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Comment by HyperSane | Hacker News Reader

A pregnant person is a woman.

At least, the person that birthed you is your mother.

I'd question the association between mother and woman, rather than mother and birth

Thank you, I swear half the time I can’t figure out if people are genuinely confused by inclusive language or if they confuse it on purpose just to get riled up.

It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.

No — people are just aware that humans are sexually dimorphic and don’t appreciate people demanding they not use language that accurately describes the peaks of a bimodal distribution because there’s a small percentage of outliers. Mammals in general are sexually dimorphic.

Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.

We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.

Girl you gotta get off the internet. No one is demanding you use this language. It’s actually the opposite where people have a visceral reaction to someone voluntarily choosing to use inclusive language. Style guides like these are for awareness, everyone has had the moment where they discover a word they picked up is actually offensive. One that happened for me was “gypped.” A lot of the guides do contain silly substitutions but that’s because they’re wrong about the history of the words and their usage not because the idea or intent is bad.

I am almost certain the person who told you that was offensive was not someone from the group allegedly being offended, but by some person from a highly educated privileged background deciding to be offended on that group’s behalf.

“Hey by the way that word is offensive” isn’t really the same as being offended. It was a 5 second interaction where they were like “that word is like jewed or welshed but for the Roma” and I was like, “my bad didn’t know that.” That was it. Despite what the internet told me I wasn’t immediately canceled. Like what is the point you’re trying to make, that it’s not offensive or that someone who isn’t Roma isn’t allowed to recognize that using an ethnicity’s name as a verb in a disparaging way is offensive?

Humans can handle exceptions without having to created incredibly vague or generic terms like "birthing person"

Many adopted people would disagree. “Biological mother” is closer, but surrogate pregnancy is a thing, so that doesn’t work reliably.

Part of the reason rule based language processing failed, is because language does not fall into hard and fast categories with no exceptions.

Normal people instinctively understand this, and “woman” and “mother” are completely understandable and useful terms, even if there are a handful of exceptions out of millions are exceptions to the strict definition.

Flagged with 23 points. Looks like I ran afoul of the thought police.

Nobody seems to be able to define woman anymore. How can we be sure?

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