Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

There are few trigger words I detest more than “warfighters” to refer to what we already have a word for- soldier.

Soldier specifically refers to the Army. Marines are called Marines. Naval personnel are called sailors. Air Force personnel were called "airmen" but I assume they've probably come up with something gender-neutral by now. No idea what Space Force settled on but "spacemen" would be hilarious. Warfighter is meant to be a blanket term for all uniformed personnel of the armed forces that doesn't only include the Army.

At least that is the US terminology. I can't speak for other countries.

"guardians" are the term used for members of the space force.

Don’t forget ‘houseless’ or ‘transient’ to describe homeless. Or ‘bodies with vaginas’ to describe women. Or ‘latinx’ to describe latinos. Pretty sure all of these are exonyms. The linguistic contortions we have to perform to describe things we already had perfectly acceptable words for is absurd and rarely serves the person or thing being described.

As I understand it, "people with <x> genitalia" is a trans-accepting way of discussing medical issues without rejecting anyone's gender identification. Having a vagina is no longer considered necessary or sufficient to be called a "woman".

I’m not the OP, but I think we deeply erred by conflating gender and biological sex characteristics into a single word. Unfortunately, the solution to retain men/women for gender and use more specific terminology for sex is problematic.

- There’s a greater argument to be made for binary biological sex, and you can attach obvious descriptions to it to make the two categories distinct. - Gender on the other hand is more fluid (both historically in its expression, and in between cultures). - Biological based terminology can be used historically (e.g. Women’s History)

But this is all off topic, so I’ll stop here.

Lets just all go back to calling them mentally ill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com