Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. Like tall, or blonde, or young.

Sure, you can have another preferred label. You can even try to make it popular - maybe others will like it too. It wouldn't be the first time there's a shift like that.

By "get over it", I mean realise nobody's using it to insult them and there's zero impact on their lives due to the term existing. (For many, if they don't actively seek out conversations about this topic, they may not even realise it exists)

View on HN

> This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today.

That may seem reasonable, and I certainly wouldn't want to argue against it, but I've seen enough discussions around these questions to know that what's written there is not entirely uncontroversial.

Firstly, even an indisputable fact can be offensive if you mention it in a context in which other people consider it to be entirely irrelevant.

Secondly, some activists vehemently deny the existence of "biological sex". They insist on talking about "gender assigned at birth" instead. I can tell you from experience that arguing with those people is not always productive.

Thirdly, although standard English uses two different pronouns for people, "he" and "she", so gender is an undeniable social fact in any community that speaks standard English, some languages (probably most languages) don't have gender so "gender" isn't such a simple factual thing in those communities. You may be able to infer gender from roles in society, behaviour or clothing styles but it's less clear.

I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect.

1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You could do by constantly talking about cars, but it has no effect on the word "car".

2. In that case cis/trans still exists in terms of changing the gender.

3. Have you got a source for that? I won't pretend I'm a linguist, but most language families I'm aware of certainly have at least 2 genders. Many have 3. Quite a few assign genders to objects as well. Wikipedia lists just a few examples and some of them are further qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles... Even English is a qualified entry on that list and yet we have no issues taking about it. Coming from a way more gendered language natively, I can tell you it only makes this situation harder. English didn't have to deal with a "women are doctors now, but doctor is a male word" issue. I can have a whole conversation about someone in English and you wouldn't know their gender, but in other languages I know, I couldn't say a single sentence without it.

You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game

I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine.

Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).

Do you mean English has gender? Then what languages lack gender?

Yes, though perhaps I'm not using the best terminology. English doesn't have "grammatical gender", so a noun like "table" or "wisdom" doesn't have a gender like it would in French or German, but there's a distinction in pronouns ("he" and "she") which many (perhaps most) languages don't have.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a list of languages that lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of. It would be nice to have such a list, or to refine the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... so that it contains that information.

Finnish and Hungarian lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of, and so does spoken Chinese or old Chinese: I'm told that gender was introduced into the modern written language by Europeans. (I have often heard Chinese people say "he" instead of "she" or vice versa when speaking English. I don't think I've ever heard a French or German person make that mistake. I'm thinking of cases in which the speaker knows the gender of the person being referred to but is making a language error. I don't mean cases in which people incorrectly guess the person's gender, which is also interesting, but a different kind of error.)

Some people believe sex and gender are different things and gender is just sex based stereotypes. These views are legal and in the UK considered protected.

You wouldn't call someone transgender if they didn't believe they were trans, or someone a christian if they didn't believe in the bible, it's the same the other way round. If someone doesn't think gender is real, calling them it is putting a label on them they don't agree with.

I've then seen the label used to devalue people's opinions on things, so yes it can be a slur. Unfortunately these debates end up being so toxic due to people on both sides.

> calling them it is putting a label on them they don't agree with.

That does not follow from your examples. I don't have religious beliefs, therefore I'm an atheist - a label which wouldn't exist without religious views. The fact people have religious views does not devalue my ideas in any way and isn't insulting in any way.

People who don't believe gender can be different than gender/sex at birth do not even disagree with the idea of being cisgendered. They just don't agree that other options exist.

The objection to cisgendered is that it is based on the disputed belief that the categories of woman and man are further split into the subcategories trans and cis. Such that what was previously understood as woman (as in, an adult female human) is, per this belief, cis woman, and man who desires to be a woman (or some similar description) is now trans woman.

Many people who don't hold this belief oppose being referred to as cisgender or cis woman or cis man or cis, because it implicitly regards this belief as being true.

This is unlike the term atheist, which acknowledges that theistic beliefs exist, but doesn't imply that any of these beliefs are true.

This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. Like tall, or blonde, or young.

“Mentally retarded” is a factual description of those with a certain degree of mental impairment.

But we don’t use it any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com