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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

Being accommodative of small minorities seems to be a kind, and thoughtful thing to do.

However having large majorities(95%+ of the population) make concessions in order to accommodate a small group imposes a cost (however small) born by many to the benefit of a few. My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off? What’s the cost benefit analysis? At some point where do people say the cost of accommodating this 1/100k/1m people by another 300m+ people is not a worthwhile use of societal resources?

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Political data would suggest that we aren't actually being more empathic or accommodating, actually, the exact opposite!

Online communities are extremely disproportionally composed of people who fall into the Cluster B/emotionally dysregulated/CPTSD spectrum.

Internet addiction or "Internet Use Disorder" is nearly entirely composed of people in this camp. Same goes for trans people - this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!

Leadership should not use Internet communities as the north star for guiding the culture shifts of wider society, it will obviously lead to (to use a British understatement) social friction. We risk crumbling the institution of science and higher education due to catering to the wants of Cluster B, all just so these people can move on to the next subject to split into good and evil parts.

The focus should be on providing help to Cluster B, NOT about letting them take control of society and crumble all of our institutions to pieces over dissociative morality plays, making everyone's health worse in the process.

Politicians, like many performers, are addicted to attention. Perhaps as much as they're addicted to power. The Internet is irresistible catnip for them and part of the reason why the chronically online are able to have so much impact on our 'leaders'.

I agree with everything here but the presumption that "Leadership" is taking its cues from "internet communities" does not compute for me.

I for one am not so sure this so-called "leadership" cares for family, as a social unit. Accordingly, there is (for me at least) the possibility that this "leadership" is using a pretext to achieve related but orthogonal goals, since purely on rational, moral, and ethical basis, causing this much social division and disruption over this niche issue does not make any sense.

> this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!

What exactly are you saying here? That all the trans kids had cluster B personality disorders? You said and/or but the rest of you post seems to be implying that all trans people have cluster B personality disorders. There are lots of other reasons to be a psychiatric inpatient that are not cluster B personality disorders, and CPTSD is also not a personality disorder of any type.

It's not particularly suprising that trans kids end up as inpatients in psychiatric wards. My experience with them is that they know that the vast majority of the world absolutely hates them. I mean, I heard about this one internet comment that implied that they all have cluster B personality disorders. Absolutely shocking.

Your whole thesis reads weird. There are estimated to be about a million trans people in the US. You really think that many are "extremely online?" Do they all have cluster B personality disorders? Are none of them living quiet lives?

Do you do this with all minorities?

Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together. We are, after all, in a thread about making sense of how a population the size of a rounding error got to rewrite the literature on birth.

No judgement, I don't judge people on mental health. Unless someone is calling to make institutional changes that undermine the public's trust in it, then I will exert my right to judge these people's character.

> Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together.

You didn't do this though. You just said that your ex-girlfriend worked in a psychiatric ward and there were lots of people with cluster B and lots of trans kids. It was honestly just a mess of associations.

Psychiatric comorbidities in transgender people are reasonably well studied so you don't have to guess here. There are a number of small studies involving presentations to psychiatrists, but this is no longer the way that most trans people seek care, so the results are biased to complicated cases. Here is a large study comparing gender-minority coded files in a group of 53M patients:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/trgh.2019.0029

As you'd expect, depression and anxiety are extremely common. Cluster B personality disorders are at a prevalence of 3.4%, though again, attention must be paid to the limitations of the study which fails to capture transgender people seeking care outside of this system. While it's certainly elevated of the general population, please internalize the fact that 96-97% of transgender people do not have a cluster B personality disorder.

As I've pointed out above, minorities are medicine's business. We absolutely write things in a way to include everyone, because we definitely want to get the most at-risk people out there. I don't care what you think about transgender men, you should want them to seek reproductive care if they are pregnant, because there is potentially another person involved or not, depending on what they choose to do.

Like I said above. There are about 40,000 people living with cystic fibrosis in the USA, about 1/3200 live births. It's really expensive to keep these people alive, with replacement enzymes, biologics, very, very frequent hospital admissions to the point where pediatrics calls them "CF tune-ups" and eventually lung or possibly multi-organ transplants. They do, however, have intrinsic human value, so we like to keep them alive. I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here, especially given that in a care context we still say "pregnant woman" when it's specifically a woman that I'm talking about, even though we say "pregnant people" in the abstract.

> I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here

That's the assumption that is (indirectly) being questioned here. I don't have strong opinion either way, just trying to show how to steelman better.

It's not even accommodation to small minorities, it's accommodation to an ideology. Activists push this conflation to make it appear about minorities and not their ideology. They present it as though minorities all have the same opinion and then weaponize your compassion to get compliance.

"Oh, this is what minorities want. Ok, I'm a good person, I want to respect their wishes."

What you may not realize is that many gay and trans people strongly disagree with gender ideology and do not want this.

Indeed, they don't all have the same opinion!

The loud, aggressive, too online activists do not speak for everyone.

I would think ideological minority is a kind of thing that is worth considering accommodating too, but the problem is the relevant activists actively want to harm people with opposing ideology (the chosen method of enforcement is trying to get people fired and otherwise ruined). So they have no interest in ideological accommodation themselves.

Great point. In other words, we are experiencing the usual failure mode to liberalism: it can be taken advantage of by non liberal actors. Not sure what the restoring force is to prevent this.

You ignore them. And if that doesn’t work, you politely - but firmly - ask them to leave.

The reason that this is considered a failure mode is that these systems are set up so that you can't just ignore activists who speak for, or claim to be speaking for, an approved minority. Just saying "no, I'm going to ignore your demands" gets you hurt, because you are required to take positive action.

True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate whether women have penises or if men can get pregnant.

It's possible that this becomes something that is no longer an academic question.

> True, but in many respects that failure mode is academic, and localized. Normal people who aren't way too online don't sit around and debate...

But for instance, journalists are often "way too online," and people in general seem to have a bad habit of seeing social media activity as some kind of representation of society as a whole (because it's easy). It doesn't matter what "normal people" think or do, if the media as a whole starts saying something different.

Also true, journalists (the people who literally know nothing) have outsized power and influence in controlling what these "normal" people see as, well, normal.

I don't want to get in a flame war, but I guess my comments are meant to convey a perspective that is optimistic that these "normals" will reject and ignore the machinations of the way too online tech people who, again, are the only ones that want to debate basic biology for some reason. About half of my life has been on a farm or in the military, so it's amusing seeing all of this debate about "gender" and "sex". Again, normal people don't think about this.

I corrected a Latino that the proper term was Latinx - and learned that the ideology is def different than the minority :)

I find it curious that the dems chose to run this renaming experiment on latinos. They could've tried to push "blax" - at least you wouldn't need to break your tongue to pronounce it. My theory is they wanted to see how much they can bend the public opinion, and an awkward word would better test compliance.

It's not something that "the dems" made up. It seems to have started as a self-descriptive term for nonbinary Latinos, although the history's not 100% clear. But as the source article describes, there's a large and influential segment of the populace who believes that in order to be inclusive they should use trans-focused language as much as possible. So people started saying "Latinx" for precisely the same reasons as they stopped saying "pregnant women".

The word "black" does not have a gender connotation. "Latino" is a masculine word, the feminine equivalent being "Latina". That's the problem (if you consider that a problem)

The term "Latinx" was invented by Latinos.

It's also wildly unpopular among many Latinos, because there are hundreds of millions of them and they don't all have the same opinions. On the whole it seems to be a flop. But let's at least credit Latinos as a group with the agency to come up with their own ideas, good or bad, hey?

Do you have any evidence you can share about who invented “Latinx”? I’ve lived in Central America for a few years now, and the only time I’ve heard this term, or related ones, here, is when someone was mocking it. Of course that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t invented by some Latinos. But I only encounter it used with pride when I’m reading NPR articles in English.

Who exactly used it first appears to be lost to history, but the first known published academic appearance seems to have been in the Fall 2004 volume of a bilingual journal called Feministas Unidas. It was used there is passing, without explanation, apparently assuming the readers were already familiar with it. https://people.wku.edu/inma.pertusa/encuentros/FemUn/newslet...

There are reports of online usage of both "Latinx" and "Latin@" going back to the late '90s. There are other references to academic uses that I haven't been able to track to original sources after a brief search.

Mainstream media (in English or Spanish) only appears to have discovered it in the last few years. I do get the impression that a lot of early adoption was from English-speaking Latinos in the US, which might explain the apparent incompatibility with actual Spanish. I don't read Spanish myself, so there's only so far I can pursue this. But it's not a recent invention of clueless white people.

"Latine" is a compromise I've seen proposed recently. https://callmelatine.wordpress.com/

I really appreciate these details; thank you.

On “Latine”: at a recent gathering of friends I mistakenly said «miembre» for “member” instead of «miembro» (I’m still learning Spanish). This led to a certain amount of hilarity and jokes aimed at the progressive gender-neutralizing crowd, that likes to use «e» endings instead of the correct ones. It’s a small extremist minority, and a general butt of jokes here. So «Latine» would be seen as just as ridiculous as «Latinx».

"Latinx" is a germanic language construction grafted onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and is non-pronounceable in Spanish. "Latine" is, perhaps, pronounceable, but is a confusing suffix. My recommendation is to drop this silliness. Germanic languages (English is one) and Romantic languages (like Spanish, French etc) have rules and trying to bleed rules from one into the other leads to the hilarity that you describe in your comment.

(I speak conversational German, a little Spanish, native English)

No actual evidence, but I get the impression that it was invented by the tiny fraction of Latino people who are at liberal arts colleges in the US, or involved in ultra-niche politics.

“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though. The former has the advantage that it is straightforward to pronounce in Spanish (I assume for “Latin@s” you’d use the cumbersome “Latinas y Latinos”, and “LatinX” is just impossible).

>“Latine” and “Latin@” (and similar constructions for other -o/-a words) are not unheard of in some actual Latin American countries, though.

"Latrine", " Latin@", and "Latinx" are almost entirely unheard of in actual Latin American countries, though.

The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language is the governing body that defines what official Spanish is. If you can find a single academy that lists "Latinx" or "Latin@" as official Spanish, I'll eat my hat.

These neologisms are nothing more than US leftist linguistic imperialism.

I have actually encountered “Latine” and “Latin@” in Colombia. The academies you mention don’t determine how people speak in practice.

/r/thathappened

Why would you correct someone about what they call themselves? That seems incredibly condescending.

Yes, exactly.

I’m involved with several gay organizations - one professional and one centered around gay athletics.

In both cases there are a small group of activists that are trying to erase gay and lesbian identity, and all mentions of gender, from the org to be more trans- and non-binary-inclusive.

In one case a trans board member didn’t feel represented by the organization name (which includes “gay”) because they now identify as straight with their new gender identity. And for this they demanded the org with thousands of gay members should be renamed.

People were afraid to push back out of fear of being labeled transphobic.

See r/detrans for how detransitioners are bullied mercilessly.

Whenever people make this big deal about undermining the meaning of biology by using gender identity as the center of everyday language, all I can think is it's literally no different to adoption, which we all accept.

An adoptive parent is a parent. We don't specify "adoptive" all the time, and it'd be rude to refuse to refer to adoptive parents as parents because they aren't biologically related to their children in the same way.

We have done exactly this kind of language change in schools over that issue too, teachers often prefer "guardians" to "parents" in some contexts these days because some children won't live with parents, things like that. To pretend this hurts people is just counter to these examples we see in reality, it's just trying to use the words that apply to everyone, not just the most common case. The cost is so small, the attempts to push back on it seem actively spiteful, because there is no reason to contest it generally. The thing it brings to mind is the "but marriage means a man and a woman" argument from the attempts to stop marriage equality.

The costs are small but so are the benefits.

Treating others with respect, dignity and kindness is a small cost for us, but could mean the world to a person who faces discrimination.

I agree but I also see low hanging fruit with real data backing it that I'd like to see addressed with more urgency than this. My buddy who is a lefty factory worker complains that it is more dangerous for him to operate certain equipment. And indeed studies seem to suggest this. But the talking heads don't get into this much.

I am somehow more interested in people who commit suicide, face work and housing discrimination over some OSHA violations, on the other hand, and unlike you, I can't see why those orthogonal issues can not be tackled in parallel. Care to enlighten me?

https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/20/colora...

There is absolutely no discrimination or data pointing the bigotry and hatred towards LGBTQ people, absolutely zero.

In case it wasn't obvious, I was being sarcastic.

Look each and every one of those people up, and tell me they are not real, tell me they didn't die as a consequence of people like you; unempathetic, ignorant, and full of bigotry for people who drew a bad card at birth.

https://imgur.com/gallery/u6djZYX

https://i.imgur.com/8EHugaA.jpeg

Agreed but scale has to be a factor. Millions of American children are in the custody of grandparents or the foster system at any given time.

Secondly, there is way more friction here than with a term like guardian, which represents a situation that is universal thoughtout humanity, and always has been. The common language only changed because of the need for accuracy and inclusiveness in things like school handbooks, not because it wasn't fully understood and accepted by the population as being an inevitable element of human populations for anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 children.

"Parent -> Guardian" or "adoptive parent -> parent" hardly matter because there's very little chance of being surprised by the change, the terms are nearly equivalent and the differences are unimportant in almost all contexts.

In contrast the differences between "man" and "woman" are stark and matter in all kinds of contexts.

Why is it OK to not call cis-women what they want to be called?

They do not want to be called "menstruators", they want to be called women.

Why does their opinion about what they want to be called not matter?

> Why does their opinion about what they want to be called not matter?

I mean it does, but it doesn't override everyone else's. Consider people with with albinism. A medical text should not refer to people with albinism as albino men, even if some men might prefer to be called "men" instead of albinos. That'd mean calling albino women "men" which they clearly are not.

In the same way, assuming you accept that trans men are men (which the author purports to) calling people who menstruate women is calling these men something that they are not. So you need to use something that actually describes what you are trying to describe. This is also true since not all biological women menstruate, so even there if you use the term "women" instead of "people who menstruate" when discussing something medical that has to do with menstruating, you've now used an inaccurate term that describes a larger group of people than you are discussing.

>>I mean it does, but it doesn't override everyone else's.

That same logic should apply to people who claim to be the opposite gender from what they were born.

"Women" as a term is incredibly useful and descriptive when referring to females. It's strongly correlated with multiple important traits. When its definition is changed to mean any one who assigns the word 'woman' to themselves, the word conveys no meaningful information.

>> When its definition is changed to mean any one who assigns the word 'woman' to themselves, the word conveys no meaningful information.

This is the heart of the matter, and they even admit as much when they have to use terms like AFAB or ciswoman. These distinctions were not needed until they intentionally made the term "woman" meaningless.

That's what's a social construct is, and unless you make everyone you meet drop pants and show off their genitals, which you then inspect for surgical scars etc then run a DNA test to make sure they aren't intersex - you make a quick guess based on limited information that alligns with your previous experiences with people who also shared those traits.

You're mad at passing culture, not pronouns.

> unless you make everyone you meet drop pants and show off their genitals

What's the obsession with this phrase, as if everyone is going to say "Oh no, we can't try to prevent rape anymore because we'd have to look at people's genitals to accomplish it. haha, silly us."

For one, we had a solution to this. It was your ID which listed your sex.

And two, if people screw with ID laws enough that it can't be trusted then you will be required to go to a doctor and drop your pants down to have your biology categorized as a requirement to enter female spaces and events.

Repackaged homophobic rehtoric.

Not all trans people are trans-women, and if you wanted to prevent rape you'd do better to ban politicians and priests from bathrooms

> if you wanted to prevent rape you'd do better to ban politicians and priests

We already had banned all male politicians and priests from female spaces simply by virtue of their being male. You're weakening that protection by letting them claim to be female to avoid being removed.

https://fairplayforwomen.com/prison-review/

> Not all trans people are trans-women

And yet trans women (and males by any other ID) are the risk.

> Repackaged homophobic rehtoric

Wow, no. What's homophobic is you trying to use homosexuality to defend men in women's spaces. This is why the LGB Alliance is fighting for homosexual and sex-based rights and separation from the trans-queer movement.

Lmao, just no. Grow up

We do often make a quick guess about a person's gender, but that doesn't invalidate anything I said. The two genders themselves once referred strictly to biological sex so when we said someone is a "woman", everyone knew what traits would be highly likely to be associated with that person.

There is a clear biological definition of the sexes (down to the genetic level if you want). Rather than changing definitions in language, wouldn’t it make more sense to add to our current definitions and language to accommodate the social flavours of sexuality?

A more adaptive definition of gender might be more suitable: social gender, body gender and biological gender.

E.g. bisexual trans women.

On the other hand, adoptive parents don't insist that there is literally no difference between them and a bio parent. In fact, if you take adoption home studies and do the training (in california at least) to adopt a child, you will learn the many ways in which you are not like biological family. My wife and I went through most of the process, but never ended up going through with the adoption (open to it in the future). We were told in no uncertain terms that pretending you are basically a family like everyone else and not being truthful with your child about their origins is bad for the child.

Thus, it should not be offensive to say things like 'trans women are biologically male, thus have biological male advantages in things like sports'. This is a controversial statement. However, there is a section of the trans community who will insist that trans women are actually literally women like all other women.

I don’t think the fact is controversial, it’s just that the fact lacks context of being directed at a harassed minority. “There are higher crime statistics in majority black communities” is also a true but if you constantly go around screaming it we will wonder what your intentions are, education of facts?

Adoptive parents don't call anyone a bigot for not pretending that they gave birth to their adopted children.

And biological parents don’t believe society will collapse and people will forget how to make babies if I call them “Guardians”

Keep in mind it's easy to break down the adoption argument.

In many situations, the adoptive parent is considered the parent, if the parent and child are OK with it, so is society in general. But at a doctor appointment, it is imperative to distinguish between biological and civil parenthood.

But apart from that: I (and many others nowadays) are OK with considering male to female trans as women. If you want to be a woman and act like a woman, I'll consider you a woman regardless of your biological sex.

But I'm not OK with referring to people as menstruators and semen donors: I think that's humiliating.

I guess I draw the line there: I respect trans identity, but I don't want that every single text must think about every single minority and accommodate them at all costs.

I have a friend with 1 arm but I wouldn't be outraged if someone said "people have two arms". I wouldn't even think about it, and neither would he: it's generally true, and if it's not said in bad faith, who cares?

Talk about walking on egg shells! Let's drop the thought police act, which some people like way to much, and let's fucking try to live together.

> apart from that: I (and many others nowadays) are OK with considering male to female trans as women. If you want to be a woman and act like a woman, I'll consider you a woman regardless of your biological sex.

I'm fine to let trans men into male spaces around me because that's my decision, as a man, to waive some of my rights temporarily.

But for us to declare that a man can be a woman is giving away women's rights, and that's not okay.

Online pregnancy literature is part of medicine. Including marginalized groups is absolutely crucial and is done or should be done in virtually all aspects of medicine. Your intake forms for a child shouldn't have spaces labelled "mother" and "father" because same sex couples exist. You don't ask a woman "what does your husband do" or a man "what does your wife do" because you never know if they're in a same sex relationship, and there is a significant history of medicine treating queer people poorly and you're at risk of ruining rapport with your patient before you even get a chance to develop it. We don't call people struggling with addiction "addicts" or "junkies" because they still deserve help, and we don't want them walking out the door because they're already suspicious that you're going to abuse them.

Even outside of social denigrated groups, medicine is all about accommodating that 10% or 1% or 0.01%. I spent quite a bit of time on lectures about cystic fibrosis patients considering there are only about 40,000 people living with CF in all of the US, about 1/3200 live births. It costs real money to keep these people alive, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. Somehow "pregnant people" is an absolute deal breaker though, where we start talking about "is it worth to accommodate them?"

All of this boils down to people saying "you can't say woman anymore." Except you absolutely can, if you're talking about a pregnant woman, just like you can say "husband and wife" if that applies to a married couple, because those are specific situations. But when medicine speaks, it has to speak to everyone, especially those most at risk.

I regularly consume parenting advice for mothers. It has never hurt me, as a man. Not once. To pretend that gendered words are harmful in such a way is really ludicrous to me

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an interesting take on these type of controversies that is hard to argue with in his essay titled, "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority."

Basically, if a small percentage of the population is motivated enough and the rest of the population is mainly indifferent to the cause then the minority will get their way.

Most people have other things to do than to expend any energy on this. Plus, the magnification afforded by the internet leads to what we have.

But in an interesting way, the argument has turned into minority view vs minority view. I think we'll be reading about this argument for a very very long time since no single side has an advantage over the other.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Sometimes there are ways to be inclusive without undertaking a cost... E.g. talk about "health issues that arise during pregnancy".

But those zero or low cost mechanisms don't achieve the advocacy goals that some are chasing. For advocacy purposes it needs to be visible, not silently accommodating.

And then you end up with the crude, objectifying and biologically reductive alternatives to "women" like calling them "menstruators" or "breeders".

One doesn't need to abandon politely accommodating to reject being made a tool of someone's disruptive advocacy.

> And then you end up with the crude, objectifying and biologically reductive alternatives to "women" like calling them "menstruators" or "breeders".

What’s objectifying is deciding that women are defined by fertility.

Keep reducing and they’re just people. Why the insistence on being a “woman” at all? What’s wrong with just being trans? Or you know, just an effeminate male or butch woman?

When I admitted I was gay I didn’t want to still be called a straight male.

I have a friend whose ovaries were removed when she was a child, and, as a result, she was never fertile. She's not trans, an effeminate male or a butch woman. This would be the case even if she did not receive hormone therapy. She's a woman, and it's not 'reductive' to separate being a woman from reproductive function or hormones.

No but that’s a man made operation. Doesn’t change the origins biological sex. I think rather than trying to change gender from the original biological meaning, maybe (like someone else here said) treat it like a religious identity.

You can have a “personality” trait of masculine, feminine, etc.

I said women shouldn’t be defined by their fertility. This is inclusive of XX women. You blindly interpreted it as an argument to separate biological sex from gender.

The comment I responded to claimed that referring to someone by a biological function such as menstruating was objectifying. I don’t think that follows, because being fertile is not a requirement to be a woman.

Further, if all that matters to you to define biological sex is karyotype regardless of biological expression, that is like a religion.

But she is still XX and was born with ovaries.

That’s irrelevant to the point. We should not define women by their fertility, therefore it is not objectifying to refer to some women by their fertility.

"We should not define women by their fertility"

Not all women can be pregnant, but a person who is pregnant is a woman.

Even if they are 46,XY with ovotestes?

Can they become pregnant? In any case we don't have to modify language for one in a billion freaks.

I have a friend who had a hysterectomy as a child because of cancer. She can't and never could have children. Is she not a woman because she isn't 'so

Not when we are talking about women who are currently pregnant.

Women are defined by being able to give birth during their fertile years if they are healthy.

The issue is that the costs of accomodating trans people are greatly exaggerated to push for discimination. This article is focused on language which is obviously of great importance to everyone involved. I support the writer's hurt feeling but you can't justify not accomodating people because it requires looking at words differently.

If you can just look at words differently... then the people being "accommodated" can just do exactly the same thing, in this case, and there is no reason to waste time energy or resources doing any of this.

It's worth asking whether anyone is actually being excluded merely because the words aren't generic enough.

We can accept that a very small portion of the population doesn't fit into the definitions we commonly use without having to abandon them. It's obvious with good intentions but it seems like a silly hill to die on.

Why can't we just accept as a community that when you say male/female there will always be a little [*] attached to it for the exceptions?

I am deeply uncomfortable in gendered spaces. Many places offer gender neutral spaces (eg restrooms that are all genders).

I don't require everyone to make me comfortable, but I do positively notice when someone does. If I go to my office and there are men's rooms, women's rooms, and all gender rooms, I do feel much less excluded.

Not everyone is like me, but thousands or millions are. I do feel excluded by gendered language, and it does impact my ability to get work done, navigate social situations, etc.

I think society at large can and should be much more inclusive to people who don't fall cleanly into man and woman, but in the specific case of pregnancy, it seems trying remove all references to gender is challenging.

> I am deeply uncomfortable in gendered spaces.

I'm not trans or any of that sort - I'm generally uncomfortable around people. What I don't understand is, why impose upon others? To me, that's my cross to bear.

I literally said I don't impose it on others. Others make attempts to accommodate me and I feel more included as a result.

If your workplace said, "we've got some private rooms to work if it would make you more comfortable, it'd be something you positively regard and would make you feel more included, right?

Ah, but the whole genesis of this discussion is that many people are trying to impose it on others.

I have absolutely no problem with gender neutral bathrooms. But I have a big problem with the name calling (“transphobe”), bullying, and shaming in some attempt to push an agenda where the upside is only fewer hurt feelings.

If I choose to say "pregnant people" and I explain that I'm choosing that word to intentionally include both pregnant women and pregnant non-women, is that shaming or bullying?

If I then go to my peers and say, "heads up, the phrase 'pregnant women' might not include everyone who is pregnant", and they say, "oh, that makes sense, let me adjust my own language!", I think that's probably not shaming or bullying either.

If, over time, those conversations spread and we see a general public movement to use "pregnant person", this again seems like good intentions without any particular agenda besides, "oh, of course. If we recognize trans men, then we should probably make sure we say pregnant people".

I don't think changing the language is bullying, shaming, or pushing an agenda - it's people making changes that are logically consistent with how they experience the world. Again: if trans men exist, then pregnancy must occur in men and women.

The reason you hear people react strongly is because they believe they have a simple logic, and people come in and say, "I deny that trans men exist, or I deny trans men are men."

That's a pretty strong thing to say and a pretty strong thing to hear.

> If I choose to say "pregnant people" and I explain that I'm choosing that word to intentionally include both pregnant women and pregnant non-women, is that shaming or bullying?

Are you really just talking about yourself? You don't also expect everyone else to use the same language? You don't want every corporate website, school newsletter, teacher's curriculum, every Tweet from a public person, random Reddit comments, etc to also use your preferred language?

Because that's what it's meant IRL.

I've heard 100 people on Reddit/Twitter saying "they just want to be left alone to do what they want" and "why do you care what people do with their own private lives (or in their bedroom)?". Then they spend all of their time gatekeeping and purity-testing the language and actions of every person they come into contact with.

I want to use language that makes trans parents feel included. That's it.

I'd encourage others to use that language and explain my reasoning (which is what I did above.) If they don't, I'm bummed out but I move on. I may think more negatively of that person in the future.

That's all. In real life and in internet life.

You’re absolutely free to do use whatever language you want, but your expectation that I do the same, implicit or otherwise, is where I draw the line.

I get it. You’re super hip.

But words are indeed meaningful and you don’t get to choose how I use them or what they mean to me. I have a wife, not a “partner”. She is a woman, not a “birthing person”.

Make up whatever new words of definitions you wish. Hell, create a new language if you want. But stop trying to make everyone else conform to your vocabulary that primarily exists to virtue signal and for attention seeking.

Well, she's both a pregnant person and a pregnant woman.

I don't believe I've ever said you couldn't choose the words you prefer to use for yourself. The most I'd say is, "here is the reasoning for why this might make some people feel excluded" and let you make your own choices.

You've responded quite aggressively to me, attacking positions I don't hold while also insulting me. (Ironically calling me super hip, virtue signaling, and attention seeking.)

I'm non-binary, it has nothing to do with any of the reasons you mentioned, it's just the language I use with my community, and explaining to others calmly and rationally why it helps some people feel included.

I hear you, but please also consider that almost all people (trans or otherwise) experience social discomfort.

For example, there are many more people who experience severe social anxiety than would identify as trans. Those people can have literal panic attacks and experience terrible fear and we aren’t considering redesigning society or language to accommodate them. Nor should we.

I'm curious why you feel this way. If we could find ways to make people with social anxiety more comfortable, why shouldn't we try to accommodate them?

It comes down to cost, and what costs society's are currently and consistently willing to bear. Would ADA laws have so much force if FDR were able bodied?

The cost that should be factored in is the people who seek external validation to feel happy with never be satisfied with just the first thing. They'll be constantly seeking new external places to become content again once the initial emotional wave passes.

Anxiety comes from within. You cannot reorganize all of reality to be perfectly comfortable to you specifically, because reality is shared with others. Your safe space is a cost for everyone else.

Fix your own head. It's more efficient.

If only it were so simple. We make adjustments for people with all manner of neuroatypical behaviors. While it may feel like we should be able to just "fix" a mental health issue, sometimes it's not so simple.

I'd prefer to live in a world where we support people in finding coping skills to work through their own anxieties AND we recognized some humans will always be outliers who would benefit from some affordances. We can do both.

I have what was once pretty serious social anxiety which is why I chose that example.

I view it as MY challenge, not everyone else’s.

Your emotions aren’t just these immutable, uncontrollable things that happen to you.

Discomfort very often is a signal that YOU need to make some internal change and grow as a person. It doesn’t mean that the world needs more bubble wrap so you feel safe.

> If I go to my office and there are men's rooms, women's rooms, and all gender rooms, I do feel much less excluded.

I'm not against gender neutral spaces. There's often no need to segregate by gender, and it makes no sense to do so if there is no need. What I don't understand is why you feel excluded.

I don't feel an affinity to a gender either, but I understand that bathrooms labelled "mens" are generally intended to apply to people with penises, and bathrooms labelled "womens" a generally intended to apply to people with vaginas. That has nothing to do with any feelings I might or might not have about gender, and it's literally just a room. Why does it matter which one I/you use?

It's not something that can be rationally explained. Sorta like trying to explain why you don't like a taste. The mix of cultural history and labeling myself by entering a "men's" space is ... stressful. Same with people using "he".

It's a automatic response I don't have much control over, but I've adapted to fairly well. Brains are wired to find different stimuli impacting or not.

I've wondered if I am high functioning autistic at times, for a number of reasons unrelated to gender. Some of the "fight or flight" responses to, eg, the sounds of someone eating are very similar to the fight or flight response I have in a men's room.

Ultimately, it's fairly textbook dysphoria and I've built up a lot of strategies so it's not super impactful day to day. But when I don't have to expend any of the energy employing those strategies, it's better.

The problem with changing words is that women, females, who are more at risk of attack than males, lose their ability to have their own spaces and identities and to organize for their own safety. As we see they actually face attack for continuing to fight for their sex-based rights. That's identity appropriation.

> I don't think changing the language is bullying, shaming, or pushing an agenda

It doesn't have to be but it is. Look at the three-year long hate mob attacking Maya Forstater and JK Rowling because they objected to losing sex-based language. They both receive many credible death threats. That's bullying to push an agenda.

Even when this is sugar coated it's a poison pill. Accepting that males could be "trans women" immediately requires you to accept that they should use the women's washroom despite being the wrong sex and that sex being the large dangerous one. (Females in male spaces isn't a safety issue so I'm ignoring it for now.)

> people making changes that are logically consistent with how they experience the world. Again: if trans men exist, then pregnancy must occur in men and women.

Occam's razor would suggest that if a person is pregnant they probably aren't a man. Being that man basically means "the people who don't get pregnant". That is the difference between sexes.

> The reason you hear people react strongly is because they believe they have a simple logic, and people come in and say, "I deny that trans men exist, or I deny trans men are men." That's a pretty strong thing to say and a pretty strong thing to hear.

You say that as if your trans man friend will vanish in a puff of logic. Nobody is denying that they exist or threatening to make it happen and it's emotional blackmail to exaggerate like that.

There's a middle ground we could shoot for. These people would probably agree your TM friend was Masc (/Femme), because as a newly created word it doesn't have an existing meaning and isn't used to gate access to single-sex spaces like prisons.

You use words like "comfort", "support", "included" and say that you feel uncomfortable entering "gendered" spaces.

I submit that women are not supported, not included, are uncomfortable, and actually are unsafe when men enter women's spaces.

When it comes to medicine, people not realising something applies to them can have negative health outcomes. Trying to produce the language that ensures everyone can understand if something applies to them is valuable.

To be clear: I don't think that just means using inclusive language, you may need to specify more to help people understand that language if it isn't in common use, or whatever. I don't think there is a simple one-size-fits-all solution, but I think just assuming gendered language is good enough is clearly sub-optimal, and best terms that clarify the specific group in question are the best starting point.

This aligns with my opinions so you're not really disagreeing with me.

Most of the comments here never established what's actually being discussed.

Personally I think a big source of contention is that a lot of people don't accept exceptions to words.

But the gender-inclusive language is not clear. It was downright confusing to be honest. If I were pregnant, anxious and trying to find info online, I wouldn’t want to wade through that either. The purpose of language is to communicate clearly, not to make you feel included.

>The purpose of language is to communicate clearly, not to make you feel included.

My brother was mentally ill his whole life; she is trans now. I showed her this comment and we both agreed.

It’s a good way to put it. We can try and do both, but clearly has to come before feelings.

My wife left her online breastfeeding support group after several incidents of obvious males (self identified trans women) would join, despite not even having children. They just wanted to observe the moms breastfeeding. It's just not a comfortable space anymore. Very sad.

That is disgusting, but sadly not unexpected these days. The elephant in the room is that many 'transwomen' identify as so because of sexual fetishism; these men want to become the pornified image they have of women.

It's easily witnessed in their forums, for example the 'MtF' subreddit, there are countless posts of men asking if it's normal to be sexually aroused while cross-dressing, fetishising their own breasts, talking about their longing to be a 'hot woman', and so on.

Deferring to how people want to be called seem like the non-asshole default.If you prefer to go by "Ty": people ought to call you Ty- it may be inconvenient looking you up in AD (is it Tyler, or Tyson?)

If someone who's pregnant wants me to address them as "sir" or "them", that's exactly what I'll do, even if the author of TFA may be offended.

> Deferring to how people want to be called seem like the non-asshole default.If you prefer to go by "Ty": people ought to call you Ty- it may be inconvenient looking you up in AD (is it Tyler, or Tyson?)

That only really makes sense on an individual basis. The OP article (which I can't read due to a paywall), appears to be talking about pregnancy literature, and your solution can't really apply to literature. If you have group of 1000 people, where 999 want to be called "pregnant women" and 1 who wants to be called a "person experiencing pregnancy," what term do you use in your literature to refer to the group? If you defer to the one, you fail to defer to the 999.

Weird. It wasn't paywalled when this first hit HN. They must have noticed the traffic.

Anyway, you're on the right track but the article was actually far worse than your example. There was a chart showing "recommended gender-neutral language" for pregnancy literature which had some real head-scratchers on it. For example, instead of "penis" you should say "erect erogenous zone." That's almost bad enough, as if I had encountered it in the wild it would take me a moment to figure out what they are talking about (erect penis? erect nipples?).

But it gets better! Guess what they recommended you replace "vagina" with? Also "erect erogenous zone"! (wtf?!) Now beyond the fact that its is anatomically wrong, I can't even know if they're talking about male or female genitalia. If I am on a medical website reading something about changes to my "erect erogenous zone", does it apply to me? Heck if I know!

That's part of what the article covered and what I was responding to in my above comment. This goes way, way beyond the relatively harmless change of "mother" -> "birthing person."

> Deferring to how people want to be called seem like the non-asshole default.

Lots of women don’t want to be called menstrators, a tiny number of transmen do. To whom should we defer?

Your personal choice is just that. The more important conversation is about what gets imposed on everyone else via law and organisational policy.

Note that the benefits of using the new language and terms are also greatly exaggerated. Only the most fragile of people are going to commit suicide because of talk of "women" in pregnancy resources. And frankly with that level of fragility they probably weren't long for this world anyway.

I support the writer's hurt feeling but you can't justify not accomodating people because it requires looking at words differently.

You can. This is feelings all the way down. Specifically whose feelings are going to be accommodated.

Accomodation to receive good medical treatment is more important than accomodating feelings about words.

Those things don’t trade off against each other. What trades off is accommodating some people’s feelings about words vs accommodating other people’s feelings about words. Since these different feelings are about the same words both sets of feelings can’t be accommodated. When we as a society make our choice between two incompatible options we express our values.

Yes, why it is important to use clear words referring to biological sex, as that has far more important ramifications for medical treatment than gender identity.

I'm not sure what the best words to use are, as if many cis women find these gender neutral terms offensive, they have a right to complain and push back. However, trans men have a right not to be ignored, for their view in what they're called to be taken into account by the medical literature and for their existence and needs to be reflected in the medical literature.

Feelings vs Fatalities

When men are allowed into women's spaces - washrooms, rape shelters, and prisons - women and children die.

We have single-sex spaces for a lot of very good reasons.

In what way is this language accomodating trans people?

English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women. You seem to want a new word that means, "i want people to treat me the way society treats women/men". This is not a problem with the language, you might argue that its a problem with society, but consider exactly what it is that you're asking for.

Do you really have a right to be treated differently from other people? Its pretty easy to argue that men and women should be treated more equitably, but theres also a fair amount of structure in place to treat men and women differently to further that aim. Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?

It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.

Assuming you mean all of this in good faith.

> English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women.

Yes, but language has to evolve with new information. We discovered and are now socially recognizing the existence of a different kind of human. We now have XX women, XY women, XX men, and XY men. So now XX women, XX men (and in the future potentially XY women) can get pregnant so there’s a desire to adapt to this new information and genericise the term.

> Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?

If that’s how it worked that would be a good point but it isn’t. Trans folks didn’t choose to be trans. A trans woman is and always has been a woman and can’t just opt in to being a man. If you’ve ever talked to one you would know most of them try and fail because it destroys their mental health.

And this should be intuitively obvious because if a gay trans woman could just choose to be a straight man they probably would without hesitation. No hormones, expensive surgeries, no extreme difficulty dating, being the political punching bag de jour, don’t have to worry about being hatecrimed or discriminated against.

> It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.

No, in fact it’s the opposite. Trans people are some of the biggest proponents of abolishing gender roles and pointlessly gendered stuff. Trans people are all about breaking down those social divisions.

Wanting to be seen and treated as the gender you are is not the same thing as reinforcing or valuing the divisions between genders. Again, it really comes down to that not being able to choose thing. If people could choose and trans men were really just masculine women then you would have a point.

This also should be intuitive because there are feminine trans men and masculine trans women. If they could choose and it was based on presentation wouldn’t it have been a heck of a lot easier for them to not be trans?

What studies or science is there that trans isn’t just a mental condition? I don’t get just accepting the sex you’re born as.

It certainly seems to me, that rather than be a more effeminate male, instead they want to be in the gender roles and be the “role” of a woman (or vice versa).

You won’t find such studies because it is! Or more accurately gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. Just because it’s in the mind doesn’t make it not a real thing. Since we’re on a programming forum maybe a good metaphor would be it’s something that’s in your firmware.

Aside: Since in real life people use sex and gender interchangeably I’m gonna do that too and just refer to chromosomes directly when needed.

> I don’t get just accepting the sex you’re born as.

When you actually survey trans people they do try really really hard to be the sex that usually goes with their chromosomes. But empirically it doesn’t work out. The distress caused by trying drives a worryingly high percentage of them to attempt suicide.

I know you didn’t mean it this way but what you said was right. Trans people need to accept the sex they were born as and transition if they want to live happier healthier lives. People in the lgbt community call this acceptance “coming out to yourself” or “your egg cracking.”

> It certainly seems to me, that rather than be a more effeminate male…

Okay so I think you’ve almost got it but have some wires crossed. So this is a bit simplistic but for the purposes of this lets classify people as either masculine or feminine and men or women.

You’re probably used to masculine women being called “tomboys” or “butches.” You can do the opposite too with “tomgirls” and “femboys.” These are expressions of gender. You can kind of think of them as aesthetics but more central and important to the individual. Like for example most men would typically feel not themselves or like they were wearing a costume if they dressed feminine.

Okay so gender roles! Men take out the trash, women do the cleaning, men are the breadwinners, women are the caregivers, boys like rockets, girls like dolls, yada yada. These are mostly, but not entirely, cultural. Lgbt folks are pretty darn anti gender roles in general because they stop making sense in same sex couples and trans people prior to transitioning feel put in a box, and not only that but the wrong box which triggers their dysphoria.

So trying to read between the lines here I think again you’re right. Trans women aren’t feminine men, and would like to be treated just like any other women.

But the difference is that this treatment is totally separate from the individual’s gender expression or the roles they wish to take on. Trans women can be feminine, masculine, both, or neither and they can take on traditional gender roles or completely ignore them.

But aren't preconceptions about gender stereotypes implicit in "coming out"? How would a man realize that he is, in fact, a woman, without the idea that there are certain feelings only a woman can feel?

Right. Like what I mean to say is it seems you are implicitly trying to fulfill a man-made role and changing your biological body in the process. That seems a bit overboard. Just act how you want.

>Trans people are some of the biggest proponents of abolishing gender roles and pointlessly gendered stuff.

I couldn't disagree more, and this is precisely what i am arguing. The argument that the biological and social categories of men and women are different is fundamentally predicated on the existence of the social category, otherwise known as gender. This is regressive, and we should absolutely not accomodate it.

It's growing up being told that men play with trucks and women play with dolls, and instead of casting this obvious bullshit aside, you acquiesce and now argue that men who play with dolls are women, and that's ok.

This is an extremely misguided attempt at constructing justice fron the premises of religious fundamentalism.

> English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women.

Does someone stop being a woman if they have a hysterectomy or go through menopause? If someone is born infertile, can they never be a woman?

Can get pregnant => woman is not the same thing as woman => can get pregnant. I think you will find I did not claim more than that, mainly beacuse I don't want to deal with this incredibly stupid, bad faith argument.

Yet, I bet you'd have problem with: "English has a right to a word that means 'a plane figure with four equal straight sides and four right angles' and that word is "rhombus."

Calling genuine questions about your statement 'bad faith' or a 'stupid argument' is a bad look when you communicated incorrectly. I am here out of curiosity and to learn, not to foster any agenda.

Women who can get pregnant is not a vanishingly small subset of women. Moreover, it can be derived from context in pregnancy literature that this is the subset of interest. Using a different word here carries no additional information, unlike specifying a square.

Wrt bad faith, are you really curious about how language works? Or are you just looking for short arguments with long counterarguments. Aka technical knockouts on twitter. It seems like making spurious analogies to mathematical language, or just generally arguing that english words are complicated intersections of unions of properties, and therefore no argument about what words mean can ever be valid, are just intrinsically arguments made in bad faith, and with no regard to what these additional assumptions would do to your own arguments.

Women who cannot get pregnant is not a vanishingly small subset of women. There are many XX women who cannot get pregnant who are subject to a cruel assessment that their value and identity as women is severely impacted. There are several such women in my life, and they are important to me. This is a very real thing and you are eliding it with a clumsy and goofy spew about the rights a language has or the suggestion that concern about it is bad faith twitter argument. Honestly, that sounds like projection.

I didn't realize I had to say this so explicitly. The way you wrote your comment indicated that the definition of 'woman' is someone who can get pregnant. If this is not what you intended to communicate, then your wording is at fault.

I responded by questioning the argument. I asked, based on what you wrote, what that meant to you as far as 'biological' women who are not able to get pregnant. There was no trap of logic, no pedantry, no counterargument. I asked questions about what you meant. And yes, I am genuinely curious how someone who argues that women=fertile person would categorize my friend who had her reproductive organs removed as a child.

The "spurious analogy to mathematical language" was an attempt to efficiently illustrate the meaning of your own words as written based on an understanding I assumed you would have.

Further, it genuinely reads to me that you're claiming no argument can ever be valid unless you cannot be questioned when saying "the English word for 'roasted bird' is 'chicken.'"

>Women who cannot get pregnant is not a vanishingly small subset of women.

You need to read my comment closer.

I read it correctly. Cis women who can get pregnant and those who cannot both exist in substantial numbers.

> I support the writer's hurt feeling but you can't justify not accomodating people because it requires looking at words differently.

Why does that only apply to trans people and how they want to be addressed? What about cis-women that want to be addressed as women, but now the medical profession is refusing to grant them that basic request for dignity?

I never said that cis women don't deserve this right. If you look my other responses in this thread you'll see that I have expressed that they do multiple times.

I also don't just mean accomodation in terms of words: if trans men have any needs different to cis women, then medical literature on pregancy must include this when in circumstances where it's appropriate.

> if trans men have any needs different to cis women, then medical literature on pregancy must...

Serious question: do you suppose that that trans men have different needs than cis women (in a medical sense) with regard to pregnancy?

If they’ve undergone medical transitioning procedures (e.g. hormones), then yes, quite possibly.

They might find they have increased problems with gender dysphoria as their body changes during pregnancy. It might cause a number of problems that should be considered/monitored/treated by their doctors.

I'm not familiar with the topic so I don't know, but it seems reasonable that the question at a minimum needs to be asked.

That said, if they've transitioned they (I think) need to stop taking testosterone, which points out that hormone stuff could perhaps be different. There's also the social aspect of a man attending/needing typically women only support.

We're not talking 95%/5% here, more 99.99995 / 0.00005%.

And trying to even argue that men cannot be pregnant is even doing too much. It is as insane as trying to "debate" whether the earth is round.

The earth is not perfectly round, it's an oblate spheroid with a rough surface. How non-round is the earth? About 0.3%...

This feels like it proves the point, I believe this is true, but yet, for all situations that aren't very specific and technical, the earth is round, and saying otherwise will cause more confusion->harm than good.

We're talking about trans men getting pregnant, not trans women. While trans men are a minority, those percentages are multiple orders of magnitude too small.

Lets just say that while a transman is pregnant are an honorary woman. Problem solved.

It's like one day you decided to build a company that needs a website. The first task you come up with is accessibility and i18n. Good luck with that. My heuristics is, are we serving the main audience, are we serving them well, can we expand the audience, can we expand the audience without harming the main audience.

There is another comment mentioned about ramp. I think it is a good example where serving the extended audience (wheel chair user) is not harming the experience of main audience (non-wheel chair user). On the other hand, OP's article is about using gender neutral term on parenting/pregnancy websites where the main audience should be, well, women women and men men, that the article should lay its focus on.

A related concept is the paradox of tolerance [1]. We demand ourselves to be ever inclusive like the dodo [2]. All the dodos got eaten at last.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo

Nassim Taleb has an article about this but I can't remember the name. Something like tyranny of the minority. Worth a read. The main idea is the most vocal, intolerant minority runs the world.

One of my favorite essays.

“The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

That's the one. Nassim has blocked me on twitter so I refuse to google for his stuff.

Taleb is a prick, and is "right" much less often than he thinks. Still, the Incerto series is a good read.

Yes, I cannot deny that his writings have had a real influence in the way I live my life.

It is unclear to me what concession is being made by way of accurate language?

What is a woman?

A woman is someone who sees in herself at least one attribute, which she regards as a sufficient condition for her own membership in that category. What that attribute is can vary from woman to woman.

The same definition applies mutatis mutandis to men.

---

Now what is the concession that's being made?

> A woman is someone who sees in herself at least one attribute, which she regards as a sufficient condition for her own membership in that category. What that attribute is can vary from woman to woman. Now what is the concession that's being made?

If we had to limit ourselves to that entirely unclear definition we'd be giving up a lot, including the ability to recognize anyone as either man or woman (or even male or female) in cases where they aren't able to communicate to us whatever they've decided using made up attributes they (entirely on their own) deem sufficient to place them in one group or another.

This would include every single non-living person and anyone whose physical or mental limitations prevent them from communicating or inventing that list of arbitrary attributes and then classifying each one themselves according to some unspecified process in order to determine which term should apply to them.

Even just changing the definition from something that was nearly always entirely clear, easy to define objectively, and immutable, to something that is not defined, where the determining criteria can differ from one person to the next, and where the classification for a single person can change from one moment to the next is a major concession that has wide ranging implications.

The only reason that redefinitions such as this are being proposed (and in many places, accepted) is so that some men can claim to be women, and to twist law and policy around such claims.

So, as a consequence of this, we now have men in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men in women's shelters, and so on. Is this really a beneficial concession to be made?

The concession is that the word "woman" becomes utterly meaningless and thus terms like AFAB or ciswoman are then needed to serve the function woman used to.

„Woman“ in your mind is the only societal category which is completely devoid of external attributes.

I can not be a baseball player without playing baseball. I can not be German without being born in Germany. I can not be of color without the needed heritage or a certain amount of melanin in my skin. I can not choose to be tall. I can not choose to be male without being male.

It just doesn‘t make sense. If the category is that loose, then why have it at all?

>My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off?

If I were dictator the first step would be to round up and deport to labor camps all the people who misrepresent "small, diffuse and hard to quantify" as zero. So much BS in modern society in all areas and subject matters is predicated on this fallacy.

Second step would be to go about making an attempt at quantifying the cost.

At exactly 0. To not be racist or transphobic costs me nothing. I can do it without effort.

To pretend it‘s fair for them to partake in sports or to disadvantage women in favor of trans people upsets that equilibrium when it happens to the first woman. Trans people need to be accepted, not advantaged.

Using language that includes a group isn't a cost that is born by those not in the group. Notably, many people not in the group may OK or even encouraging of the changes.

I'm not terribly pleased by extremely vague bureaucratic language. But the arguments that try to turn such into an actual harm or cost to those not in the group being protected here are engaging in language that's far more deceptively vague.

> Using language that includes a group isn't a cost that is born by those not in the group.

Often it is. Simply changing from familiar terms to artificial terms is a cost.

All of language is artificial.

My point is that inclusion isn't like a check written out to an excluded group. Inclusion benefits society by making things run more smoothly, it benefits various bureaucracy since the bureaucracies can deal with more people and so-forth.

And the cost is a small amount of understandability, yes. But even that isn't necessary paid by those outside the exclude group.

> Inclusion benefits society by making things run more smoothly

Big claim, little justification

> Using language that includes a group isn't a cost that is born by those not in the group

Exactly. Using „woman“ isn‘t a cost to the tiny majority that feels excluded by that word.

Consider that the next time you see a wheelchair ramp.

People with physical disabilities are a massive % of the population, and could potentially include any person at some point of their lives.

Being a trans birth giver is infinitesimally less common.

Wheelchair ramps are important. They serve an obvious physical function, kinda like the bits that allow pregnancy, and clear language that means things to people with the necessary biology to utilize that information safely.

The people in favor of a lot of the erasures would want the wheelchair ramps removed, if people with functioning legs were the minority. It should not be entertained.

It's asking for the removal of accommodations for women.

"The people in favor of a lot of the erasures would want the wheelchair ramps removed, if people with functioning legs were the minority"

This is a perfect analogy, thanks for it.

No, this is equivalent of removing all stairs and talk about stairs because some people need the ramps. No one is arguing against removal of accomodations.

The question was what is the framework to do the cost benefit analysis? (I’d say giving access to essential services, basic social participation for >10% of the population is pretty easy to justify, but very expensive).

Please say wheelchair-stairs. They are real stairs too.

Please call them chairs of wheels.

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