss generalizations about gender roles in context and invite people to think about whether they feel like they identify with that role or not.
When definitions change organically over long periods of time, due to the masses of people concluding they like the new definition better, that's one thing. It may be disruptive but it's usually a slow process so there's plenty of time to adjust.
But here it's a small minority of exceptionally aggressive people with nothing better to do, trying to change language by forceful tactics. They need to receive strong pushback and possibly exclusion. Words exist purely to communicate, they have no other purpose. Once bored over-educated people are allowed to start redefining the language it's open season and they won't ever stop. See: newspeak, inspired by the Soviet Union. Given your username you should know all about that.
This verbal game-playing has already caused immense damage with the effort to redefine words like racism to mean "discrimination based on skin color that's bad unless it's against white people", an effort that now means accusations of racism no longer carry any weight. Ditto for the attempt to redefine fascism to mean "anything that isn't far left". Words have meanings and people may not simply try to blow their way through to a new meaning by viciously attacking everyone who uses the normal definition until they concede through exhaustion. It's anti-social behavior to do that regardless of whether you like the idea or not. Come up with new words if you care so much.
Do you believe that's what I'm doing? Are my comments "exceptionally aggressive"?
I'd like to think I'm rather the opposite - firm in my convictions but willing to walk anyone through my reasoning. You may not agree with my conclusions and you may walk away thinking I'm out of touch.
But I feel I'm watching a situation where both sides are painting with over broad brushes - you accuse everyone of being exceptionally aggressive, many folks in my camp accuse everyone of being a bigot. It's the same pattern, imo, and we'd get a lot farther if we all avoided such generalizations. (Imo)
No, see my other comment. You're doing fine - same as in the other thread, I'm making a general comment about the notion of language "evolving". Evolution is a natural and emergent phenomena. In this case the language is not evolving so much as being forced into strange new forms through a kind of epistemic eugenics programme.
But let me ask, do you really argue that the people arguing that women shouldn't be called women, are not exceptionally aggressive? These are people who routinely throw around accusations of "phobias" and "isms", publicly demand people be fired and often succeed for using language in ways that are entirely normal, routinely destroy people's entire lives overnight and are widely regarded as people you want to stay away from at all costs. There are views being expressed in this thread that are just flat out crazy, like the idea that if you go on a date with someone you should immediately ask them what genitals they have as a matter of course and if you don't and are then caught by surprise, the problem is you!
"you accuse everyone of being exceptionally aggressive, many folks in my camp accuse everyone of being a bigot"
That's exactly the point. Do you see the connection here? Accusing everyone of being a bigot is exceptionally aggressive behavior. There isn't some equivalence here. People who engage in those tactics will be described as aggressive as a consequence, they can't then say "well I think you're a bigot so we're even", that's not how it works. Aggression is about concrete, objective acts.
Very true, but what was claimed in the comment you replied to is the current scientific position, has been for some time, and hasn't changed. The idea that mammalian zoology will suddenly find a third sex at any point in the future also seems fanciful, regardless of any theoretical possibility that it could change.
Women and men can still be "real" in the sense of being strongly correlated trait clusters. And indeed, these are the only two clusters of significance.
Tens or hundreds of millions of people are trans or non-binary. While I agree that there are two primary clusters, I strongly object to the idea that so many lives are of no significance.
That's about an order of magnitude higher than what I would expect (note that the trans and non binary rates are much higher in the West likely due to different chemical exposure).
klinefelter males are still males. Turner syndrome women are still women. Chromosomal abnormalities are not separate genders. Otherwise Downs syndrome would be its own gender.
All chromosomes are passed down through sexual reproduction. Chromosomal aberration, of sex chromosome or not, does not result in people of a different sex. Chromosomal aberration of sex chromosomes often results in underdeveloped sex organs and infertility, but a wan with Turner syndrome still has a uterus. XXY and XYY boys are still have penises. These are not different genders.
> In anisogamety, an individual's sex condition coincides with the type of gametes it produces; male if it produces male gametes exclusively, female if it only produces female gametes, and hermaphrodite if simultaneously or at different times
Cambridge University Press
The Biology of Reproduction
I am glad I am not alone in noticing this. The number of bad takes on HN regarding gender issues is grand and mighty.
Even the belief that “trans-ness” is something new or “modern” is erasure and possibly even revisionism [1], to claim that there isn’t even science on this is absurd as the topic has been studied since Freud.
The worst of all is that the perpetrators of the bigotry end up causing mass hysteria and reactionary measures that actually harm innocent people. People like any of us who just happened to draw a bad card at birth. Why is it this difficult to show compassion? We show compassion for rarer diseases. Why is it this difficult for people to imagine that they could have been in the shows of the people they spill vitriol against?
Occam’s razor says the dehumanisation employed by Fox and the likes is the cause. Dehumanisation has always been used to justify atrocities and attacks since the Dawn of time. We should have been better at this point.
> Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4,500 years ago document priests known as gala who may have been transgender. Likely depictions occur in art around the Mediterranean from 9,000 to 3,700 years ago. In Ancient Greece, Phrygia, and Rome, there were galli priests that some scholars believe to have been trans women. Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery, and in the modern day has been seen as a trans figure. Hijras on the Indian subcontinent and kathoeys in Thailand have formed trans-feminine third gender social and spiritual communities since ancient times, with their presence documented for thousands of years in texts which also mention trans male figures. Today, at least half a million hijras live in India and another half million in Bangladesh, legally recognized as a third gender, and many trans people are accepted in Thailand. In Arabia, khanith today (like earlier mukhannathun) fulfill a third gender role attested since the AD 600s. In Africa, many societies have traditional roles for trans women and trans men, some of which survive in the modern era. In the Americas prior to European colonization, as well as in some contemporary North American Indigenous cultures, there are social and ceremonial roles for third gender people, or those whose gender expression transforms, such as the Navajo nádleehi or the Zuni lhamana.
> In the Middle Ages, accounts around Europe document transgender people. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus's lament for being born a man instead of a woman has been seen as an early account of gender dysphoria. Eleanor Rykener, a male-bodied Briton arrested in 1394 while living and doing sex work dressed as a woman, has been seen as a trans woman. In the Balkans since the 1400s, female-assigned people have transitioned to live as men called sworn virgins. In Japan, accounts of trans people go back to the Edo period. In Indonesia, there are millions of trans-/third-gender waria, and the bugis of Sulawesi recognize five genders. In Oceania, trans-/third-gender roles like the akava'ine, fa'afafine and fakaleiti exist among the Cook Island Maori, Samoans, and Tongans.
> In colonial America, Thomas(ine) Hall in the 1600s adopted clothes and roles of both men and women, while in 1776 the genderless Public Universal Friend refused both birth name and gendered pronouns. During the 1800s, some people began new lives as men and served in the military, including Albert Cashier and James Barry, or otherwise transitioned, like Joseph Lobdell; trans women like Frances Thompson also transitioned. In 1895, trans autobiographer Jennie June and others organized the Cercle Hermaphroditos; in the 1900s, musician Billy Tipton lived as a man, while Lucy Hicks Anderson was supported by her parents and community in being a woman.
There’s so much evidence in support of trans people that one needs only to ask with honesty and be ready to adjust their views. The fact that a community that supposedly prides itself on rationality, and open mindedness is consistently unable to be rational and open minded is beyond me.
The GP comment has been fluctuating in upvotes and downvotes, often getting massively up or down voted in the span of minutes.
It wouldn’t surprise me if people downvoted some of my other responses here on the basis of this comment. In fact I have seen multiple comments downvoted in a very short timespan.
Yes, I'm referring to several groups of people - trans men who were born women, intersex people who may have been assigned man or woman, non-binary/queer/agender people who were born with a functional uterus.
All three of those groups might not be women. They may identify as female, but not women. Or they may not identify as female.
Language is evolving and not settled at all, but there's a movement to separate the concepts of "man" and "male". For example, we can probably agree that Bruce Willis is manlier than PeeWee Herman. But they are both male. Manliness, how much a "man" someone is, is a huge spectrum and it's socially defined. Likewise, how "womanly" someone is is a spectrum, and also cultural.
By separating the concepts of man from male, and woman from female, we can discuss how womanly or manly someone is, and what our societies expect from the roles of women and men.
I find it useful. Others have strong aversions to even discussing the concept. I'm happy to answer further questions!
> Manliness, how much a "man" someone is, is a huge spectrum and it's socially defined. Likewise, how "womanly" someone is is a spectrum, and also cultural.
This doesn't seem to be anything new. Go back 100 years, or more, there were manly women and effeminate men.
I was reading a science-fiction book [0], where they refer to the biological sex as being a manform or a womanform, but the personal articles are the indication of the person gender, either man, woman, or neutral. My own native language is genderless, so unless you precise the sex or other biological attributes, there's no way to determine if you're speaking of a male or a female.
I thought the male/female dichotomy was the one meant to be separated from matters of identity, and simply be a biology based designation. I understand identifying as man or woman or neither is a self determined social designation; but how can someone claim that they are not female if they have two X chromosomes?
Some folks who identify as women might not identify as female. This might be true even for cisgender women in rare cases. An infertile XY person may be born with female genitalia in rare cases, and be raised as a woman only to discover later in life they have the typically male chromosomes.
These sets of people are small, but non zero. It's probably safe to say nearly all XX people identify as female.
"Woman" is indeed a cultural category, but it's a category based on biology. If you wish to bleed some new ideology into this category space, you are going to find that people will be resistant to the redefining of language. While things may not be binary, they are certainly bimodal.
I agree that this is the goal. And a worthy one. However, I think a lot of the controversy around self-identity centric models of gender is that they don't achieve that goal. They don't allow people to talk about the physical aspects of sex, which is something that lots people want to do. And they redefine gender in such a way that many people will feel like they no longer self-identify as the gender they identified as their entire lives.
We always have an obligation to design society to accommodate everyone, not just the majority. Otherwise, with your line of reasoning, you might as well repeal the ADA, do away with ethical AI considerations to enable equal processing of richer skin tones, etc.
Society isn't designed. It emerges spontaneously over time due to the beliefs and behaviors of everyone, and it's literally impossible to "design society to accommodate everyone."
I'm 6'3" and I wish plane seats were designed with me in mind, but they aren't. My short wife wishes countertops were usually built higher, but they aren't.
I think children are treated very poorly in our society and I've homeschooled my children to allow them to exert more agency over their lives. I'm fortunate to live in the US where this is legal, but in most of the world it isn't. Other cultures believe that they should dictate that children's time be spent according to adults' wishes. How can both be accommodated?
One of the great accomplishments of industrialization is that shoes became mass produced cheaply, rather than expensive one-offs handmade by a cobbler. The downside, of course, is that mass produced shoes come in standard sizes, and too bad for you if your feet don't work in them (mine don't).
Why split society into a zero-sum war of factions by declaring that society should be organized around the majority, rather than attempting to accommodate as many people as possible?
Biology did that. Society is recognizing it, and only recently at that, by giving women sex-based rights.
> by declaring that society should be organized around the majority, rather than attempting to accommodate as many people as possible?
The needs of X vs the needs of Y.
Females need single-sex spaces to avoid violence and rape. Males do not need to be in female single-sex spaces. Needs trump wants.
> zero-sum war of
Many things are zero sum. A single-sex space is only useful if it remains single-sex. A single male rapist can traumatize and attack an entire rape shelter of female victims.
Women's rights don't matter if "woman" means whatever anyone else wants.
I think concerns about single-sex spaces are very understandable. It's a sensitive topic and should be handled as such. But with the language on a pregnancy website I think we could accommodate everyone. In the root comment I suggested different materials for cis women and trans men.
An interesting argument. Quantum physics does a better job of explaining the universe, that’s why we use it.
Changing common language for the sole purpose of being an “ally” to some ultra small minority only serves to confuse. Quite a dumb thing to do when the best possible effect is sparing a few hurt feelings.
99% of the people who support this nonsense aren’t in the affected group and are simply trying to earn “cool points” via virtue signaling.
I'm non binary. When people use the correct pronouns, understand that I prefer a gender neutral restroom, and ensure that I'm represented in surveys, it helps me feel included.
This allyship has a material, positive benefit on my life beyond just "feelings".
Trans and non binary people represent somewhere around 1-3% of people. (Some studies push it up to about 5%, others closer to 0.5%)
This makes trans and non binary folks about as frequent as wheelchair users or people with red hair. That's millions of people in America, and it's enough people that most workplaces and schools will have trans and non binary people in them.
"designing after" would to me suggest solely focussing on, not also including. The same way that we didn't "design society after women" when they got voting rights.
Well, listen, as Eleanor Roosevelt has said, "no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I think it incredibly disingenuous to equate a literal debate about appropriate medical terminology around childbirth to anything less than that.
I support trans rights; what I dont support is the intellectual terrorism that underlies the notion that just because someone has a legitimate difference of opinion on appropriate language use, they are "treat[ing] people like shit" or worse.
But with that you lose the definition of "woman". What is a woman then? Without circling back (and using the word "woman" in the definition), you cannot define what a woman is anymore.
Yup. That's why "pregnant person" is used instead as a descriptor; it is a condition that a person experiences, it does not refer to extraneous factors like gender identification.
If you read that article and came away with the idea that you should hate or be violent towards trans people, then you are searching for hatred where it doesn't exist.
A woman expressing her opinion that "chest-feeding" and "birthing persons" are terms obnoxious to her is not hatred.
It seems presumptuous for males to pressure or shame females for wanting to recognize biology and single-sex rights. They only recently won them after a hard-fought battle and obviously they need them; violent sex crimes are overwhelmingly committed by males, and overwhelmingly against females (women) and children.
I read this whole article, and I find the entire premise... strange. It seems like she feels like all of this language is to pretend "biological males" can have babies, in fact she even says at one point:
> And if being a trans-inclusive feminist means re-embracing classic female self-negation to make biological men happy (didn’t we all agree this was bad decades ago?), then I’ll gladly trade in my feminist card so long as I can stop pretending that Lia Thomas is a feminist hero.
Yet it seems pretty clear it's the opposite. The point of not inherently assuming pregnant people are women is to avoid misgendering trans men who happen to be pregnant and calling them women. Given that she goes out of her way to indicate her support for the trans community, it seems like she'd also agree that trans-men should indeed be called men and not women.
There's plenty I can get behind in the article, plain language is almost always easier to understand than weird synonyms, and I don't think that a trans man is going to struggle with the fact that they will indeed have to give birth through their vagina, but the entire article seems to be railing against a pretense that isn't happening.
Regardless of whether one agrees with it or not, the point is to include trans men, because they think that they're better described as men. If trans women were to get pregnant by some not yet existing medical procedure, why would they complain about being called women?
"Then why are they getting pregnant and having children?"
Because human being often desire to reproduce.
"At least for the time they are pregnant and giving I will consider them to be women."
Regardless of what you consider, trans men consider themselves men. Their circumstances and medical needs aren't the same since they typically take testosterone and look like average men.
Another reason I don't think your wording works is that the majority consider the concepts of "man" and "woman" to be permanent things.
I actually wasn't making any claims beyond noting that the author appeared to make an incorrect assumption about why people were using these terms, but when you put it that way...
Yes actually. Precision in language, especially when talking medical has significant value.
Law is often not just. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to fix the injustices.
As for internet articles somehow not being in a medical context, she literally talks about going to them to try to figure out if she has a life threatening condition or a fart. If that's not "medical" I don't know what is.
I don't understand the table in this article which refers to replacement words for e.g. "penis" or "breast". My first instinct is to think that it must obviously be some sort of parody.
I am male. I have a penis and no breasts. If I were to transition into being a woman, I assume that would involve me having breasts and a vagina (in the final state).
At some point in the process I imagine that I would have some set of physical attributes that don't correspond neatly into being either e.g. a "penis" or a "vagina", unless it's a one and done operation. At that point using either term would be inaccurate, but the terms themselves would not be inaccurate.
At no point in that process would any of the words "penis", "vagina", "chest", "breast" etc cause me offence. They quite obviously are good descriptors, both for myself (past, present and future) and for others.
What am I missing? Why do the terms need to be replaced, what is gained by doing so?
I think the original reasoning went like this. When you refer to a black person standing by a tree, it is preferable to say "That guy in a blue shirt/in glasses" and omit the skin color.
Similarly here, you omit the names of body parts that could be used to identify the biological sex and therefore infer the gender of the person you refer to. But I'm not convinced it's actually beneficial to the people in question.
Why is using a defining characteristic of someone offensive in and of itself? If you're in Asia you might say "that white guy over there" because it's the most easily recognized characteristic when picking a person out. If you're in a minority, no matter the characteristic, it's a matter of convenience for others to use it to denote you. The priest, the tall woman, the handicapped person, etc...
1. Some people don't want to be racist, so they over correct. That's OK, but we can also take a step back in some cases eg "actually acknowledging race is not racist, let's stop avoiding it all costs".
2. Some people like to be virtuous and tell others what they can think and say. It's a powerful position. So they spend their time telling others what is OK or not to say, and find reasons to be outraged.
Not that we've solved racism: there's still lots of violence and re-appearance of racist ideologies. But we should fight those, not the "micro-agressions" which just create fights between people who could be OK the same side.
But, to use your analogy there, the table is simply replacing "myopic person" with "person who wears glasses". The terms are specifically being used to refer to the same things, just with some sort of bizarre euphemism for basic terminology.
It feels like saying "the colour at the low energy end of the spectrum" instead of "red". Are people offended by the mere utterance of the word "breast"?
Why doesn’t it stand up? The best supported theory (like theory of gravity theory) is that one’s gender is innate and unchangeable. Since we’re on a programming forum it’s read-only human firmware.
So Elliot Page was born a man but assigned female at birth. Eventually he realized that the pain and wrongness he’d been feeling his whole life was dysphoria. So he changed his name to something that suited him better.
Okay, so why then don’t we say that Elliot Page was in Inception but back then he went by Ellen? Why the rewriting history? We don’t do that for changing last names in marriage. Well because it’s a kindnesses for trans people. A huge number of them have extremely painful and negative associations with their deadname and so we backdate it so they can experience their past in a way that doesn’t bring up trauma. It’s similar to why when taking to a trans person you would probably edit a quotation you’re relaying that misgenders them.
If a man had a crush on Page 10 years ago, does that mean he was attracted to a man? If a lesbian had a crush on Page 10 years ago, does that mean she was attracted to a man?
This isn’t a gotcha. No neither the man nor the woman was attracted to a man because what they were attracted to was their internal perception of Elliot which was a woman in their heads.
If I draw a person you assume to be a woman based on their appearance and you’re attracted to them I can’t be like “haha he was actually a man your gay now.” That’s stupid and applies exactly the same to real life people.
If you’re attracted to someone because you thought they were kind and it turns out they were actually mean people don’t go, “see what you’re really attracted to is mean people.” No you were just attracted to the person you thought they were.
I like your comparison to a mean person. But the true analogy is if someone is attracted to a person they know in 2010 who is a jerk at that time. Then the person becomes nice 10 years later. At that time the person is not attracted to the new personality. But the person says "I identify as a person who has always been nice, and you liked me 10 years ago, so therefore you like nice people."
That doesn't add up, at least for me. Especially if you're not allowed to say that the person used to be mean since due to their current self-identification as nice.
"A huge number of them have extremely painful and negative associations with their deadname and so we backdate it so they can experience their past in a way that doesn’t bring up trauma."
Society really should not have to pretend they were never a woman just to protect a person's feelings. And why is acknowledging that they used to be a woman be so horrible? They have their own memories of their life before transitioning.
Uhh I meant backdating his name. He was never a woman that’s like the whole point.
So you’re asking why bringing up that he used to be perceived as and treated as a woman which gave him gender dysphoria — a feeling so bad that it causes 80% of trans people to seriously consider taking their own like and 40% of people to actually try — horrible?
You being up a good point about memories. But memories are mutable, first person, and we’re really bad at remembering how our bodies felt at different times so most of his memories probably feature him as he is now.
Your comment here pretty much hits on the crux of the issue.
According to your ideology, he never was a woman.
But... he was. He was a baby girl, a teenage girl, an adult woman, all or at least most of that whilst I assume suffering dysphoria. He is now an adult man who, unfortunately, likely still doesn't feel "complete".
Grandpa suffered trauma during the war. So we don't bring up the war, at least in his presence. We don't pretend that he never served. You can be sensitive about history without rewriting it, we do it for everything else.
Why does this argument give trans men short shrift? Apart from saying she dated trans men, their concerns aren’t even discussed, and all the blame for the change in language is placed on ‘biological men.’
Is the experience of being a trans man largely that other people don’t even believe you exist?
> Is the experience of being a trans man largely that other people don’t even believe you exist?
10000% yes. Once you look for it you can’t unsee the amount of public discourse that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever if you acknowledge that trans men exist.
Trans men are typically former lesbians, and the existence of lesbians have also been largely ignored in society. I don’t think this is anyone’s fault—I think lesbians naturally try to keep themselves out of the limelight.
If you were in online techie chat communities since at least "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", you might think at least 10% of people were trans.
I figured the disproportionate representation was because it was easier to "pass" online, and/or easier to find acceptance.
And other people came to just treat them as people.
We also learned, from daily casual conversations, that being trans (like being gay, or other minority) can be really, really rough. Partly because the Real World wasn't nearly as accepting. Whether it's strangers who flip out and try to physically harm them, employers who don't want to hire them, or their own families.
To fix this, I think the Real World will have to swing the pendulum a bit, while everyone figures out how to be accepting and supportive.
I don't know what the answers are, but I assume some mistakes will be made, some of the loudest people will turn out to be mistaken, there will be some miscommunication as everyone gets to the same baseline understanding, some people will try with the best of intentions but do things that they later see as silly and counterproductive, a lot of people will have the rough right ideas and uncertainty but will be drowned out, etc.
Eventually, we'll hit critical masses of understanding, find the right notes and conventions, etc., and we'll collectively have advanced as people.
I suspect that the biggest risk in the figuring-out period in the US is actually politicians promoting news calculated to cause backlash. Consider a political operator/outlet a few years ago that decides to make the public bathroom sex/gender access (and spinning it in an awful way) a big news story right before elections. I could be mistaken, but I thought at the time that an actual trans rights activist would've been making a grave error to pick just before elections to make their big media push -- I didn't see it getting concessions from Democrats looking for the transgender vote nor generating much sympathetic understanding, but I did see it riling up some Republican voters, to get to the polls over "culture war".
We've come so far with accepting people as people, and supporting people how they need. Don't get discouraged from keeping doing that, by learning periods and malicious actors.
Because my response is to how I think the original piece would be picked up.
I think people aren't going to read that piece and think "let's only consider this one thing, in isolation, and not consider the context in which this is happening".
> If you were in online techie chat communities since at least "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", you might think at least 10% of people were trans.
The actual number is very hard to measure. Two explanations for this off the top of my head are:
1) Some people will decline to publicly identify as trans for safety reasons. The safer it gets to be out as trans, even in pockets of the US, the more people will. (See the infamous graph of left-handedness over time.[1])
2) Many people aren't aware that what they've experienced lines up with trans identity or gender dysphoria until they encounter someone else who's experienced the same thing (whether in person or in the media).
Much as with LGB folks, there's a generational trend where younger folks are more likely to identify as trans and/or nonbinary. In a recent Pew Research survey[1], 5.1% of people from ages 18-29% identify that way; 1.6% of those 30-49; and 0.3% of those 50+.
> 2) Many people aren't aware that what they've experienced lines up with trans identity or gender dysphoria until they encounter someone else who's experienced the same thing (whether in person or in the media).
This is probably true. But I rather suspect that the reverse is also true. Many trans people don't realise that their feelings and experiences line up with lots of people who are happily cis-identifying (but were perhaps raised in an environment that was more accepting of gender-nonconformity).
I don't doubt it! I personally spent a long time trying to figure out if I was really a trans woman or simply an effeminate man, and believe me, things would have been easier (though not easy) and a lot less expensive if I were the latter. Also, as someone who experienced bullying in grade school for appearing to be an effeminate cis boy, I'm sure that a more accepting environment benefits everyone.
> trying to figure out if I was really a trans woman or simply an effeminate man
As someone who has also thought about this a lot, I'd be interested in what conclusion you came to about what the difference is between a trans woman and an effeminate man. The only differences I have been able to come up with are:
1. Dysphoria specifically about the body and/or a desire to change one's body
2. Different views on what gender is (i.e. if you believe gender is performative then you might consider yourself to be a woman whereas someone else with the same personal experience of gender but who views gender as physical might consider themselves to be a man).
Based on you saying deciding you are trans has been expensive, I'm guessing you might fall into category 1? But I'd be particularly interested if you have in mind any differentiating factors that aren't on my list.
Do you suppose there is an opposite overcount from people that think or say they might be trans? Some people may find it exceptionally convenient to their political and social standing.
One major issue is that you don’t see the same thing for men. From the NYTimes: “In Chicago, a New Approach to Gay and Bisexual Men With Prostate Cancer.”
I don't understand how your link relates to the topic, but a similar concept in sexual health is the use of the phrase "men who have sex with men" because they have specific health needs but if you ask them to tick a box that says "homosexual" or "gay" then some of them won't identify with those terms.
Because when you accept idea that sex is social construct, you cannot explain what is a women or man. I guess it wouldn't be possible to push this ideology without social media and different way of communication in our society.
Virtual world easily spread tribalism that could be around most ridiculous things we can think of, because of lack of confrontation with reality. IRL there would be laughing, denial, fear, explanation why those ideas are nonsense... But all of that is not there if you lock yourself in bubble of virtual people that share same ridiculous ideas. Of course they will eventually dominate field where they invest most of their time - internet.
We know from history (or China, Russia, North Korea) what was a purpose of control peoples tongue and what they should think about. We should learn from it. I still believe that this ideology is pushed by small, very loudly screaming group of people. Majority don't care.
> when you accept idea that sex is social construct
I can’t accept something wrong though. Sex is not a social construct, gender is.
Bearing a child is something exclusively reserved to the female sex, no matter what their preferred gender is. Articles related to pregnancy should not talk about « internal gonades » instead of « ovaries » to be more inclusive. You might identify as a a gender other than female, if your sex is female, you have ovaries, period. It doesn’t invalidate the gender in any way. And ironically it becomes a bit more exclusive of 99% of the female population which is not familiar with this newspeak.
It is supported by the fact that the brain shows dimorphism which can go wrong in many ways due to stressors, environment or genetic factors and therefore alter neurotypical development .
You can apply that basically on anything. Its a part of our life to deal with problems.
I'm sure a lot of people well have damaged neurotypical development if someone, who is clearly "he" would eventually let everyone around call him "she" or whatever. If gender is social construct we are "it". Sorry, I'm not playing this game, it is quite boring actually.
> To the person, what they perceive as their gender is a very real thing
To a schizophrenic, their delusions are very real. At a what point, when reality does not match a person's perceptions, do we judge their perceptions to be delusion, hallucination, or some other mental illness?
I don't know the answer to that question. There is probably not a clear dividing line, sort of like the heliopause at the edge of our solar system. But to declare these things as hard, clear facts is not correct.
> transsexuals would still opt to transition
We should be very clear about the results of transitioning. It does not result in female anatomy by an regular definition. It is a physical state that imitates the <female/male> anatomy, very superficially, with long term health consequences and perpetual maintenance. I suspect that this terminal state does not achieve the goals of trans folks, and is likely a major source of the ongoing emotional disturbance so commonly observed.
> But to declare these things as hard, clear facts is not correct.
Given the scientific evidence from fMRI, and post-partum biopsies of their brain, those things are very much real. They do not misinterpret reality.
Schizophrenic people do misinterpret reality, whereas transsexuals do not. Had transsexuals misinterpreted reality, they would not experience GID or Gender Dysphoria, nor would reality ie their sex, be a stressor.
> We should be very clear about the results of transitioning.
People are very clear about the results and consequences of transitioning, people don't do it on a whim, and fyi, transitioning is a very long and arduous process. It does not happen over a day; over a week; a month; or even a single year. The person chooses to walk that path every single day, and at least in Europe, they are well aware of both the consequences and the results.
> It does not result in female anatomy by an regular definition. It is a physical stake that imitates the <female/male> anatomy, very superficially, with long term health consequences and perpetual maintenance
Nobody is claiming it provides the person with a uterus, ovaries, or - if the person has transitioned into adulthood - skeletal structure.
On the other hand, it has very real changes; from brain region activations, taste, muscle tissue change, skin change, and a lot more. To claim that it does nothing would imply that it is needless, had it been needless, people wouldn't be fighting for better coverage, wouldn't ask for treatment, and on and on.
> I suspect that this terminal state does not achieve the goals of trans folks,
Sorry but at this point you are imposing your beliefs to argue for the experiences of other people, millions of them who contradict yours. At this point, it is good to listen carefully with the intent to learn over claiming what you believe is the truth.
> is likely a major source of the ongoing emotional disturbance so commonly observed.
Transition is a source of emotional disturbance when the person is not accepted, in fact, discrimination in workplace, housing, along with overall lack of acceptance from the broader society is the main source of stress and the main cause of detransition.
In-fact, people who transition early pass significantly easier, have the same outcomes as cis people, and get to live a happy life, in fact over 98% of people who transition early do not detransition. That's a big super-majority.
I recommend spending more time with actual trans people and being more empathetic towards people whose shoes you can not walk in.
> Also congrats to all the people with XX chromosomes who are infertile and are now men.
You’ll notice I didn’t define the female sex as the ability to get pregnant, nor that all of them can or want, just that it’s reserved to the female sex.
You guys always do the « reverse argument trick » where you try to put words in the mouth of your victim. It’s more obvious than you think it is.
> Pour one out for all the women who’ve had oophorectomies due to medical complications or women born with vaginal agenesis and androgen insensitivity syndrome.
If you want to think of all the exceptions you cannot ever say anything. I’ll stick to the 90+% of humanity.
The fact is, having ovaries is reserved to people of the female sex, which once again doesn’t mean all females (sex) have ovaries because of all you say. Ok, except for that one rare syndrome where men can sometimes develop ovaries, but again, we can’t possibly consider all the cases every time we speak if it means we can’t properly talk about the vast majority of the world population.
I don’t know who “you guys” refers to but I assure you whatever it is I’m not a member.
Your trick is ignoring the stronger argument which is it’s very likely that a trans woman will get pregnant after a uterus transplant at some point during our lifetime.
> If you want to think of all the exceptions you cannot ever say anything
No you can’t say what you’re trying to force. I can say without worrying about any exceptions that the set of people who can get pregnant includes men, women, and non-binary people.
> we can’t possibly consider all the cases every time we speak if it means we can’t…
use silly biological arguments that aren’t even true for no purpose except to invalidate trans people who by current estimates are 1 in 100 people.
> the stronger argument which is it’s very likely that a trans woman will get pregnant after a uterus transplant
It seems that taking a uterus, a female organ, and putting it into a male and him "giving birth" would prove the difference between the sexes. Without that uterus he wasn't going anywhere.
Look I completely agree with you. But people in this thread keep making pointless biological arguments with the motivated goal of invalidating trans people. And my hope that pointing out that the world is weirder than people assume at the biological level (like you can have a uterus where the cells are all XY) would make people realize that being trans is actually one of the less weird phenomenon that occurs in humans. Trans women aren’t women because maybe one day with a transplant they will be able to give birth, they’re women because they experience distress and wrongness when treated as a man but it’s alleviated when treated as a woman.
It wound be easier to argue that this is just some kind of delusion if cis people didn’t also experience it when treated as the opposite gender and it happens about 1 in 100 people.
> people in this thread [...] the motivated goal of invalidating trans people.
Not the goal of invalidating, but mainly because I wouldn't use valid/invalid language. When I disagree with a devout catholic I'm not invalidating their beliefs - even when I argue that their god probably doesn't exist.
My interests in identity-based arguments are the rights-erosion I see going on. Females need, and have fought doggedly to achieve, sex-based rights such as single-sex spaces, matching funding, etc.
How can those rights be respected and dangers avoided if men can declare themselves women? Even leaving aside "actual trans women", what about all the abusive non-trans males who'll use the loophole?
> Trans women aren’t women because [X], they’re women
They aren't though.
You seem to be saying "therefore it is imperative that we treat them as if they are the sex they claim" and that's another question, and perhaps worth debate, but what would the end be? Treat them the same all the way into women's prisons? (Trans women have a higher sex criminality than the average male prisoner by a factor of four, and most are still sexually intact and functional as males.)
I feel that this sort of breathless panic to protect trans people ignores that the proposed solution totally demolishes the single-sex protections that nearly half the planet enjoys, and that keep our children safe.
Perhaps we could revisit this with a goal of maintaining zero additional risk to women over the status quo, but otherwise it seems like it's a non-starter because it has to come at the expense of women.
> they experience distress and wrongness when treated as a man but it’s alleviated when treated as a woman.
There definitely are some people who chafe at the gender expectations they perceive others (rightly or wrongly) having for them. Like a girl who doesn't like dresses and being proper or whatever. I believe the solution is to remove these expectations, not to tell that girl that the source of her angst is that she's a boy in a girl's boy, but to actually help her understand the issues of growing up. She can't actually be a boy but she can be happy as a girl.
How is this not like anorexia, where normal teen issues contagiously coalesced into common symptoms across a large area? Their underlying issues were real, but the expression (that they were fat and the solution was to lose weight) was manufactured collectively by our society and was near impossible to beat in an individual. Anorexia remains incredibly rare outside of American media influence.
Now that same angst seems to be channeled into other externally manufactured solutions, such as being in the wrong body. Despite claims of indigenous third-gender, trans is a modern western phenomenon. A product of social contagion.
In both cases the correct answer seems to be to discuss and treat the underlying issues and conditions before assuming that someone's body is broken and needs sexual modification and lifelong medicalization.
> Your trick is ignoring the stronger argument which is it's very likely that a trans woman will get pregnant after a uterus transplant at some point during our lifetime.
Harvesting the uterus of a woman and hosting it inside a man does not make him a member of a female sex.
Even if a womb was lab-grown somehow, rather than poached, it's highly unlikely his body would be compatible with pregnancy. And there would be massive ethical concerns in performing this experiment, given that this is an attempt to artificially create and grow a new human life in a body fundamentally unsuited to this task.
Women who’ve had their ovaries removed? 200k per year.
Women who’ve had their uteruses removed? 400k per year.
Women born without a uterus? 1 in 4500 or about 900k women in the world.
Women who are born without a uterus and ovaries? About 7% of those born without a uterus so 63k women worldwide.
But you know what the definition destroying counter evidence is? That if current estimates are accurate that about 1 in 100 people are trans. If trans people were rarer it would be easier to argue that they should just be an asterisk.
Edit: For my own curiosity I wanted to see if being trans would qualify as a rare disease and apparently the FDA’s threshold is 1 in 200k.
You missed my point. Maybe I didn't make it clear. These are all things that happen to women (and can only happen to women). You have to be born with a uterus in order to have it removed. Somehow, individuals born without a uterus and/or ovaries are recognized as women/female in whatever source it is you're not citing.
Let be very clear, I'm not advocating against trans people. On the contrary, I think all people who aren't hurting others are deserving of respect and dignity within the limits of reason and the law of "your reach ends where my nose begins."
But that doesn't entitle them or anyone else to unilaterally (and with a strong authoritarian bent, I might add) change our language or to proclaim "Trans women are women." I would counter, "No. Trans women are trans women, and that's OK."
1% certainly doesn't strike me as definition destroying counter evidence. Again, not sure what your source is.
Who wrote that? Not me. That is a cynical attempt at zooming into a very specific feature as though it is defining. (Which the green apple vs. red apple fallacy actually helps demonstrate!) Basic common sense tells us that a woman is defined by many anatomical (and, consequently, behavioral) traits.
Let's look at the Wikipedia definition, which matches the definition that the vast majority of humanity understands and agrees with:
"...inherit a pair of X chromosomes.."
"...are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause..."
"...lack of a present, or functioning, SRY-gene on either one of the respective sex chromosomes..."
"...Female anatomy is distinguished from male anatomy by the female reproductive system, which includes the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, and vulva..."
"...a wider pelvis, broader hips, and larger breasts than an adult man..."
"...Women have significantly less facial and other body hair, have a higher body fat composition, and are on average shorter and less muscular than men..."
Conversely, we can say, quite clearly, that a person born with a penis, who then has the penis surgically refashioned into a "vagina", who has top surgery, and who undergoes significant hormone treatments clearly does not meet that definition.
This is a transparent, motivated attempt to erase the definition of woman.
Again, let me be CRYSTAL clear. Saying "trans woman != woman" is true and OK to say. It does NOT equate to saying trans women are bad and should be mistreated. To say, believe, or act on that is NOT OK.
Look, clearly you’ve made up your mind, there literally nothing I could say to you that would convince you that you’re wrong and that trans women are women and trans men are men.
So I don’t know why I’m bothering but here.
> clearly does not meet that definition.
Which is why the definition is being updated to include them. We discovered and are now socially recognizing a different kind of man and woman.
> Saying "trans woman != woman" is true
Your arguing something on a completely different plane than the actual discussion. It’s should we update the definition of men and women to include trans folks — why or why not? If I define good person as someone who doesn’t misgender trans people then you are NOT a good person and that’s okay to say. Do you see how meaningless that statement is?
> This is a transparent, motivated attempt to erase the definition of woman.
This is literally insane levels of conspiracy theory nonsense. There is no group of mustache twirling trans people who are out to erase the definition of man and woman. What end game are you possibly imagining for this made up group? Murhahaha we’ve updated the definition of men and women to include trans men and women and now… world domination?
> It does NOT equate to saying trans women are bad and should be mistreated.
Yes and that mistreatment is called “treating them in a manner different from a cisgender woman including but not limited to calling them
something other than women.”
> Trans women are trans women, and that's OK.
If you care this belief has a name and is called third gendering if you want something to Google.
> Which is why the definition is being updated to include them. We discovered and are now socially recognizing a different kind of man and woman.
Ah, but there is the problem. You've declared that the definition is changing. The majority of people are not on board with this, and yet you press ahead. This is where the authoritarianism of this movement emerges...
> If I define good person as someone who doesn’t misgender trans people then you are NOT a good person and that’s okay to say
There it is again. "I decided on a new definition. If you don't participate, you are a bad person." This is a cynical ploy to seize the moral high ground, but it is not actually accompanied by moral superiority.
> we’ve updated the definition of men and women to include trans men and women
Who is "we"? You belong to a tiny minority that has declared victory without the vast majority of English speakers consenting. Yes, changing the definition of "woman" hurts women.
> treating them in a manner different from a cisgender woman including but not limited to calling them something other than women.
You don't have the right to declare a new definition and then call other people bad for not agreeing. This, again, is the authoritarian problem with this movement. And, thus, it will fail.
You have a right to be treated with respect. You don't have a right to control or bulldoze other people. "Your reach ends where my nose beings."
"Trans woman" is the most apt descriptor of a trans woman. "Woman" is not. Trans women ARE different than biological women.
> You've declared that the definition is changing.
Well yeah because I’m a language descriptivist, not because I’m authoritarian. All words are subject to change at all times.
> There it is again. "I decided on a new definition. If you don't participate
Read that bit again. I’m pointing out the absurdity of that very statement. You say word should mean X, I say it should mean Y. The argument is not whether it does mean X or Y. That’s irrelevant and just leads us to taking past one another. The argument for trans women being women and meaning Y is the one that’s backed by the medical community.
> Who is "we"? You belong to a tiny minority that has declared victory.
Bold of you to assume I’m trans. I’m up in this thread because I do lgbt activism work and use the internet to workshop talking to people about lgbt issues.
Also trans people aren’t a tiny minority, 1 in 100 is small but not insignificant by any stretch.
> Yes, changing the definition of "woman" hurts women.
It most certainly doesn’t hurt me. Acknowledging that there are XX women and XY women changes absolutely nothing about the women’s issues I fight for. In fact trans women are marching right beside us on issues like abortion rights and access to birth control.
Genuinely curious, does changing the definition of man hurt men in your view?
> You don't have the right to declare a new definition
I’m not, misgendering trans people is mistreatment by the usual definition. What else would you call knowingly doing some that hurts someone else? And that hurt can be measured empirically, the biggest factor in the trans suicide rate is how accepted they are as their gender.
You can call fighting for the ability of trans folks to live their lives free of that harm authoritarian all you want but I can’t see how triggering a trans person’s dysphoria and trauma they were born with and had no choice or control over doesn’t make you a bad person if you do it on purpose.
> And, thus, it will fail.
Wishful thinking, I’m actually on the ground taking to people. The IRL opposition to trans people isn’t all that big and is vastly over represented on the internet and public discourse by politicians angling for clout. Your typical IRL conservative has no issue with trans people. Thanks to the success of the movement and a bunch of trans folks finally getting to come out it’s pretty rare for someone not to personally know anyone who’s trans. And that’s by far the biggest predictor of how accepting and supportive they are.
> Trans woman is the most apt descriptor of a trans woman. "Woman" is not.
If you’re not going to call them women then just call them men. It sounds less silly than “grape soda isn’t soda.”
Of course trans women are different from cis women. That’s why there’s different words for them. They’re both still women.
As am I. And modifying the definition of "woman" is not the act of a descriptivist. Maybe what you're saying is true if one lives in SF or Seattle, but over 1 billion people speak English. The vast majority of them do not use the words "woman/man" to include trans women/trans men. For example, in the Philippines, where 90+ million people speak English, the reality of and language for a third gender is widely accepted. But the inclusion of trans people in the definition of "man" and "woman" is not.
> I say it should mean Y
You say "should", not me. "Should" is not the word of a descriptivist. It is the word of a prescriptivist.
> The argument for trans women being women and meaning Y is the one that’s backed by the medical community.
For starters, if you're a descriptivist, then you don't believe that any one person or group decides what any word means. Instead, a descriptivist describes usage. What you're referring to is prescriptivism–i.e. that definitions are dictated to their users. Second, this is not settled even within the medical community.
> Bold of you to assume I’m trans
Where did I make that assumption? The tiny minority of which you are a member, and to which I refer, is the group of people that believe the word "women" includes trans women. Again, there are more than 1 billion English speakers in the world, and the vast majority do not share in this definition.
> misgendering trans people is mistreatment by the usual definition. What else would you call knowingly doing some that hurts someone else?
Describing physical reality with precision according to a shared vocabulary (aka "a language") is not immoral and it is not an act of violence. Thus, if someone's feelings are hurt by it, it is not wrong. Rather, perhaps we should think about why that person's feelings are injured by an accurate descriptor? Is it a personal problem? Is it a societal problem? Etc.
> I’m not (declaring a new definition)...You can call fighting for the ability of trans folks to live their lives free of that harm authoritarian
Advocating for trans people isn't the issue. That's great. Glad you're doing it. The issue is the desire to seize authority over something that doesn't belong to you: the English language. To do so is an authoritarian act. Again, there are over 1 billion English speakers, that vast majority of which do not agree with nor consent to this expanded definition of woman. This is not a descriptivist act. It is not a democratic act. It is an authoritarian act.
> Wishful thinking, I’m actually on the ground taking to people.
Sounds like you may be operating under significant selection bias. Also, you're conflating a resistance to the language you seek to change to dictate to "opposition to trans people." Those are not the same thing. I agree, most people don't have an opposition to trans people in principle. The resistance materializes as an effect of how and for what many trans activists advocate. Most of us agree that we should treat trans people with respect and dignity. However, we often do not agree with, for example, unilateral changes to our language or believing that health insurance should pay for reassignment surgeries and hormonal therapies.
The principle of "your reach ends where my nose begins" cuts both ways.
> If you’re not going to call them women then just call them men. It sounds less silly than “grape soda isn’t soda.”
This is a bad metaphor, similar to the green apples/red apples metaphor. A more apt metaphor would be "grape juice isn't soda, but it is a beverage". I.e. "a trans woman isn't a woman, but they are a human."
I feel like this has been a long journey but I think at this point I grok the fundamental differences.
- I know that what trans folks experience with dysphoria isn't "hurt feelings" and is a medical issue more akin to triggering someone's PTSD.
- I view the absolute bare minimum of what is required for acceptance of trans women is using their names, pronouns, treating them as you would cisgender women in all situations not directly related to medical care where chromosomal differences are relevant, recognizing dysphoria as a medical condition, and providing them access to the medically necessary healthcare of medical transition in the same manner as any other medical treatment.
If there was a treatment that could alter a trans person's brain chemistry so they would no longer feel dysphoria it would without question be deemed medically necessary and covered. I view medical transition as the same thing.
And if you oppose any of those things that is opposing trans people since every single one is fundamentally necessary for trans people to exist in society. I would think you mad if you tried to argue that a law banning two people of the same sex from having sex was not opposing gay people and that it was enough to simply view them as people instead of monsters.
- I view fighting for the usage of the word man and woman that is consistent with the medical community (yes I know you disagree with that bit) as convincing people to include trans men and women when using those words so that the meaning changes, not telling people that they have to. You are under no obligation to accept trans women, but in my view calling them women is a prerequisite to that.
It's great that you're now not shunning them from polite society, locking them up in mental institutions, or lynching them but that alone doesn't constitute acceptance. I view what you're doing the same way I would view someone who said they "accepted black people" but were insistent that they were "black people" not "people" because the overwhelming majority believed that "people" means humans of white skin.
Also lol at SF or Seattle. I live in a deep red state.
> there literally nothing I could say to you that would convince you that you’re wrong and that trans women are women and trans men are men.
All I saw you use is an argument that the impossibility of perfectly distinguishing between a male and a female meant that the question is unanswerable.
I'm not only concerned about actual trans women, but primarily men just saying they're trans women when caught in inappropriate places, so that argument isn't totally addressing my concerns but if you were to try to convince me that trans women were entirely women I'd expect it to include an attempted proof that they exhibit female pattern sex criminality.
Here's a thought experiment. Let's say you're somewhere where nobody has heard of gender, with a mixed-sex group of people. At a small distance you see a male walking by in a garment that is usually worn by a female. One of the females with you says "I'm glad that the changing norms now let a man wear what was once seen as female clothing!".
1) Do you say "You don't know that they aren't a woman!"?
2) Who's more progressive, you or her?
3) Who, if either of you, is creating a third gender category?
This seems to be a big hullabaloo about nothing. Language is a tool for communicating meaning; as long as the other person is understanding what you're saying then it's not that big a deal how the message was delivered. People get so offended over nothing. If some people don't want to use the words "mother" and "brestfeeding", so be it. I personally still use those terms because they feel right to me, and I don't plan on changing. But it doesn't bother me that other people are making the change.
If we just learned to communicate with each other and understand intent instead of getting so micro-aggrieved over how language is semantically used, we'd all be better off.
Indeed, literally no one is saying people can't use these words if they identify with them either, it's just about using the most inclusive terms in the general sense by professionals trying to communicate with broad groups that will include edge cases.
This isn't even a "gender" issue, saying something like "people with a uterus" when it is the most accurate term helps cis women who have had hysterectomies know it isn't relevant to them. Of course, we should always inspect the impact of words: (e.g: maybe some people won't know their biology to know if they have a uterus, so we should clarify for them if that's a potential case), but the goal of being accurate rather than just making assumptions based on gender is obviously reasonable and beneficial as a base idea.
> Language is a tool for communicating meaning; as long as the other person is understanding what you're saying then it's not that big a deal how the message was delivered. People get so offended over nothing.
Would you be okay if a new religion came along that started casually referring to non-believers as heathens, pagans, and infidels? And referring to believers as "the saved"? And if such language were enshrined into law, and you could lose your job if you refused to use it?
Obviously not because the intent and the message behind those words would be clear. They would be choosing those words because they want to discriminate against non-believers by branding them as inferior.
There is no good faith argument to be had in why a religion would choose "heathen" as a description of a non-believer unless they mean it in a negative way. The message itself is clearly bad and the chosen language reflects it.
That's not the same as me calling a pregnant person a "pregnant woman" or someone else calling them a "uterus having pregnant person". The meaning in both cases is a biological female human who is carrying a baby in pregnancy. You can find people who will get offended by either phrase, but why? I don't get it. Neither phrase is meant to be disparaging or trivializing towards other people. If you hear "pregnant woman" you should assume that "woman" is meant in a biological sense and not a gender sense.
I don't get what it means to identify as a woman. As we have all come to understand in recent years, women can give birth, but women can also have a penis. They can have breasts, or they can lack them. They can be bold or they can be shy. They can be strong or they can be weak. They can be short or they can be tall. What does the word woman mean? It seems like a word that doesn't mean anything at all? It's just an arbitrary group of people with nothing in common?
I would highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT4WjLWRRrw
(specifically "part 2: Gender" and "Part 3 Labels"). If you want ramblings continue reading but really the video is much better.
The answer that I have come to is that the term 'woman' is vague, it means different things to different people, and that's ok. Defining a group based on difference like you have makes things needlessly complicated, for example what is chair?:
As we have all come to understand in recent years, CHAIRS can HAVE WHEEL, but CHAIRS can also HAVE LEGS . They can have a BACK, or they can lack them. They can be WELL BUILT or they can be WEAK . They can be strong or they can be weak. They can be short or they can be tall. What does the word CHAIR mean? It seems like a word that doesn't mean anything at all?
A chair is something you perceive as a chair and a woman is someone you perceive as a woman. Thus, to identify as woman means you would like to be perceived as a woman with whatever baggage comes attached with the person's concept of women. To that end you 'do woman'
> As we have all come to understand in recent years, CHAIRS can HAVE WHEEL, but CHAIRS can also HAVE LEGS . They can have a BACK, or they can lack them. They can be WELL BUILT or they can be WEAK . They can be strong or they can be weak. They can be short or they can be tall. What does the word CHAIR mean? It seems like a word that doesn't mean anything at all?
You don't have to lift a horse to take it with you, they move on their own (that's what makes them so useful), are domesticated and will follow you when properly handled.
Also, humans have been putting a type of chair on horses for some 2700 years, called a saddle, and sitting on that.
Does the tech field seem to be highly represented in the T part of LGBT? I can’t count how many times I’ve see a woman’s name as the maintainer of some software and thought, wow it’s awesome to see a woman working on something as low-level or esoteric or whatever and it almost always ends up being a trans woman. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just an observation.
I am a trans woman in tech. Yes, this is a thing. We joke about it all the time. (Even trans women who don’t work in tech constantly joke about the number of trans women who work in tech.) Certain fields and communities (security, Rust, other low-level stuff) have particularly strong representation.
The main reasons I’ve heard thrown around for this are: 1) Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows) and also correlate to high technical ability, 2) tech is generally fairly accepting of alternative lifestyles and identities, 3) if you were brought up as a boy you probably had more access to computers and were encouraged to go into that field, 4) if you were brought up as a boy but were actually trans, you probably preferred nerdy stuff to sports and computers were a good distraction from hating your body, 5) tech jobs have good healthcare.
> Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows)
Here are some reasons:
- Autists tend to be uncoordinated which makes them feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, which is a feeling used to diagnose transgenderism.
- Autists are often outcasts, which can make men feel less masculine, which they may accidentally equate to being more feminine.
- It’s accepted in the literature that autists tend to be naive as they can’t read social cues properly. Compared to their more socially sensitive neurotypical peers, they are more likely to trust that others will genuinely perceive them as the opposite gender based on cues from social media alone.
- Autists tend to over-rationalize which can lead to thought spirals that cause them to convince themselves of something that a neurotypical person would think is unrealistic.
- Autists tend to lack social sensitivity which includes the absence of the ability to sense the subtle discomfort that people feel in their presence.
This is why trans women who are lesbians are extremely over represented compared to cis women.
I think we must give great weight to the fact there are prominent and proud trans techies -- it tells you that in tech you can be successful. In what other fields would you be as accepted?
There's also the need to be part of a community online, a community which is not physically accessible in most places, so the level of social media engagement is higher, and maybe that leads to tech and tech-adjacent work.
I feel like that acceptance (and I’ve worked at a few places that have just been amazingly supportive and accommodating, long before it was widely discussed) is somehow vaguely related to the way us nerds don’t care about formal dress. “You do you” is the nerd individualistic way, and that seems to apply to a wide range of things, including lifestyle choices, fashion, being trans, and many other axes. So long as you can do the work, who cares how you choose to present?
Thank you for your reply. All of the reasons you provided make sense, but number three was one I hadn't even considered. It seems so obvious once you pointed it out lol.
More boys being encouraged to go into tech is a potential reason. However, personally I think the biggest reason is that lots of people with ASD are in tech, and there is an overlap between ASD and trans. All of the times I can remember where I came a across a trans women in programming, they also had ASD traits.
> Does the tech field seem to be highly represented in the T part of LGBT? I can’t count how many times I’ve see a woman’s name as the maintainer of some software and thought, wow it’s awesome to see a woman working on something as low-level or esoteric or whatever and it almost always ends up being a trans woman. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just an observation.
Possibly, or also possibly likely that people are more likely to come out when they feel less constrained to societal expectations (i.e there may be more LGBTQIA+ who are closeted outside of tech because of nonconformity-related fears). Whether it's one or the other (or both), these populations have always gravitated towards tech because tech was always the outcast thing to do.
Tech has lots of places tolerant of people falling outside the "mainstream normal", pays well (which is quite useful for people who want to medically transition), and until quite a short time ago, niche online communities were probably one of the main avenues for people to understand what's going on with them and what they can do about it.
I share your observations. I often find trans women behind very cool and interesting projects. I don't have any statistics or anything but it's certainly my personal experience.
Females learn early that broadcasting your feminity comes with risks, largely from males. I think some trans people don't have that qualm, and on the contrary find clear use of female correlating names affirming. I also think I.T. has a larger proportion of the sort of neuro-divergence that correlates strongly with gender identity transition. I don't know why that is, and finding out why seems to have been made taboo, and don't expect any different on HN.
The field seems to have comparatively visible representation, which is something I'm happy to see. An immediate question I have is how much of this change is because of society becoming thankfully more accepting of transpeople? Further by extension, in prior generations of tech workers how many are people who would have not felt able to present who they are?
Your observation (which I noticed too) boils down to the under representation of biological women (both cis women and trans men) in the tech industry, due to cultural and societal reasons.
There is no visual component to sexuality. Given that GitHub profiles are mostly just a name and profile pic, you can’t tell someone’s sexuality while you can easily tell if someone is trans.
Ehhhhh this swerves into a long discussion about the stereotypes trans people face, how we have really narrow ideas about what men and women look like that leads to cis folks getting misgendered and the weird world of people who deny that passing trans folks exist.
HOWEVER, you can easily tell trans folks on github because their avatar will be an anime picrew.
That hasn’t been my experience, but possibly the over-representation of males in the industry means trans people in tech are more likely to be trans women.
For what it is worth, I wanted to provide a transgender woman's opinion on this article. I am only speaking for myself here, not all transwomen, especially since I have only come to a realization I am transgender earlier this year. I have hardly had to live most of my life subject to discrimination, although this year I may have lost a job and definitely lost a friend due to it.
Reading the author's article, I couldn't help but think about this situation as it relates to other minority groups and how it relates to the growth and change of language over the years. I am not a linguist, but I can say that some words that were commonly accepted in my adolescence in the 1980s could now end careers and friendships, and rightfully so. MLK said the long arc of history bends towards justice, and I think our language has moved certain injurious words into the trash bin. I think that certain people react to the language changing as they do to many other aspects of social change: by planting their flag and declaring they won't stand for it. I think such plantings have as little effect as prior plantings have: life is going to change, whether you like it or not.
I think the author's reasoning is suspect in, at the very least, two particular issues. First, she declares outright that she is not bigoted nor a social conservative, and uses as backup support that she's not evicted transgender students from her class (despite the fact that would've opened her up to a lawsuit, most likely), that she almost worked for a transgender woman, and that she's dated trans men. It feels like a list of credentials that lets her exempt herself from examining with self-awareness the actual beliefs she holds for bigotry or social conservatism, especially when she goes on to describe Dylan Mulvaney as "an adult biological man going through a grotesquely stereotypical transgender girlhood."
It's interesting that in the exact essay she references, Orwell cites a "lack of precision" as one of the problems of the English language. Yet she demands that lack of precious, which Orwell rails against! Orwell goes on to note that words must be consciously chosen: "[a]fterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning," saying, moments later, that when choosing that word, above all else, "[b]reak any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
"Politics and the English Language," to me, can be accurately read as a caution not to let legalese and rote phrases enter your head and flow out of your fingers without self-examination. But that essay also, to me at least, is very much for the accuracy of language and for not limiting its growth: "[t]he defence of the English language [...] has nothing to do with [...] the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. [...] What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about."
And look at Orwell's other essay, "The Politics of Newspeak," speaking of how (in a '1984' dystopia) words are eliminated and definitions stripped away from them.
The author's essay, though, seems to be based on a very significant misstep that I'm surprised no one caught before this went to print, unless I'm very much mistaken: she seems to be attacking trans women who were AMAB. (A common abbreviation today is AMAB and AFAB - assigned male/female at birth.)
Perhaps someday, a trans woman will be able to have a uterus implanted and be able to bring a child to term. But the vast majority of the accommodations she complains about, she seems to think is somehow aimed towards accommodating AMAB trans women who, right now, cannot give birth ("making biological men happy", "while almost no one actually believes that men can get pregnant", etc.).
But these accommodations in wording are aimed at AFAB trans men, who can biologically get pregnant. Trans men, depending on the choices they have made up until that time, CAN become pregnant and give birth. But they are men. To call them 'biological women,' or to argue that they must be called biological women and not trans men, is "barbarous" ('characterized by savagery; very cruel'). It is also factually imprecise, in that it does not accurately reflect the gender identity of the individual in question.
I hesitate to get personal, but I feel that her essay is mostly about screaming from a visceral level of her being that this trauma she's experiencing is hers and hers alone. But she uses this trauma to branch off into a very fervent diatribe that demands that AMAB trans women should not be referred to with inaccurate wording, while ignoring the existence of AFAB trans men who could experience the very things she describes as dealing with.
In the very first paragraph of her essay, the author relates the origin of these opinions as coming to her (and perhaps contemporaneously being written?) in the midst of a time where she was experiencing what sounds like very severe physical and emotional trauma with badly weakened access to her support system.
That doesn't excuse anything on her part. Trump had a truly horrifying childhood, but that does not excuse what he's done to other people during his life. Abuse doesn't excuse being an abuser; trauma doesn't excuse becoming one who traumatizes.
Plenty cis women are not in the group of people with all these characteristics (and while there attempts to deny them womanhood on that basis, those are also generally considered a very bad thing to do)
What does it possibly mean to 'deny' womanhood? There's no womanhood department that hands out womanhood or manhood in little goodie bags. This is a completely meaningless term.
It's true that binary concepts of gender are gross oversimplifications. But that's just as true of binary gender defined by identity as it is of binary gender defined by sex. My take it that we ought to be ought be consistent and allow either both or neither.
Because typical bureaucratic literature has added one more abstraction?
Health literature and other bureaucratic literature is chock full of abstraction and euphemisms. The entire edifice is aesthetically unpleasant and euphemisms broadly are sometimes used to let bureaucrats get away with terrible thing (see George Orwell talking of "population relocation" in Politics and The English Language). But I don't see the euphemisms targeted here doing any real damage. I mean "not saying things I think should be said" only qualifies as harm if you abuse language far more than these changes do.
It's the inconsistency that gets me. If we have to say "people who menstruate" and "people with uteruses" for physical sex characteristics because "women" isn't precise enough, then shouldn't we also say "people who feel like women", "people who conform to feminine social norms" etc rather than "women" for the social aspects of gender. They aren't binary either, so "women" is no more accurate.
"Women-born-women" is a term sometimes used among trans-exclusionary feminists. That very use made it - and similar-sounding terms - very much non-neutral.
I can't quote from the article because I accidentally reloaded the page once and triggered its paywall, but that's an impressively on-script rendition of the classic "I'm not racist, I have lots of black friends, I just don't believe they're actually oppressed" bit.
I mean, she literally did say that cis women are more oppressed than trans people. That's a pretty impressive claim from someone who was trumpeting her LGBT-friendliness a couple paragraphs earlier.
This won't ever be resolved so long as there is insistence on equating biological sex with what gender someone identifies as. Biological differences are real, regardless of what your brain tells you to feel.
That won’t be resolved until “we” stop overloading words with incompatible meanings.
If we are separating gender and sex, then gender references need to stop using words referring to sex, because the vast and overwhelming majority of English speakers understand words like man/woman in sexual terms.
I certainly think it is worth distinguishing sex and gender, and that using different words is the necessary first step. However I think that by-and-large people use "man" and "woman" to describe gender -- though not gender identity, but filling the role in society successfully. No one checks genitals, chromosomes, or gametes. They look and eyeball it, based somewhat on anatomical clues, but also a gestalt of dress, hairstyles, mannerisms, etc.
Typically I hear "male" and "female" used to describe sex, though it would be somewhat awkward to use them as nouns rather than adjectives.
If someone advertises as, say, "a man seeking a woman" in the local paper I think they probably are going to checking genitals. A very key reason why we have genders is specifically to advertise what genitals someone has, because that is need-to-know information for pregnancy and then building up a family.
This brings up another good point. While someone absolutely 100% has the right to identify as whichever gender feels right to them, it is also 100% unacceptable to hide that when you are dating.
That is a good argument for not trying so hard to overload the same terms.
>it is also 100% unacceptable to hide that when you are dating.
If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them. No-one is hiding information about their genitals by identifying as a particular gender. Don't make unwarranted assumptions and you won't have any problem. (That said, the false conception that trans people are tricksters lying in wait to ambush you with their unexpected genitals is a pretty big component of trans panic transphobia.)
If, as GP suggests, the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
> No-one is hiding information about their genitals by identifying as a particular gender. Don't make unwarranted assumptions and you won't have any problem. (That said, the false conception that trans people are tricksters lying in wait to ambush you with their unexpected genitals is a pretty big component of trans panic transphobia.)
It's not universal, but I've had conversations with quite a few trans people who considered it transphobic to care about genitals in dating.
That's just an anecdote, but as a more public example: consider that dating apps/websites let you select gender identity but don't have space for identifying physical sex characteristics, even though that is a primary selection criteria for many people. I consider this pretty ridiculous when a lot of these sites have a box for height/weight and even star sign.
> If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them.
I think part of the problem is that you can't. There are lots of trans people that would be offended by such a question (and if they aren't, then why not just communicate it publicly in the first place!)
> the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
It's needn't be about pregnancy and families. It may simply be about attraction. For example, I'm attracted exclusively to biologically female people. I know from my past life experiences that this rule holds consistently, so if I'm looking for a sexual partner, then I don't want to waste my time making an emotional connection with someone who I then later find out isn't sexually compatible with me.
The bottom line is that you don't have to have sex with anyone if you don't want to have sex with them. Literally the worst thing that can happen here is that your date gets naked and and you realize that you're not into them. That can happen even if they have the genital phenotype you expected. I'm willing to bet that for 99% of people, most instances of this kind of disappointment occur with people who wield the expected and preferred kind of equipment.
I agree that the general prudishness of dating and dating apps (especially for straight dating) makes this all more difficult than it needs to be. But as far as trans people are concerned, all I really see here is a lot of unnecessary worrying about improbable hypotheticals that aren't even that bad if they actually happen.
Very few trans people are likely to do a 'surprise reveal' because they know all too well that this can have disastrously violent consequences in a heavily transphobic society.
I'm not worried about being forced into doing something I don't want to do. I'm worried about wasting my time. I'm worried about getting someone's hopes up, only to upset them when I have to have a very awkward conversation where I tell them I'm not interested. I'm worried about an angry reaction or being accused of being transphobic if I have to do that.
You claim that nobody is hiding information about their genitals. But while we can debate the semantics of "hiding", there are certainly lots of people who are not being open about that information. And I am arguing that the world would be a better place if everyone was just open about their genitals (and indeed their hormones).
It shouldn't need to be a big deal. There's nothing shameful about having genitals that don't match your gender identity (and that would not put me off dating someone).
Wasting your time and having awkward conversations is table stakes for dating, no? All of that would still be happening if you only ever interacted with cis people!
Are large numbers of cis people really finding that trans people are contributing substantially to their difficulty in finding a suitable partner? I see no evidence of it. This concern is almost always raised in rhetorically heated threads about trans identity, in the service of a particular argument – but almost never in threads about dating.
I find this hard to relate to as a gay man, since us gay men happily exchange information about our penises (or other equipment) before meeting up. I think if it's important to you that your prospective partner has a penis or vagina, then it ought to be be possible to clarify this directly rather than making assumptions based on gender identity. If you find that it's not possible to do so in the current dating climate then, well, I'm sorry. But I don't think trans people are to blame for whatever is creating that barrier to honest communication. My guess is that there are probably a lot of other questions that you would like to be able to ask your Tinder matches but can't because of various societal hangups and tabus.
From the gay side of things, I've never had the experience of finding out that someone was trans only at the point where they took their clothes off. I find it difficult to believe that this is a common enough occurrence that it's actually causing people significant problems in their dating lives. If you don't want to ask, then assuming that women have vaginas is a pretty accurate heuristic. In a small number of cases it may not work out. Of course, dates don't work out for all kinds of reasons; unanticipated penises are likely to be the least of them.
That distinction is already there. As I understand it, there's a differentiation between "male" and "female" biological sex v. "man" and "woman" gender identities. Hence terms like AMAB/AFAB (assigned male/female at birth).
I'm not at all as well versed on it as I should be and I'm working to understand it better as time goes on, but the distinction was made using existing language to avoid overloading, and later generations already understand the distinction pretty intuitively.
These "assigned" terms don't really work IMO. It imples some choice has been made, by someone. Who is doing the assigning? And it happens before birth, if we want to be accurate.
"Conceived male" or "Conceived female" (leaving out the case of genetic abnormalities) seems better to me.
> Or that such "assignments" can be made without ending with suicide.
Well for one, it'd cause dysphoria, not necessarily suicide. Some people feel bad their whole lives without killing themselves.
But the main point is, that's why doctors shouldn't do these assignments. Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
> But the main point is, that's why doctors shouldn't do these assignments
Do they ACTUALLY do them, though? I've read about some freakish case when a child was mutilated during circumcision, and the doctor had advised to bring up the child as a girl, but I am having a hard time believing that this is a common practice, that just doesn't pass my sanity check.
> Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
It's not like anyone actually "decides" these things, but rather has to live with what nature gave you. One can surely try to cosmetically "fix" this and strive for social acceptance, but this won't change medical facts. And theoretically it shouldn't, if we actually distinct between biological sex and gender.
It seems to me that most of all the confusion and the fixation on genitalia comes from people not actually truly believing gender to be an actual social construct.
Otherwise, HRT would be sufficient in 99.9% times and SRS wouldn't even be a thing.
>There are lots of kids born with ambiguous & differing genitals where parents & doctors make an assignment for that kid outside the womb.
I don’t think most people would argue against medically intersex people identifying outside of traditional norms, which I would imagine is a small subset of people identifying as trans.
Doesn't seem like assignment to me, more like documenting.
Has a penis -> Boy
Has a vagina -> Girl
Of course that is not a designation of what gender identity the person will adopt, and perhaps change more than once, over the course of his or her lifetime.
When it comes to biological sex, which is what "male" and "female" normally refer to, the established science is that it is determined by your physiology. It's not the same thing as "man" and "woman", which is gender identity.
That's certainly one opinion. A common use of language these days separates the concept of manliness from the concept of maleness.
Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.
I find it useful to separate the concepts, and others do too. You might not find that useful, but you should be aware language is evolving towards those definitions recently.
The term 'man' infers gender while 'male' refers to sex, and has nothing to do with the term 'manliness' in the context you described.
The language is 'evolving' only among a very small subset of people on earth who happen to believe they are the 'social vanguard', that doesn't make them so.
The response to the linguistic disassociation between the obviously inexorable relationship between gender and sex is, I would guess, considerably bigger and I don't think this argument is going to be won but the language antagonists. I think society is going to accept trans people, which is good ... but I suggest we're never moving away from classical gender terminology.
The rest of the world is coming online very quickly and they want nothing to do with our linguistic wars. They'll change their language when they start using 'Latinx' (a term invented by 'colonialist progressives') in Mexico which is to say, probably never.
And by the way that's perfectly fine. Paradoxically, in many other parts of the world trans people are far more commonly accepted and have been for some time, lo and behold, they use 'men and women' in the common sense, without any problem at all.
In Canada, they fight over whether the stop signs should say 'STOP' or 'ARRET' (aka English or French) because that's how rich and prosperous they are, they can afford to inflate ideological inanities to the level of material concern.
> Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.
What does manly mean? Because Bill Gates does not seem to be missing features that I find typical of males in the US. Otherwise, I would say pretty much all male office workers and many other males are as “manly” as Bill Gates”, at which point I figure the word loses utility.
Compare, say, Brad Pitt to Bill Gates. Or The Rock to Peewee Herman. There are differences between how closely those people fit the archetypal mold of "manly".
I'm comfortable saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is manlier than I am. He ticks more of the boxes we associate with "man", culturally. He's muscular, successful, attractive, tough, etc. I've got a bit of a spare tire, I'm pretty soft, etc.
He and I both are male, and about the same degree of male. We both have penises, etc.
In this way we can use "man" to describe our features that are culturally associated (ruggedness, toughness, cigars and whiskey, etc.) from the biological features (penis, testicles, body hair, etc.)
I'm trying to articulate my understanding of what the typical American considers manly. Do you have a different understanding of what the archetype is? I'm happy to work with that.
Apologies, I'm happy to work with whatever your icon of unmanliness is. The specific objective was to identify that there are spreads of people who appear to the general public as more or less manly. Please, if you have an alternative, I'm happy to work with that.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how you can be so prescriptive about language.
People use the words in the manner I describe. People use the words in the manner you describe. Both usages exist and are common, albeit in different areas.
I'm not denying people use the language in the manner you describe, I'm saying people additionally use it in the manner I describe. And since language is descriptive, not proscriptive, we need to understand both usages exist and be able to recognize both, even if we disagree with them.
Your example contradicts the claim. They say "assigned male at birth" rather than "male", because they believe you can be a female even if you were assigned male at birth.
It's more that male/female is not a single binary, it's several bimodal spectra. Chromosomes of xx or xy don't perfectly line up with birth genitals, birth genitals don't perfectly line up with endogenous hormones, and endogenous hormones don't perfectly line up with internal sense of self, several of those things can be changed later, and none of them are clear binaries.
Not even 99.98% of people have unambiguous genitalia (it's about 99.5-99.97% [1]), before we even get to people with the "opposite" genitalia of what their chromosomes would suggest. An in any case, genitalia was only one of the 4 things I mentioned, and are also one of the ones that can be changed later.
Trans bottom surgery has one of the highest satisfaction rates of any surgery. You're entitled to your opinion, but I'll rely on the opinions of people actually living with the surgical results. This [1] lists a 94-100% satisfaction rate, which to me feels a fair bit higher than one might normally expect from victims of "mutilation".
> Your example contradicts the claim. They say "assigned male at birth" rather than "male", because they believe you can be a female even if you were assigned male at birth.
I'm not sure that's a contradiction so much as it's trying to weave through people's own synonymizing of the two terms where a distinction is being made. I hear your point though.
It wasn't that long ago that conservatives were arguing that "man" and "he" worked equally well for both sexes and it was ridiculous and odd to replace "chairman" with "chairperson" or "chair" or "all men are created equal" didn't exclude women.
The concept of "biological sex" is not even a binary, and it's treated differently in different parts of the world. So we haven't settled on definitions of biological sex outside as a species yet.
There is absolutely a consensus (well, there was until about 5 years ago). People point at exceptions to prove the rule is entirely false. How many arms do humans have? Two. “Well my uncle was born without arms! So clearly humans have an unknown amount of arms”. Men and women are real, there are a couple of exceptions, but not as many as people imagine.
I expect this to be promptly removed from the front page. I’m happy to see taboo subjects being spoken of again.
Third gender people and intersex people have existed as long as humans have.
Western cultures in the past couple decades have started acknowledging this, but the concept is not foreign to all countries.
And the changes proposed are to include as many people as possible. You might say, people are typically born with two arms, sometimes fewer. It doesn't remove the fact that most people express as 2 armed, while including the people who don't.
The example you've provided actually does not support you argument, just the opposite.
People 'typically' have two arms?
Well they 'typically' also have two legs, a sense of smell, sight, hearing, a heart, two lungs, the ability to speak.
What exactly can we expect all 'humans' to have? And how can we refer to them without making any assumptions whatsoever about their state of being so as to be 'inclusive' as you say?
It's a Monty Python sketch of absurdity and will end up with people slapping others in the face with fish.
Aside from probably using 'they' or 'them' in some cases in which we didn't tend to before, language as we use it is perfectly fine in almost all cases. It never will perfectly encompass everyone and that's fine, it doesn't have to.
>What exactly can we expect all 'humans' to have? And how can we refer to them without making any assumptions whatsoever about their state of being so as to be 'inclusive' as you say?
This question answers itself, no? You can refer to them as 'humans'.
Actually in practical use, we'd be obliged to use whatever language the individual identified as, which is the new 'subjective' way of being 'objective'.
I'm happy to use he, she or they, because it's reasonable and rational but beyond that it's all shenanigans, I have no time for it.
Atoms are binary in your model, every atom is hydrogen or helium, or an exception?
I believe that we can be inclusive of those exceptions and treat them as unique things that are within the definition, rather than placing them outside the definition. I would rather spend the energy to evolve definitions to include people rather than tell people they are marginalia.
I don’t understand what atoms have to do with gender.
It is not inclusive to call a woman a “birthing person” it’s actually excluding the women who can’t give birth. Are women who can’t become pregnant men? Of course not.
We have let politeness run away with us. It’s time to kindly, but firmly tell people there are two genders. It’s not a kindness to lie to a person, even if they ask for the lie.
> it’s actually excluding the women who can’t give birth
Not out of the group of "women", so "Are women who can’t become pregnant men?" doesn't make sense.
EDIT: and indeed the creepy arguments centering womanhood around periods or pregnancy, which do actually exclude women who can't give birth from womanhood, tend to come from a subset(!) of the people that also are strongly against such language, not the people for it.
You will never get an answer. Biological sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression and even gender roles are thrown into a pile to play 5D chess.
Fact remains, there is no third sex. Intersex is not a third sex and sexual anomalies also do not introduce a third sex.
Depends on your culture. The Diné people have four genders (feminine man, masculine man, feminine woman, masculine woman), hijra and fa'afafine are feminine male genders, in Inuit culture a sipiniq is someone who fulfills a man's role with female genitalia.
In mesopotamia, mesoamerica, and the Indus valley there were people of unclear sex who fulfilled genders beyond men and women.
A neologism from pan indigenous culture is Two Spirit.
These concepts have existed for a loooong time, however they were quite rare in western countries. As westerners, we're being exposed to them now, but they are hardly novel on the world stage.
It's interesting though that all those cultures came up with distinct terms for trans identities. I suspect there'd be a lot less pushback if this was tried with English instead of overloading the meaning of pre-existing terms.
These are nice terms but they're heavily rooted in social constructs and don't really answer the OPS question which was tying biological sex to well... biology and in this particular case gametes/chromosomes.
That argument is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of biological sex, which is connected to the distinct type of gametes (sex cells) that an organism produces. As a broad concept, males are the sex that produce small gametes (sperm) and females produce large gametes (ova). There are no intermediate gametes, which is why there is no spectrum of sex. Biological sex in humans is a binary system.
Regardless, it misses the distinction between biological sex v. a mind's gender identity, and solely by the sheer quantity of neurons and possible interconnects, it's impossible to say that every person's brain strictly aligns with one of two modes of operation. (if anyone who specializes in gender studies knows more on this topic and believes I'm summarizing this—or even stating the problem—incorrectly, please step in; this isn't my specialty)
In fact, it's only appropriate to say that every brain is unique in how it processes the self and the world, and that while for the majority of people it's easy or even innate to identify with certain characteristics, there are minorities for whom this isn't the case.
We need to express inclusive empathy where we can, even if the only reason for doing so is to make sure that when we fall outside societally defined structures, we ourselves can also continue to be respected. Ideally we'd do so because we're trying to be good people, but my point is, even a selfish person should reach the same conclusion.
We should also acknowledge that language more often than not works in approximations and generalizations, and usually everyone still understands what is meant. There needs to be some flexibility on both sides.
This is an important point and it's lost in these debates.
The new cool thing is to pretend context/intent doesn't exist, that words and expressions should always be looked at in isolation. Even though it's a fundamental part of language and how the brain perception systems work to contextualize and loosely categorize everything based on the current set of information in a particular scenario.
Words/language is messy, highly flexible, and rarely strictly defined. For good reason.
Mostly so people can win internet arguments and feel superior/victimized.
If you have no distinguishing organs that produce sexual cell lines via meiosis, and have never ever had such organs, then you are functionally sexless. This seems like a reasonable position to take. Given our understanding of embryology and development we may try to piece together what would have happened had something not gone awry and base our judgement on that. But if we don't know, then it's hardly unreasonable to simply say 'I don't know'. However, we are not being asked to acknowledge that we cannot know for some individuals, we are being asked to accept those with obvious organs and gametes of one sex as individuals of the other.
Hormones help regulate the brain and there are sex differences in the hormones. I have a hard time believing that someone can be in the wrong body, as the brain is a part of the body.
> Hormones help regulate the brain and there are sex differences in the hormones.
Does every cell in every body react to hormones etc. the same way? There are differences between each and every person on the planet in terms of how each cell in their body reacts to things like hormones, neurotransmitters, and other signaling molecules that manifest either subtly or extremely. Anything from a person's height to their temperament to their hunger (literally, or figuratively e.g drive) can vary based on the production of and reception of these transmitters, and every single person's body varies in every facet of the above based on environmental and genetic considerations.
> I have a hard time believing that someone can be in the wrong body, as the brain is a part of the body.
That doesn't mean that those other considerations are stronger than the hormonal differences due to sex. The sex differences for testosterone are large.
> That's an empathy thing.
You're welcome to empathize with my inability to believe that someone can be in the wrong body.
My understanding is that "differences in sex development" or "disorders of sex development" is now the preferred terminology. See for instance:
"Disorders of sex development, or DSD (previously called intersex), includes a range of conditions that lead to abnormal development of the sex organs and atypical genitalia ..."
Stop using intersex people (who have extremely rare physiological diseases) as a political tool to justify transsexual ideology, when >99% of transsexuals do not have any such disease.
While you're right that there's no connection between being trans and being intersex (except that intersex people are probably more likely to be misgendered at birth), it's not the case that intersex people are 'extremely rare'. Depending on definition, we are talking about ~1% of people. For comparison, that is e.g. around the percentage of men who are 6'4 or taller (in the US).
This is not an endorsement of any particular take in the thread, but this seemed like an appropriate place to correct a mistake regarding the frequency of intersex births and link out to some articles for the curious.
That 1% number comes from the Fausto-Sterling survey which incorrectly lumps in Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. Eliminating those diseases yields a rate no higher than 0.018%, 2 orders of magnitude lower as the upper bound[1]. Only a small portion have cells for producing both types of gametes, only about 5% of all intersex people[2][3].
The controversy about what counts as 'intersex' is mostly pointless, as far as I can tell, as the term neither has (nor requires) a precise definition. I think in this context it makes sense to include any condition that blurs the edges of the gender binary as traditionally understood in society. If you look at the details of e.g. Klinefelter syndrome from this perspective, it's not difficult to see why it might be seen as part of the intersex spectrum:
>broad hips, poor muscle tone and slower than usual muscle growth, reduced facial and body hair that starts growing later than usual, a small penis and testicles, and enlarged breasts (gynaecomastia)
It's by no means a settled matter what does or doesn't count as 'intersex'. I suspect that few reputable researchers would waste time engaging in such a pointless debate over terminology. Some relevant points in this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5808814/
All that said, one can, if one wishes, cherry pick the smallest available estimate of the number of 'intersex' people and thereby dismiss the issues raised by these people on the grounds that they're small in number. I'm not sure how much scrutiny the logic of that rhetorical move would withstand.
I’m not trying to make any claims about the broader issue or cherry-pick here, but a lot of experts do not include Klinefelter syndrome so I think that’s worth at least noting. Moreover I think pointing out that 95% of the people in question clearly have cells to produce a single type of gamete and are often fertile is instructive.
My only point in responding is to add useful scientific/medical context. People can make what they want of that information.
Fundamentally I agree with what you seem to be getting at, taxonomy is hard.
> Moreover I think pointing out that 95% of the people in question clearly have cells to produce a single type of gamete AND ARE OFTEN FERTILE is instructive.
It’s only informative if it’s true. With regard to the second conjunct, people with Klinefelter syndrome and Turner syndrome are typically functionally infertile.
I’m not convinced that ‘a lot of experts’ are even working on defining what counts as ‘interesex’. It would make more sense to listen to intersex people, who as far as I can see, tend to think that a fairly broad definition is useful.
Note that .13% was not what I rounded up. That .13% is a subset of people who are gender minorities (eg trans or non-binary) and there are several academic estimates that put the number higher than 1%.
My intuition, reading through the studies and talking a conservative estimate, is that something like 0.6 to 0.8% is a defensible estimate. I rounded that to 1%. Other scholars pick higher or lower numbers, but it's not 10%, and I firmly believe that it's not 0.1% based on studies, which makes 1% the correct order of magnitude, imo.
> I'd rather make sure that the language I use includes them where possible.
Man/Woman does. As do Male/Female. Disorders of Sexual Development are disorders, not new sexes. A woman without breasts or with an extra X chromosome is a much a woman as a man without arms or with an extra toe is still a man.
> are you willing to write off the [people] that doesn't cover
Those are weird made-up scare words. Nobody is writing them off. What does what even mean? We just don't recognize their identity or their identity terminology as being meaningful, in the same way an atheist feels about their religion.
They're just as welcome, or not, as they were without it.
Clarifying question: are you saying that 1% of humans don't produce either "small mobile gametes or large, immobile ones"? In that case what do they produce?
I've noticed that in the debate around 'binary' (on Twitter, I confess), some people claim that no human has ever been observed who didn't produce either sperm or ova (and never both). I'd like to know whether that's true. If it's true, then the GP's claim covers 100% of cases, not 99%.
Yes — discussing a bimodal distribution as a bimodal distribution is useful, even in the presence of outliers and data points bridging the two peaks.
“Man” and “woman” are names for those nodes in the bimodal distribution of traits, as correlated with sex. Same as “cow” and “bull”, or “hen” and “cock”, or “doe” and “stag”, or “female” and “male”.
I’d rather my language be able to discuss the experience of the 99%+ than become incapable of discussing basic facts (like apes being sexually dimorphic) because reality might offend outliers.
And the field where that prominence matters, astrophysics, refers to anything that isn't hydrogen or helium as a "metal". Definitions are fluid. Insisting that everyone tediously say "people who may possibly become pregnant" rather than the simple "women" (with the more precise existentially quantified, more and less inclusive intent being clear from context) is itself extremely intolerant.
> I think 80 million people is a lot of people ...
and thus, unasked by intersex people and without a clear theory of how this would help, you would destroy the concept of sex-based-rights which keep four billion people and the world's children safe?
Most people only ever learn high school level biology, where that "fact" is taught. That's not bad, it's just an incomplete picture.
Few people take the time to study further because there's no need for them to do so. Just like I haven't studied veterinary medicine - it's just something I never needed to understand beyond a common sense level.
The problem arises when people who have been working with simplified models make assertions using those models.
> The concept of "biological sex" is not even a binary
That's just not true. Biological sex is defined by the gametes produced, and I'm not aware of conditions where one person produces both male and female gametes.
We call people "black" and "white", when there is statistically almost an even spectrum between skin colors, genes, etc. Your examples in between are really statistical outliers, numbers-wise.
They are people. Even in small numbers, they are important.
Hell, nearly every atom in the universe is hydrogen and helium, does that make carbon, oxygen, iron, etc statistical outliers we shouldn't account for? Of course not. Our science and language accounts for even marginal percentages, why would it be any different when talking about people?
But do they hold more weight to rename how the 99.9% of the population is referred to?
it’s the latter that frustrates people IMO. I think if people focused on simple acceptance of themselves instead of trying to rewrite the social fabric, it would help.
Also, even though Hydrogen and Helium are by far the most common elements, oxygen is still a different element.
Biological differences are real but lots of them can be changed by hormones. People caring about how they are categorised is universally central to a lot of people, this article illustrates that. I think ciswomen have the right to be upset about changes in language but transmen deserve no less rights for being a minority. How different ideas of how language should be used can be reconciled is not something I know the answer to, but denying the biological reality of changes experienced by people who are trans is discrimination. I don't think the complaints expressed by this writer are invalid, quite the opposite, but her support for gender criticals makes everything hypocritical.
I have strong opinions on this subject but I don't think it's possible to have a healthy and productive conversation about it in a forum and medium such as this.
There are some subjects for which it is not possible to have a productive discussion at all anywhere, and this is one of them. This is an ideological difference so strong that it makes it difficult for the opposing views to even share a society.
I've comported myself quite well in this thread, and elsewhere.
Please don't generalize about people because they hold different opinions than you. Just because someone is a socialist does not make them a cudgel wielding censor, just like someone being a republican does not make them a fascist.
I've had many positive interactions with people in this thread I strongly disagree with.
I'd encourage you to be more open minded and not write off people so quickly.
>>Just because someone is a socialist does not make them a cudgel wielding censor
If you indulge me in a mental experiment. If there would be a person on HN with a nickname "nationalsocialismisok" and claiming him being a national socialist doesn't make him a jew(or other minority) hater. Would you believe them?
You're right, you have done pretty well here - I was taking your comment as a jumping off point for a more general theme, it wasn't meant to be a personal attack against you specifically.
"Just because someone is a socialist does not make them a cudgel wielding censor"
Although it's clearly a true statement in the technical sense - there are surely at least a few people like that - my bitter personal experience has been that people who self identify as socialists are nearly always cudgel wielding censors given half the chance. Are there any countries that both declare themselves to be socialist and yet have a truly free press, and free speech rights? Have there been in the past? I can't think of any. They always have strict state control of what people can say.
And so that was my point. You're shocked to see this on HN, and it's not because such stories don't get posted. They do. What happens is, almost always, they get immediately flagged to death. It's not some generalized anti-politics rule or anything to do with the underlying quality of the article either, there's a clear ideological bent to what makes it through.
Weekend HN has more posts by the right-leaning culture warriors. Has been the case for several years at least. Race and Gender related topics seem to be more frequent on the weekends.
Just because someone disagrees with you on an issue like this doesn't make them right leaning. Adding on the culture warrior part seems rather childish.
This is true, but whatever discussion or flamewar comes out of it, it is neccessary. We can't pretend this conflict of language does not exist. It needs to ache out.
Most folks agree on biological facts, and the science is fairly consistent at this point. There remains a group who refuses to accept that we've improved our understanding of the human condition over the past several decades, unfortunately.
That’s the exact opposite of what a therapist would tell you. Putting all your eggs in one basket makes you way more prone to identity crises and trauma. Diversification is often a clever thing to do.
Honest question here: are there trans men that want to get pregnant? What fraction of trans men want to get pregnant? I get this is tangential to the discussion and I get I am betraying my ignorance, but it is not particularly easy to find information on this question and it seems somewhat pertinent to the practicalities of this issue.
Are you purposefully misphrasing my question? Most men want to have kids, everyone knows that. That is very different from a trans man that wants to have kids by being pregnant themselves, after they have gone through all the hard work necessary to live their life as a member of a sex that can not have kids. I am absolutely incredulous that there are *many* trans men that want to be pregnant.
Gender is a pure social construct (e.g. man, woman) and sex is more biologically derived social construct (e.g. male is xy, female is xx). But this doesn't cover all of the known sex chromosome phenotypes, hence there's still a strong social component here too.
I think that depends on your view of sex and what's more important about it. If you view reproduction as the most important (or foundational I suppose, I'm not a philosopher I don't know what this stuff means) aspect of what sex is, there would be two sexes, male and female. If you want an exact representation of all theoretically possible combinations of phenotype and genotype, including everything from surgery to accidents/birth defects and environmental conditions to intentional genetic modification, you are going to have to create a pretty sophisticated "sex" theory (in the scientific sense), but that's not what most people mean.
The answer is that there’s unlimited answers. The current fashion in some circles is that your current expression of gender is whatever you feel it to be, that that may be any number of things.
Of course, but that is not what I asked. How many people that are born female but have both physiological and social need to be male desire to reproduce in a typically female manner? That is what I am surprised by. I am sure that it exists, but it would be informative to know how often it happens. And no, I am not suggesting that these people should step forward and speak for the whole group: they should be respected and recognized either way.
> How many people that are born female but have both physiological and social need to be male desire to reproduce in a typically female manner?
I understand the prompt, but I'll challenge it with the following:
Until functioning testes can be synthesized (complete with a chromosome swap, one X for one Y), what means of biological reproduction would they have? We'll defer the distinction between performing this operation rather than keeping the existing set for another day, but for now this question is hypothetical only, so dwelling on it yields nothing.
With that in mind, I'd say the question is better posed as: "How many people that are born female but have both physiological and social need to be male desire to reproduce[...]?"
and I'd guess the answer to this would be "a lot."
No doubt some would be grossed out by the idea. Others might be fine with it. Assuming they haven't had bottom surgery, stopping hrt might be all that's needed.
That's like asking what portion of people voting for gun regulation want to own a gun. Maybe they exist, it's their right as a free individual to make that choice. Why does it matter?
Because most literature that teaches a topic usually does not expend much effort on a special case that covers 0.1% of cases -- it is just too unwieldy to talk that way. Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of people changing their genders and I would be beyond happy when medical technology evolves enough that even more scifi changes are possible. But when I am teaching a student about gravity, I do not start by talking about special relativity: I start by talking about the most common case of Newtonian gravity and just mention "by the way, there are some special cases when speeds become inhumanly great, we will discuss this next semester".
Well, trans people aren't the only ones benefiting from more generalized pregnancy curriculum. Intersex folks and even supportive men now have clearer literature to work from.
In your gravity example, I think it's more akin to teaching the theory of relativity on day 1 and wondering why half your students are lost. People need a basis of understanding for learning anything (especially complicated stuff), so that's why you teach people all of Newton's laws first, even if it's redundant to most of the class.
> Intersex folks [...] now have clearer literature to work from.
Whoa! The gender spectrum is absolutely unrelated to sex. Intersex people already had clear literature.
A person with one disorder of male sexuality as just as male as a person with a different disorder or even none at all. Sex is binary even if we have a hard time seeing it or measuring it sometimes, or even if the answer is different in two places (Chimerism) etc.
Intersex has been colonized by stuffing it into "the alphabet", largely as we see here in the service of transgender ideology, and this is vastly unfair to the people with DSDs - as stigma and ignorance are often their greatest enemies.
This is why LGB Alliance is trying to separate homosexuality and sex-based rights issues from gender and identity rights issues.
> Sex is binary even if we have a hard time seeing it or measuring it sometimes, or even if the answer is different in two places (Chimerism) etc.
Aren't intersex people the canonical example that sex is not binary? If it were, there would be no intersex people. I agree that we shouldn't conflate intersex with transgender as they're entirely different things. But it seems to me that neither is binary.
No, because sex is ultimately about the type of gamete you produce, sperm or egg, and there are only the two.
People with DSDs still fill the same role in reproduction. A male person with ambiguous external genitalia who appears female to a quick exam could still father a child for instance.
Sure it's an edge case. But I think we've definitely gotten to the stage of this debate where we need to be considering edge cases. Better to say "sex isn't binary, but it's close enough that it's a useful simplification" than doggedly insist that it is when technically it isn't.
So by same token you would say people don't have two eyes but in practice they mostly do.
How is that more useful of a sentence than saying "People have two eyes, except in rare circumstances".
It's obvious from article language is causing problems for the author. And by optimizing for the edge case, you impose problems for the most common case.
The "transgender bathroom rights" issue coming up just before Trump's election may have pushed Trump votes over the top. This might put DeSantis into the White House.
Indeed, it's a pendulum effect. There is a radical right and there is a radical left. I'm centrist, I do not identify with either side, I have nothing against abortion or gay marriage or calling people they/him/her/it or how they want but I have something against small group of people imposing on the whole society how we can use word women in context of pregnancy, especially in a world in which only biological woman can give birth to a child.
>but I have something against small group of people imposing on the whole society how we can use word women in context of pregnancy, especially in a world in which only biological woman can give birth to a child.
This. There’s a difference between asking for respect (I’ll use the name you want) versus fighting to call breastfeeding chest feeding.
Seriously, the world has bigger problems than to debate over language.
If the general public cared half as much about world hunger (or child hunger!) as it did about debating the definition about the word “women” the world would be a better place.
TLDR: Author believes that women = "adult human females" and provides "proofs" that "show" a distinction between being treated as a woman and actually being one.
The author of this does not seems to understand how iff statements work which is hilarious.
There's accommodating to minorities, then there's the enabling of a totalitarian group that terrorizes others under the pretext of diversity and inclusion. Most people are reasonable and willing to accede to the former. On the other hand, people who claim that a small change in language can't harm are missing out the point that they're doing the latter. This is not a hard dichotomy to understand, but somehow people are failing to do so, and then it's us vs them and going at each other's throats.
However having large majorities(95%+ of the population) make concessions in order to accommodate a small group imposes a cost (however small) born by many to the benefit of a few. My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off? What’s the cost benefit analysis? At some point where do people say the cost of accommodating this 1/100k/1m people by another 300m+ people is not a worthwhile use of societal resources?