Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I think trans people are deserving of respect, basic rights, and civil liberties. However I also think that trans right activists of the current era have overreached in trying to force everyone to believe trans people are whatever gender they declare, rather than a separate third category, as other older cultures have recognized. I find the resulting awkward nomenclature pushed by activists in the last few years to be both incorrect and harmful. It’s incorrect because a “woman” is an “adult human female” by definition (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/woman), meaning a grown up biological female, where female means of the sex capable of reproducing. I think using newly made up phrases like “pregnant people” or “birthing people” are harmful because they constitute an erasure of identity (for women and mothers). They are not just a denial of truth or difference of opinion, and they will lead to more extreme distortions. For example, the American Medical Association is about to begin lobbying to stop noting sex on birth certificates (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ama-to-urge-end-of-sex...), because the AMA believes people can determine what sex (in addition to “gender”) they identify with.

The rapid institutionalization of a new radical set of definitions and scrutiny (socially and professionally) over allowed/disallowed speech is disturbing, particularly because it reflects the desires of a small but vocal activist group and not broader society. The bureaucracy of diversity officers referenced in this blog post is an enabling mechanism for this type of distortion, because free inquiry and dissent are discouraged by implicit fear of reprisal, and this body therefore acts more like a “ministry of truth” from the Soviet era. I’m not surprised to see this Professor end the post by asking that 1984 once again be made required reading for Harvard students.

There are certainly plenty of small and vocal activist groups on both sides of the political spectrum that annoy me, including in academia, which is where I work. But the weird thing is that I have never really felt my colleagues or any task force volunteers being intolerant to my opinion, even if they (incorrectly) perceive my opinion as transphobic.

Sure, ridiculous situations like the one in the article happen, but usually, in my experience, it is pretty easy to have a conversation and figure out where civilized disagreement and/or miscommunication lies.

Hence, I am always perplexed when someone says that they feel it is becoming difficult to dissent.

Please define “woman”.

This is not sarcasm. What you’ve generally been taught about the binariness of these terms is an oversimplification to say the least, and wrong. Read Galileo’s Middle Finger as an excellent primer.

We shall see who's the last man standing after the upcoming civil war.

The intellectual aggrandization of what are actually classification issues at the margins is the problem.

That the edge points of group inclusion become more subjective or inconclusive, does not abnegate the very obvious reality of overall group determination.

We fully accept that there is a material ratio of people who don't fit clear categorization ... but most people do ... and that' really important artifact of sex and gender.

It's not 'grey'.

It's mostly 'pretty black and pretty white' with some interesting bits in the middle.

We are 'mostly' binary, it's really obvious, and fighting against that fact is a woeful place for people and institutions to lose all of their credibility, which over time they will, and it will be bad.

'Wrong side of history' bad.

We're already trying to convince people that vaccines are generally safe, and to accept that 'the grey areas' of gender do truly exist and to stop hating on trans people, to stop being racist etc.. Those are the important things.

And from a populist perspective, I can't imagine a bigger losing strategy than shaming people for saying 'Pregnant Women'.

There are so many obvious 'good fights' to be worked on (not just social issue either), let's focus there.

Imagine going to a fast food shop to order a pizza. The Italian cashier says they don't have pizzas. You can clearly see bunch of pizzas displayed next to him, with price tags and everything. What's the problem then? Well, according to the Italian cashier, this is not really a pizza. It does not fit the definition of pizza they have in Italy. If you want to order it, you have to say "Give me that bread with meat and vegetables on top". If you go to another shop and say that, they will look you like you are mental.

This is the problem. For every definition of woman I can give you, you can easily dispute with counter argument. So we get "something". Undefined, because every definition is flawed. We end up with an overcomplicated system because we want to be accurate. If you think woman is a woman and pizza is a pizza - you are wrong. And we make so much fuss about it.

Isn't this the crux of the issue? We used to have a clear definition of "woman", people with XX chromosomes who have the genetic code to produce ovum and bear young.

But now, there is no accepted definition of woman - because of trans-people, or intersex, or people say that women who are sterile are still women. And they are all correct.

So there is no definition of "woman" so anyone can declare their womanhood - which means there will eventually be no womens clubs, womens shelters, womens sports or womens scholarships - because without a definition of what a woman is, anyone who claims womanhood can have those too.

Is that a problem? Who knows, and only time will tell.

You can even dig up 16th century dictionaries that were more nuanced than that. (Woman literally meant married one then. Maiden was used for unmarried. Wife came later.) Current dictionaries mix the terms by the way.

Sterile women were still women. As typically were some other accidents of nature like testosterone-resistant males.

Language changes over time, and so we assigned the word woman recently more to a gender rather than social status or sex.

Polish is more permissive in this particular "pregnant woman" alleged issue, we have a gendered noun equivalent "pregnant" or long form "woman in pregnancy". Though nobody is yet using form "man in pregnancy" or "pregnant man" except as a joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com