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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

I know that most of us already know this, but it is worth repeating: sex is biological, gender is cultural (for instance, "la montaña" - the mountain is feminine in the Spanish language). A "sex machine" would tell you whether you were dealing with a biological male or biological female, or something else, but it would not tell you the gender.

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Of course you're technically right, but the pedantry is out of control. In reality, when speaking English in a professional (and pretty much any other) setting, "sex" means "gender."

I don't think it's worth repeating. I'd say it's repeating this kind of misplaced vernacular revisionism that's making us (in which I controversially refer to the disparate collection of users on HN as a single group) look even more anal and oversensitive than we actually are.

A non-zero quantity of people have a gender that is separate and different to their sex. By marking out differentating sex and gender as "vernacular revisionism", you are contributing to making the lives of a non-zero quantity of people worse than they need to be. Erasure sucks, please don't perpetuate it.

When you say things like "updated his profile" in your app, you're talking about individuals, often times to them. Those people have feelings, regardless of how "professional" the context is.

So don't assume anything unless you want to exclude people who don't fit in that binary box. It's not about being pedantic, it's about being considerate.

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