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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Nobody stood around and just made up a sex for a newborn soviet job-assignment style, making the language "assigned at birth" inaccurate from a scientific standpoint. From a scientific standpoint, Female and Male are clearly defined.

I will not engage any further in a political debate about this subject here. My point was political ideology statements should not be in scientific writing because they are political, the language changes with the political climate, and the language is imprecise. People reading scientific writings 100 years in the future should not have to wonder what political climate the paper was written in.

Scientific writing should not be a product of it's date and political climate.

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Male and female are clearly defined (not really, but let's assume for the arguments sake). Intersex people exist, and they are impossible to identify without them telling you about it. So these people are really "assigned" a gender at birth. They might not be a huge amount of the population, but they exist. So why not use "assigned at birth"? It includes them and doesn't hurt anyone at all. I'd ask you to reconsider, whether the authors made a political statement, or whether you made this a political statement by yourself. Because I read it and not a single political thought crossed my mind...

> making the language "assigned at birth" inaccurate from a scientific standpoint

That's a strawman argument about semantics ("assign" in English does not always mean "soviet-style"), which I'm not going to bother engaging with.

> Scientific writing should not be a product of it's date and political climate.

By virtue of using language, it virtually always is. For example, the common/acceptable way of referring to ethnicities changed over time. It's virtually impossible in anything involving humans to have language (and therefore scientific language) not evolve over time.

> From a scientific standpoint, Female and Male are clearly defined.

And how do you distinguish the "scientific" female and male from the "colloquial" female and male, without leaving it ambiguous according to the "political background" of the reader? Or rather, what if, in a purely hypothetical future English, "female" and "male" refer unambiguously to the gender people identify as? It seems like you would like scientific writing to conform specifically (and only) to what you consider acceptable language _right now_, and are not actually particularly interested in accessibility to future readers.

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