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Comment by altmanaltman | Hacker News Reader

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What you're describing about gender is.... not really scientific. It was basically declared by fiat by researchers. It's not an authoritative definition and many people disagree with the concept, at least when it gets conflated with scientific topics.

there are some things that clearly exist that are really hard to nail down with definitions; once we get into anything social, we are kinda playing with that territory. everything is so fuzzy that our normal way of defining things breaks down. so saying precisely what gender _is_ is going to be almost impossible. but there are definitely roles and traits that are highly correlated with a person's birth sex that are distinct from their birth sex. there can even be genetic reasons why those correlations emerged. but they are still distinct.

as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.

sorry, is this in response to my post? in which case, this is exactly the distinction i'm making. the entire argument is whether or not there _is_ a distinction; my point is that this guy just, a priori, decides gender doesn't exist. but there is plenty of evidence that it does. there are plenty of social traits associated with sex that differ across different cultures: pink used to be a manly color, now it's a feminine color; "be a man" doesn't literally mean "make sure your sex is male"; etc. there are traits that are heavily correlated with a person's sex that are culturally reinforced, and this is distinct from their sex.

I think you need to read their comment again - they are clearly talking about sex and gender as two different concepts.

This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.

Are you seriously trying to claim that e.g. wearing dresses or liking the color pink is somehow fundamentally tied the the genitals in your pants or the chromosomes you have?

The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.

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