> Are you harmed so much by saying there are five lights when there are four?
Definitions and language change. I know of people who get deeply offended when "decimated" is used to not strictly mean exactly a 10% reduction, despite language not meaning quite that forever. "He" meaning "chooses to present as male and/or would really like to be referred to in ways that are associated with maleness" rather than "was born with a penis" seems OK.
Insisting on labelling someone based on your historical idea of language and what you think they should be called is not really a great way to choose to do things. I mean, you can insist on calling someone the N-word because that's "just calling a spade a spade", but...
> A mention of gender in code is probably not talking about the author's gender.
It's probably talking about a user's or a customer's gender. e.g. eventually getting in someone's face with it.
> for assuming that the same dynamics don't apply in other areas. Virtually everything that we're able to objectively measure, we find significant sex differences.
I struggle to respond to this one. I mean-- really, really seriously-- "so what?" I mean, it seems that you're upset that stereotypes might not work as well.
Basically every simple characteristic A we measure about humans is correlated with many different complex outcomes B with terrific variation.
Yes, people who present with female characteristics at birth are shorter than me on average, but not all. Most are worse at basketball than the average man, but not all. There are some differences in spatial tasks on average than men, but some outperform most men. Most show lower measures of aggression than men, but... Etc.
I mean, do you need to get gender of birth correct- or race, or natural hair color, or nation of upbringing, etc, so you can make judgments based on stereotypes better (which may be real biological correlates)? I think we should always be acting based on the actual individual ahead of us based on the actual measure in question, rather than some proxy.
And even if you really, really want stereotypes to work-- people born male who choose to present as female vary on a whole lot of measures, on average, from the overall male average. And sex hormones change a number of these measures, both immediately and with sustained usage. So, the measure is pretty broken in the first place, because of terrific individual variation and being affected by the gender transition process.
> I know of people who get deeply offended when "decimated" is used to not strictly mean exactly a 10% reduction, despite language not meaning quite that forever.
You can't expect to force someone else to use the words you want. But it would be deeply wrong to force someone who felt that way to say "decimate" when they meant something different.
> Insisting on labelling someone based on your historical idea of language and what you think they should be called is not really a great way to choose to do things.
I'm not insisting on using the same word (though I'd appreciate it if words weren't changed under me by fiat and I wasn't gaslit about what I'd been taught they meant), but I do insist on being able to convey the concept of looking and seeming like a woman/man irrespective of the person's own opinions, and that's what people really object to - nelogisms like moid/foid attract just as much criticism as "misgendering". (It's reminiscent of the way airports in China will have an "International plus Taiwan Terminal" and a "Domestic except Taiwan Terminal").
> It's probably talking about a user's or a customer's gender. e.g. eventually getting in someone's face with it.
The user is never going to see the code though.
> I struggle to respond to this one. I mean-- really, really seriously-- "so what?" I mean, it seems that you're upset that stereotypes might not work as well.
> I mean, do you need to get gender of birth correct- or race, or natural hair color, or nation of upbringing, etc, so you can make judgments based on stereotypes better (which may be real biological correlates)? I think we should always be acting based on the actual individual ahead of us based on the actual measure in question, rather than some proxy.
I'm upset at deliberately limiting my ability to draw inferences from the information available. There is simply no way to know 7 billion people in their full human depth, we all make assumptions and take shortcuts, make the best guess we can based on the superficial information we have available - there's simply no other way to live. The idea that we would always be able to directly measure the individual is a pipe dream. As you say, even our best guesses are pretty bad, so why make them worse?
> And even if you really, really want stereotypes to work-- people born male who choose to present as female vary on a whole lot of measures, on average, from the overall male average. And sex hormones change a number of these measures, both immediately and with sustained usage. So, the measure is pretty broken in the first place, because of terrific individual variation and being affected by the gender transition process.
The fact that people object to anyone actually trying proves that we all know that the stereotypes actually work pretty well.
> (though I'd appreciate it if words weren't changed under me by fiat and I wasn't gaslit about what I'd been taught they meant)
Sorry, words change under us.
If you grew up hearing that retarded meant a very specific clinical thing, and then a bunch of people use it as an insult... you shouldn't be surprised, for instance, that those people and their families don't want to be referred by that term anymore or hear it in use.
It's not their fault or your fault, that it became a pejorative. But everyone has to deal with the aftermath anyways.
> but I do insist on being able to convey the concept of looking and seeming like a woman/man irrespective of the person's own opinions
"Likes to be called she, but hasn't transitioned".
Yes, it's getting a bit more complicated. Part of that at one point in time, your sex assigned at birth set everything about your life-- socially acceptable occupation, expected mannerisms, means of dress, acceptable social partners, allowed interest.
That's become much less over the last 100 years, and the pace of that change has accelerated in the past 5.
Someone born female can choose to be androgynous in a way that doesn't carry a bunch of tomboy female connotations now. That's good for a lot of people who had to struggle to fit into a category before. But it does mean we all have a little more to explain.
> The user is never going to see the code though.
No, but the user is going to see what the code does. Microsoft doesn't want to be in the middle of the debate about people writing code that allows someone to pick "nonbinary" by suggesting one way or another.
> I'm upset at deliberately limiting my ability to draw inferences from the information available.
Look, if your best hint at how good someone is at basketball is that they were an Asian male at birth, it's not a very good hint to draw inferences from. If you need to know that thing, measure it directly, or at least pick a better proxy. If not, leave yourself open to a bit more surprise.
> The fact that people object to anyone actually trying
No, having to continually "prove" your identity to each next skeptical person really sucks, because they're sure you can't be ______ because of _______.
The fact that women objected 50-100 years ago (and really, well, now) to people just habitually considering them "another dumb girl" doesn't somehow validate that girls are actually stupid. It's not like the same bad logic works now on new subjects.
> proves that we all know that the stereotypes actually work pretty well.
Confirmation bias. And even if they did, it can still be terribly unjust.
> "Likes to be called she, but hasn't transitioned".
Then can I just say "man who likes to be called she" (or "moid who likes to be called she", if it's the specific word that's the issue), if that's the best balance between concise and informative for the person in question?
> Look, if your best hint at how good someone is at basketball is that they were an Asian male at birth, it's not a very good hint to draw inferences from. If you need to know that thing, measure it directly, or at least pick a better proxy. If not, leave yourself open to a bit more surprise.
Most of life is making decisions based on limited information. You'll have dinner with, at best, maybe a hundred thousand people out of seven billion. Even to have a casual conversation with someone is to pick them out of the crowd. Even if you were to profile strictly by age, sex, dress, race, ... (which is not remotely what I'm advocating), you'd still get plenty of surprises.
Sometimes your spade is broken enough that it's hard to use as a spade, or so bent from use that it'd be more reasonable to call it a pickaxe
The social meaning of a "man" or "woman" encompasses a large swath of things. Generally people's mental models of those concepts includes both physical and mental ideas. The issue is, this is not very constant. Some people will inevitably fail to possess some characteristics (like lacking large muscles, or having small breasts). We typically allow these exceptions without questioning it too much. Genitalia, of course, is the exception. In my experience, it is typically regarded as the fundamental cornerstone of gender.
The question is, is that really accurate?
We assign labels to make sense of the world. So, we tend to stick things in the categories where they fit the most (important) attributes. After all, we don't measure the genetics before calling something a dog, we typically see it bark, wag it's tail, play fetch and decide it's probably a dog, even if we haven't seen it before.
If someone looks like a girl, acts like a girl, has had genital recontruction surgery, has a fashion sense, wears makeup, and generally is just another regular person on the street, then for any social interaction they are just like any girl. There is one situation where this isn't true - if they are sexually involved with someone who has the intent of having children. For that purpose, they, like any infertile woman, can't provide children. I can sympathise with a hatred for people trying to force falsehoods on me - I personally have been the annoying atheist friend quite a lot. However, to take that birth genetalia are a cornerstone of gender uncritically doesn't seem very useful, since then the labels "man" or "woman" tell you nothing about how they might act - you may meet a woman, who is perfectly ordinary in every way, who then reveals that she is trans. If birth genitalia is to be the cornerstone of gender, you now have to include someone who looks and acts as any woman would in your definition of "man". To me this seems like it makes the term meaningless, and it makes far more sense to just classify that person as a "woman". Genetalia itself isn't really important to social relationships outside of sex, so for situations outside of sex classifying by it also seems somewhat useless.
The other, much more (imo) defensible argument you expressed was relating socialization. In my experience it is true that socially, boys are conditioned to be more aggressive while girls are often punished for being aggressive. This definitely leads to a difference in how far they are willing to push to fulfill their own needs.
However, assertiveness, to an extent, is a useful trait for anyone to have. Imo it shouldn't be seen as a "masculine" trait, but rather a trait men tend to have, since being able to clearly communicate needs and boundaries, and push back when those needs and boundaries get ignored, is an essential skill for anyone, but one that women might be less practiced in due to often receiving higher backlash for doing so.
Of course, there are non trans women who possess that capability. However, in your experience dealing with trans women, has that made your experience in interacting with them closer to an angry man, or closer to any other aggressive woman? It probably varies case by case. From what I've heard the looks of a woman come with the social pressures of a woman, so I'd wager that an aggressive trans woman, on average, wouldn't differ much from an aggressive non trans woman, simply because, so long as they are perceived as women, their anger is taken extremely seriously on several issues (sexual crimes and harassment) and somewhat less seriously on everything else. My personal theory is that this is due to the assumed threat of physical violence with men, while women are often seen as being incapable of/unlikely to commit violence, leading to two lopsided power dynamics rather than one even one.
Regardless, I think that basing our definition of gender off of genitalia or genetics doesn't provide a super useful mental model for socialization, which I believe to be the primary good use of gender as a concept.
Sports are one area in which I think you're wrong. If growing up on testosterone were a major contributor to advantages, we'd expect to see a lot more trans athletes at the top of the women's league, the way you anecdotally noted we do with buisness. They have been allowed to compete for quite some time now, so the fact that only recently have the media made a circus about a trans athlete in the olympics suggests to me that they likely do not possess any significant advantage - in my personal experience, I saw someone who could previously do 20 pushups when completely unfit struggle to do 1 a year after starting hormones, so I find it kind of hard to believe they retain any significant advantage, given enough time
We can say that we are humans, or evolved monkeys, or extremely processed stardust; all can be correct, but laws only apply to humans, and no one gets out of jail by claiming to be an inanimate object.
> If someone looks like a girl, acts like a girl, has had genital recontruction surgery, has a fashion sense, wears makeup, and generally is just another regular person on the street, then for any social interaction they are just like any girl.
Sure. I'm not advocating for genital fundamentalism. All I'm asking for is to be able to call someone who looks like a girl and acts like a girl a girl, and vice versa.
> All I'm asking for is to be able to call someone who looks like a girl and acts like a girl a girl, and vice versa.
And if they're deeply uncomfortable with this, and would prefer you remember to use "they", you're not harmed and should defer.
You may have to take a little extra effort to tell someone "They present as female but prefer 'they'" at some point. It's a little bit of cognitive load, but the kind of courtesy we can extend even to vague acquaintances.
And, you know-- if you screw up in good faith, they should be understanding. Of course, there's enough people screwing it up on purpose to be hostile for political and ideological reasons that it's harder for people in this situation to discern whether it's really good faith.
My other choice is to lie, to willfully mislead whoever I'm talking to (probably a friend). Again, people might not like being called rich or privileged or out of touch, but we would never dream of saying this means you shouldn't call them that.
No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misunderstanding that are mislead.
No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. Calling someone who is unlike a female in most ways "she" is deceptive even if you consider it "correct", in the same way as making a tomato dish and calling it a fruit salad.
There's no "keeping up" with an unnatural category. It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
> It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
> If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
What languages and cultures would those be? (The example usually given is "two spirit", but (as has been more widely reported recently) that was largely a fabrication)
Lots of languages have complete gender neutrality in pronouns. They often include arbitrarily or self-assigned signifiers or honorifics, which isn't too far from the direction we seem to be evolving towards. E.g. Kurdish, the Turkic languages, Tagalog (although Spanish influences have caused some appearance of -a and -o suffixes), Armenian, Estonian, etc.
Some languages assign gender to everything grammatically.
English is a rare case of a language without very little grammatical gender except personal pronouns. The only other language that I know of with this characteristic is Persian. Singular "they" dates back to middle English.
Sure, it's possible to not make a distinction at all. But no natural language has a male/female distinction that makes the kind of exceptions that trans people want for themselves.
Plenty of languages have very arbitrary and complex rules for pronouns or other signifiers. You wanting these to be, in English, very closely tied to specific characteristics of expressed gender similar to traditional usage doesn't make it have to be so.
Plenty of humans live in a language where you can't figure out what's in people's pants or whether they're likely to wear a skirt without someone explicitly telling you. Maybe it's time to shrug, and realize that language of English is morphing enough that you're going to experience this same difficulty. Your only choice is whether you passive-aggressively refer to people in ways that they don't like or not.
What's with showing up every day or two to poke at this with a two sentence reply, when you're active elsewhere on hacker news much more often? Just trollin'?
> You wanting these to be, in English, very closely tied to specific characteristics of expressed gender similar to traditional usage doesn't make it have to be so.
Right back at you - it's your side that's trying to impose changes to the meaning of these pronouns by fiat. You can start using then differently if you want, but it's incredibly entitled to demand others conform to your novel definitions.
> Plenty of humans live in a language where you can't figure out what's in people's pants or whether they're likely to wear a skirt without someone explicitly telling you.
I don't object to neutral statements. I object to deliberately misleading ones.
> What's with showing up every day or two to poke at this with a two sentence reply, when you're active elsewhere on hacker news much more often? Just trollin'?
Quite the opposite; this is such a fraught topic that I'm being very careful about what I write, because I know I won't be given the benefit of the doubt over any slight misspeaking.
> Right back at you - it's your side that's trying to impose changes to the meaning of these pronouns by fiat. You can start using then differently if you want, but it's incredibly entitled to demand others conform to your novel definitions.
It's not really "my side". Lots of people are asking me to call them differently, and I'm complying. I think people who don't listen to polite requests about how to address others are rude. I think language is moving, and that people who insist to keep older conventions at all costs are A) generally on the wrong side of history, and B) rude.
Someone may have learned growing up that calling a black person a "Negro" was a polite form of address, and that "moron" is an accurate, impartial label. But it stopped being so. Trying to pedantically cling to something that now many people consider insensitive or rude is not great.
And, language moves on. We can assume a bit less from certain pronouns about what's in someone's pants or what they might wear. Of course, we could already assume a lot less about those things than a hundred years before.
