Comment by undoware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by undoware | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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

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.

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