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Comment by kg | Hacker News Reader

His examples don't hold up.

Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two.

"Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it).

On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.

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Largely agree with you, but Democrats should drop "birthing persons" ASAP (if they haven't already) IMO.

I'm all for inclusivity, but there's a certain point/form of language policing where you're asking folks to perform a lot of mental labor to adjust their language to reflect an extremely rare edge case. Like why?

It's like if we insisted that people avoid the phrase "look at this" in general communication lest you offend/exclude a blind person who might be listening.

Also, there's no such thing as being able to give birth and not being female. Many argue that "woman" refers to an internal sense of gender and not the physical reality of one's body, but even in that framework the term "female" refers to the nature of the body. And if you can give birth, you are female, because that is the configuration your body is in.

You've never heard of hermaphrodism? Biology is _complicated_

> Democrats should drop "birthing persons"

I've never heard 1 democrat politician say "birthing person".

This was never something "democrats" said and always something that rightwing media says that Democrats say.

There's nothing to drop or defend as this is completely a distraction from real issues.

Basically, rightwing media LOVES picking fringe individuals pushing a position and pretending like every democrat actually believes the same.

2024 NIH guidance: https://web.archive.org/web/20240409042454/https://www.nih.g...

These word changes were real things that happened by government policy.

> Both pregnant women and pregnant people are acceptable phrases.

Literally the first sentence in the guidelines that talk about birthing person.

The entire paragraph says "it's fine if you want to" and isn't prescriptive.

This is a fake controversy. You are literally just mad that some people recognize and want to be accommodating to trans people.

I really can't stress enough just how offensive "chestfeeding" and similar turns of phrase are to massive numbers of women. It is a very big deal.

You definitely need to be female to give birth, regardless of whatever gender identity label you give yourself (e.g. "man" or "non binary").

That was conclusively disproven by Schwarzenegger et al., 1994.

Our education system has failed younger generations. Everyone my age watched the documentary about Schwarzenegger's pregnancy.

Oh yeah?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19155947/

I'm not sure if you're kidding or what but the mothers in that paper had 46 (the normal number) of XX chromosomes, a female with a mosaic-type defect containing some Y - successfully giving birth further proves these were female humans.

If you want your mind-blown, read up on feto-maternal microchimerism:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8762399/

tl;dr: All boy moms will have some proportion of XY cells lodged in their bodies until they die. And this can result in them showing up as genetically male on a DNA test, simply because they once gave birth to a boy. When you get down to a cellular or molecular level, notions of "sex" or even "individuality" are far more blurry than our mental models admit. Sorta like recent findings that by cell count, humans are only about 43% human, and the rest is the bacteria making up our microbiome, and that our microbiome can have significant impact on our behavior.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270

yeah I knew that already - I have a son and it was mentioned as a fun fact along the way

If you want to provide appropriate care to people with wombs you don't want to filter based on what their drivers' license or birth certificate say, because those can not only defy your expectations, but they can also be wrong due to clerical errors or other factors.

I can't even humor your assumption that there are only two sexes and one birthing sex, because intersexed people exist, as do people with unusual chromosomes. Some of them have wombs and can give birth. Language like "birthing persons", while awkward, admits the existence of those people into a larger group without requiring even more awkward phrasing akin to "women, and men with wombs, and intersexed people with wombs".

Intersex and chromosomal disorders don’t change the sexual binary. They aren’t some weird other sex.

You should probably let all the doctors and scientists know that you're changing the definition of sex and they're all wrong then.

There are literally two sexes. There is no doctor or scientist that would disagree. What other sexes do you think exist?

It ultimately does depend on how you choose to define "sex". This turns out to be a hard question, with different definitions making sense in different contexts. Is it gametes, chromosomes, genitals, hormones, something else, or some mix of all of that? What happens when these characteristics that can change, do? How do we classify people who have mismatches between some of these categories of characteristics? What assumptions are safe to make about people of different sexes?

My point is, our interpretation of these observable biological processes and facts, and our response to them, is socially constructed. There are many Doctors and Scientists who do very much agree with this complex view, just as I'm sure there are those who believe in a strong binary like you. I see the complex view here as much more useful, especially in navigating things like human dynamics and healthcare needs in ways that benefit us all

Latinx is terrible, though, because it is something no native Spanish speaker would ever say. It's an example of the exact same sort of cultural imperialism that most of the people who like to say latinx rail against.

The term that Hispanic queer and non-binary communities use is latine, which is pronounceable, follows normal Spanish grammatical rules, actually arose from the communities being discussed, and pluralizes easily to "les latines".

It's almost like it's not a Spanish word. It was coined by native English speakers to describe themselves. It also happens to be a terrible English word, but the fact that it doesn't work in a different language's grammar isn't why it's a bad English word.

when did this retcon get invented?

> "Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female.

There is no person that can give birth and is not female.

Latinx actually is comparable to what Trump is doing. It is outsiders trying to force a word on a community that doesn't want it.

Only about 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it, 75% say it should not be used, and half have never even heard of the word. It doesn't fit Spanish grammar or pronunciation rules which makes it look even out of place.

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