Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

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This horrified me. Medicine is the only place biological sex really maters. It’s our current understanding of the biological mechanisms of human sexual characteristics that enables the very treatments transgender individuals have today!

I’m supportive of all the inclusive language stuff, we actually need more of this assertive “that is not appropriate” attitude out in the world beyond university campuses to push back against socially accepted sexism and racism. However the phrase “biological sex” must be defended, the fact we have two primary (I’m aware there are more) chromosomal types XX and XY and these drive huge swaths of human biology both sexual and otherwise is critically important. Medicine is rooted in our fundamental biology, including countless aspects affected by our genetics and basic sexual development, and denial of any of these things brings only ignorance and lower quality healthcare.

I’m still struggling to understand how this has gotten as far as the stories that article is telling. I just I don’t know how to express how furious and saddened the notion of people acting this way makes me.

So, ok, without attempting to justify here, what's going on is that the word 'woman' (used in OP) and the word 'female' (used by you) are taken by some folks (an increasing tranche) to mean different things.

Like, I would consider myself a woman, but not female.

I'm not really interested in debating this; in my mouth, it's descriptive linguistics and anthropology, not an ontological claim.

I do however agree that the obsession my fellow progressives have with terminology belies a deeper fecklessness. Ultimately, it's a form of procrastination that distracts from deeper cultural transformation.

I would that we evaluate every speaker by the measure of their empathy.

When I was a PhD student in philosophy, we called this the 'principle of charity', and, like climate change, I feel its progressive loss with a deep sense of dread.

An ability to put oneself in the shoes of a very-different other is the hallmark of a wise person, and wisdom is retreating faster than glaciers.

No need to justify at all, and thanks for such a thoughtful reply! Your point about descriptive statements vs ontological facts is exactly what to me feels like the core issue. The intersection of overloaded terminology, the broader social aspects of language dynamics, and efforts to better ourselves as a society through various progressive efforts…

I don’t like being stuck with inadequate terminology and like unnecessary imprecision even more. As a society we have reached a point where the simplistic “male”/“man” and “female”/“woman” are now clearly inadequate on several fronts. Up till now it seemed as though each field of human endeavour using these terms was making up their own meanings as was appropriate for that field, and each field was being pushed back on (rightfully so) by progressive people trying to make things better. But what scares me is this recent shift to considering such words inappropriate in of themselves.

My fear and opposition here specifically stems from the actions people appear to be taking that are preventing the education of a group of trained professionals from containing information about a fundamental aspect of the biological functioning of a human being. I’m no more attached to the current paradigm of medicine using “male”/“man” and “female”/“woman” than I am to calling the t-shirt I’m wearing “navy blue” or “dark blue”.

Your point about empathy is very important, in my mind we need to have more empathy when dealing with fields like medicine where it’s going to be hardest to separate their work from biological foundations. I also think that if the terms in use currently are inadequate then just as we have seen the growth of the term “cis-gender” we may just need new terms of a similar nature for medical professionals to talk about these important biological details. If this is necessary then let’s get it done and end the distraction over a field that has much bigger problems to focus on.

If we educate a generation of doctors with an inadequate understanding of human biology, I fear for the future. It’s a hard enough profession without being taught less (not wrong, just less) because of medical educators being concerned about offending their students. The terms used to teach a medical student will have infinitely less impact on them than what lies in the actual practice of medicine. the feel of a patients ribs breaking while performing CPR, patients that die from bleeding out, children in palliative care slowly dying of cancer. I have had the pleasure of knowing a few good doctors and I know I could never do their job, I struggle to imagine the sorts of people that might raise these complaints as students having the kind of charitable and empathetic personality that makes a good doctor.

Yours is a fair and reasoned response. It’s being downvoted is probably chilling; it would be for me. I’m far more worried about that in a place like this than I am about illiberalism on campus.

> Like, I would consider myself a woman, but not female.

If you are adult and it's genetically possible for you to form oocytes (doesn't mean physiologically since you can be sterile), then by biological definition you are a woman.

edit: there's adj female which just means belonging to a girl/woman in humans

Society gets to live with the monster that it created. There are people who believe that a one-mother-and-one-father family structure matters, and they were shouted down years ago and told they were bigots and that the slippery slope was an obvious fallacy.

Saying "pregnant patient" instead of "pregnant woman" doesn't somehow stop us from learning about biological mechanisms related to sex. No one is denying that having XX chromosomes increases your risk of getting pregnant -- they're just saying that you shouldn't use language that incorrectly assumes than everyone in that situation is a woman. The absurd claim that people in medical schools are denying the existence of biological sex requires that you take everything said in bad faith and assume the dumbest possible interpretation. For example:

> > “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

> In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

When people say that biological sex is a construct, they're not saying that humans are actually sexless beings like angels and physical differences between men and women are just a lie made up by the patriarchy -- no one seriously believes such a thing. They're just saying that the way that we classify biological sex is based on our socially constructed ideas about gender. For example, children who are born with features of both sexes are often given surgery to make their bodies fit with the norm for one gender or the other so that they can grow up as a "normal" boy or girl. In other words, the sex someone is deemed to be is based on how we expect them to live in our society. Similarly, when trans people go through medical transition, some of their sex features change and others don't. Whether you view them as having changed their biological sex is a "is it hot in Athens" sort of question, and it's probably going to be affected by your social views on trans people. You might not view issues like this as sufficient to call biological sex a "construct," but you should be able to understand how someone might come to that view without believing outrage-driven fantasies about medical students thinking that sex is imaginary.

Is gravity a "construct"? Is genetics a "construct"? What exactly do you claim is the difference between a "construct" and "non-construct"? And what gives you the authority to allow certain views about said "constructs" and forbid others?

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