Intolerance
Joy Beeson
bindweed
poison ivy
people determined to take care of me
clothing without pockets
anti-walking shoes
Insistence that we "tolerate"
things which ought to be accepted or celebrated.
insistence that "old" means "bad" and "new" means "good".
defining "old" as "last week".
The use of "to die for" as an expression of mild lack of
distaste.
Restricting "spicy" to "contains capsaicin". (My dog repellent is
"spicy"?) What's wrong with cloves, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace,
cardamom, cumin, turmeric . . .
The use of "accident" as a euphemism for "crash".
The use of "adult" as a euphemism for childish filth.
The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
The use of "have sex" as a euphemism for copulation or copuloid
activity.
The use of "display of affection" as a euphemism for "making out".
The use of euphemisms for things that aren't dirty.
The use of "the Holocaust" to sanitize, simplify, and
trivialize the horrors of the Third Reich. ("The Holocaust"
was, however, a great name for an otherwise-forgotten movie.)
--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
Keith F. Lynch
> The use of "the Holocaust" to sanitize, simplify, and trivialize
> the horrors of the Third Reich.
What would you call it? If it doesn't have a short name, it will
get talked about less and will fade from memory.
I agree with most of the rest of what you said.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>I don't propose to tolerate:
>
>
>The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
to mean 'gender')?
Personally, I see sex-when-they-mean-gender rather more
often than gender-when-they-mean-sex. I wouldn't say
it's as much as twice as often, but it's enough more to
notice.
(And then, of course, there's the pervasive lack of
understanding of just what sex _is_, and the notion
that it can be defined simply by a single aspect --
different people try to use differnt aspects for their
all-or-nothing definitions -- and in a binary way,
but that's yet another rant.)
--
D. Glenn Arthur Jr./The Human Vibrator, dgl...@panix.com
Due to hand/wrist problems my newsreading time varies so I may miss followups.
"Being a _man_ means knowing that one has a choice not to act like a 'man'."
http://www.dglenn.org/ http://dglenn.dreamwidth.org
Steve Coltrin
dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) writes:
> In article <rup2p69eade72v3jm...@4ax.com>,
> Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>>I don't propose to tolerate:
>>
> [...]
>>
>>The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
>
> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
> to mean 'gender')?
How about those of us who never remember the difference, don't really
care, and _certainly_ don't care what someone has between their legs
or what they do with it?
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press
Keith F. Lynch
> Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>> The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as this
> happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying -- or requesting
> on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought to mean 'gender')?
No, that's perfectly correct. Pronouns have gender; people have sex.
The OED agrees with me. It also says that "gender" has also been a
verb meaning "copulate" since 1486.
The GLBT folks may have repurposed the word "gender" in recent
decades, but they shouldn't act as if theirs was the only correct
meaning.
David Friedman
dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
> In article <rup2p69eade72v3jm...@4ax.com>,
> Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
> >I don't propose to tolerate:
> >
> [...]
> >
> >The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
>
> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
> to mean 'gender')?
Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_
David Friedman
Steve Coltrin <spco...@omcl.org> wrote:
> begin fnord
> dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) writes:
>
> > In article <rup2p69eade72v3jm...@4ax.com>,
> > Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
> >>I don't propose to tolerate:
> >>
> > [...]
> >>
> >>The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
> >
> > How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
> > this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
> > or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
> > to mean 'gender')?
>
> How about those of us who never remember the difference, don't really
> care, and _certainly_ don't care what someone has between their legs
> or what they do with it?
"Let a man account to me for what wags between his jaws and what wags
between his legs, and I will account to him for Paradise."
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>D. Glenn Arthur Jr. <dgl...@panix.com> wrote:
>> Joy Beeson <jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>>> The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
>
>> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as this
>> happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying -- or requesting
>> on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought to mean 'gender')?
>
>No, that's perfectly correct. Pronouns have gender; people have sex.
People have both sex and gender. For a lot of people, their
sex and gender align; for others, not.
>The GLBT folks may have repurposed the word "gender" in recent
>decades, but they shouldn't act as if theirs was the only correct
>meaning.
I'm not saying it's the only correct meaning for 'gender' --
as you note, pronouns have gender of a gramattical sort, and
so do nouns in many languages. So do electronic connectors
(though, being mechanical in nature, that ought to be 'sex'
... still common usage seems to have 'gender' for that.)
What I _am_ saying is that 'gender' as applied to humans is
not just a misnomer for 'sex', but is a distinct though
related thing -- and yeah, it's the TLBG community (well,
especially the T part) that's going to notice that and talk
about it most, but it's still there, needs a name, and doesn't
really have one other than 'gender'.
Grammarians and linguists may be accustomed to using the
word 'gender' to refer to parts of speech, but they shouldn't
act as if theirs was the only correct meaning.
--
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
>> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
>> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
>> to mean 'gender')?
>
>How about those of us who never remember the difference, don't really
>care, and _certainly_ don't care what someone has between their legs
>or what they do with it?
For folks like you, a handy mnemonic: if you don't care what
someone has under their clothes but do care to use the right
pronouns, then what you're paying attention to is the gender of
both the people and the pronouns. Pronouns and people both
have gender.
Or to try a different mnemonic, you don't mind if their
Sex stays Secret.
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>In article <imvlp1$jpa$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
>> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
>> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
>> to mean 'gender')?
>
>Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
>
>I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
>
>What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
The first example that comes to mind: when a _doctor_ asks, and
it's medically relevant. (Not the only example that comes to mind,
but the clearest.)
garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>>In article <imvlp1$jpa$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
>>> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
>>> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
>>> to mean 'gender')?
>>
>>Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
>>
>>I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
>>
>>What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
>
> The first example that comes to mind: when a _doctor_ asks, and
> it's medically relevant. (Not the only example that comes to mind,
> but the clearest.)
If you venture past English, there are languages where the distinction
is clearer. E.g. in German, Mädchen (girl) is of neutrum gender, but (of
course), of feminine sex.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabík http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Paul Dormer
Arthur Jr.) wrote:
> Pronouns and people both
> have gender.
Reminds me of the Robert Lepage play Tectonic Plates that I saw at the
National Theatre in London about 20 years ago. Part of the plot involved
a young Alaskan man who'd won a trip to New York. In a bar, he tries to
impress a French-Canadian woman (who turns out to be a transvestite) by
attempting to speak French. He explains the problem with French for
English speakers is that in English, they don't have grammatical gender,
except what he says (translated back into English) was that "In England,
they don't have sex." To which the French-Canadian replies, "What a
shame." (This whole exchange was done without benefit of translation,
and no surtitles then, but I was able to follow it, even though I failed
O-level French some twenty years before that.)
Michael Stemper
>If you venture past English, there are languages where the distinction
>is clearer. E.g. in German, Mädchen (girl) is of neutrum gender, but (of
>course), of feminine sex.
Or, as my German prof put it: "Only in German would one answer the
question 'Where is the turnip?' with 'She is in the sink', but answer
'Where is the beautiful and intelligent maiden?' with 'It went to
Mu:nchen.'"
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made from meat?
Jette Goldie
> In article<imvlp1$jpa$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
>
>> In article<rup2p69eade72v3jm...@4ax.com>,
>> Joy Beeson<jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>>> I don't propose to tolerate:
>>>
>> [...]
>>>
>>> The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
>>
>> How about the conflation of sex and gender generally, as
>> this happens in _both_ directions (i.e. people saying --
>> or requesting on a form -- 'sex' when they mean or ought
>> to mean 'gender')?
>
> Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
>
> I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
>
> What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
>
when the answer you're hoping for is "Yes please!"?
--
Jette Goldie jette....@gmail.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfette/ http://wolfette.livejournal.com/
("reply to" is spamblocked - use the email addy in sig)
Paul Dormer
(Michael Stemper) wrote:
>
> In article <in1at9$e8v$2...@speranza.aioe.org>,
> garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk writes:
>
> >If you venture past English, there are languages where the distinction
> >is clearer. E.g. in German, Mädchen (girl) is of neutrum gender, but
> >(of course), of feminine sex.
>
> Or, as my German prof put it: "Only in German would one answer the
> question 'Where is the turnip?' with 'She is in the sink', but answer
> 'Where is the beautiful and intelligent maiden?' with 'It went to
> Mu:nchen.'"
Reminds me of a spoof in Punch many years ago where someone remarked
about French, any language where the word for bra is masculine and the
word for hob-nailed boot is feminine has definitely got its evolutionary
knickers in a twist.
Keith F. Lynch
> Reminds me of a spoof in Punch many years ago where someone remarked
> about French, any language where the word for bra is masculine and
> the word for hob-nailed boot is feminine has definitely got its
> evolutionary knickers in a twist.
The same is true of both words in Spanish. Also, eggs, breasts, and
ovaries are all masculine in Spanish.
Keith F. Lynch
> (This whole exchange was done without benefit of translation, and no
> surtitles then, but I was able to follow it, even though I failed
> O-level French some twenty years before that.)
Twenty years is plenty of time to learn a language.
I recently bought _Inglourious Basterds_ at a Blockbuster Video going
out of business sale, and watched it. It's unusually violent for a
war movie. Anyhow, as I usually do, to help learn Spanish, I watched
it with the Spanish subtitles turned on. Most of the movie was in
French or German. There was also a lot of English and a little
Italian. There was one section where someone is interpreting between
French and German, so I got to hear everything in both languages, as
well as seeing the words in Spanish. That was interesting.
It was an important plot point that one major character didn't know
English. Later in the movie, however, she spoke it fluently. In the
IMDB goofs section, it's explained that that's not necessarily a goof,
as the latter was three years later, ample time for her to learn
English. I still think it didn't make sense for her to be speaking
that language in that context, however.
Keith F. Lynch
> Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
> I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
> What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
As I said last night, "gender" for a person is either a neologism or
simply incorrect. The question should be which sex you are.
I don't know if you've noticed, but in California, official forms all
have "other" as a choice along with "male" and "female."
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>simply incorrect.
How old does a neologism have to be before it stops being 'neo'?
(Or does it depend on the individual referring to it, such that
if sie is old enough to remember when it was coined, it always
remains a 'neologism'?)
Pretending that 'gender' is simply a misnomer for 'sex' is something
only cis people get to do ... so insisting on that amounts to waving
your cis privilege in the faces of any trans people within earshot. I
wish you'd stop, as I find it upsetting when my friends talk/act like
bigots, whether through ignorance or through actual bigoted intent.
"gender is like underwear: if it fits ya don't
notice. If it doesn't, you can't avoid noticing"
-- LaughrioTgirl, 2009-06-30
If you're one of the people who doesn't notice, lucky you. But that
doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. It just means you're not
being bothered by it.
> The question should be which sex you are.
No, not usually. Sometimes (most often in medical contexts) yes, but
most of the time gender is what really matters unless folks are being
(a) obnoxiously nosy, (b) annoyingly ciscentric, or (c) both. Sex also
matters to many people in very personal, very intimate circumstances,
but there usually aren't forms to fill out for those situations ... and
even there, whether they've thought it out consciously or not, it's more
often a combination of sex+gender that matters, rather than solely sex.
>I don't know if you've noticed, but in California, official forms all
>have "other" as a choice along with "male" and "female."
This is a good step. (Neither sex nor gender is binary in humans.)
It's not a _perfect_ solution ("other" can be somewhat ... well,
_othering_), but it sure beats invisibility.
Note that "other" here cannot be a euphemism for "trans", since a
majority of trans people _are_ male or female (and some genderqueer or
other non-binary gendered people don't identify as trans ... and on
those occasions when you're talking about sex instead of gender, most
peope who are not unambiguously male or female don't identify as trans
AFAICT). If the form is asking for 'gender' most trans people can still
check 'male' or 'female' as appropriate. If the form asks for 'sex',
then when the individual filling it out doesn't have a clear alignment
between their sex and their gender, they're usually left trying to guess
whether the form-designer really did mean 'sex', or actually meant
'gender' and used the wrong word out of ignorance.
Note also that there are a fair number of people out there who _think_
their sex is unambiguously male or female only because they haven't
experienced any medical conditions that would lead to having tests done
that would reveal their actual sex yet ... or because their parents
chose to hide from them that they were assigned male or female (and
possibly "corrected" thus) shortly after birth when a doctor noticed
they were intersex. IIRC, that's something like half a percent of the
population, which is a lot of people. Then again, in most of the
situations where they're being _asked_ their sex, their guess is
probably good enough.
Daniel R. Reitman
<jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>. . . .
>The use of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex".
>. . . .
That I can understand. With the exception of compounds, most words
tend to reproduce parthogenetically.
Dan, ad nauseam
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > (This whole exchange was done without benefit of translation, and no
> > surtitles then, but I was able to follow it, even though I failed
> > O-level French some twenty years before that.)
>
> Twenty years is plenty of time to learn a language.
Not for me it isn't. I've been trying to learn German for at least 20
years, and I still can't hold a conversation. As soon as someone speaks
German in my presence, I forget all vocabulary I've learned.
At school, science subjects and maths were no bother, things like
geography and history I could limp along in, but languages were a closed
book. I really wanted French to be as simple as maths. I'd heard that
you needed a foreign language O-level at least to get into university in
the sixties, but fortunately, that turned out not to be the case.
At the Japanese Worldcon, I was introduced to an American fan who, it was
claimed, was fluent in German and Japanese. But, she said, she couldn't
do maths. (Well, I suppose she said math, see, I am slightly bilingual
in English and American.)
garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk
> I recently bought _Inglourious Basterds_ at a Blockbuster Video going
> out of business sale, and watched it. It's unusually violent for a
> war movie. Anyhow, as I usually do, to help learn Spanish, I watched
> it with the Spanish subtitles turned on. Most of the movie was in
> French or German. There was also a lot of English and a little
> Italian. There was one section where someone is interpreting between
> French and German, so I got to hear everything in both languages, as
> well as seeing the words in Spanish. That was interesting.
>
> It was an important plot point that one major character didn't know
> English. Later in the movie, however, she spoke it fluently. In the
> IMDB goofs section, it's explained that that's not necessarily a goof,
> as the latter was three years later, ample time for her to learn
> English.
I always assumed that she DID understand English during the first
encounter, but was way too shocked by what she heard to act in time
(only at the very last moment to save her own life).
> I still think it didn't make sense for her to be speaking
> that language in that context, however.
Exactly. Bummer. German would be much more preferable. Given the
circumstances, those 3 years would be more sensibly spent
learning German, not English.
How many people of the target audience would be reasonably expected to
understand English, anyway?
Morris Keesan
wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>> Perhaps I'm guilty of this.
>> I think of "gender" as the question to which my answer would be "male."
>> What is the context in which you would use "sex" instead of "gender?"
>
> As I said last night, "gender" for a person is either a neologism or
> simply incorrect. The question should be which sex you are.
The OED gives "sex" as one of the meanings of "gender", with a citation as
early as 1387. I think that enough centuries have passed since then for
this to not be considered a neologism.
--
Morris Keesan -- mke...@post.harvard.edu
Paul Dormer
(Morris Keesan) wrote:
>
> The OED gives "sex" as one of the meanings of "gender", with a
> citation as early as 1387. I think that enough centuries have passed
> since then for this to not be considered a neologism.
1387? That's recent history, isn't it?
I note that Newcastle upon Tyne and the New Forest are both about three
hundred years older.
David Friedman
dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
> > The question should be which sex you are.
>
> No, not usually. Sometimes (most often in medical contexts) yes, but
> most of the time gender is what really matters unless folks are being
> (a) obnoxiously nosy, (b) annoyingly ciscentric, or (c) both. Sex also
> matters to many people in very personal, very intimate circumstances,
> but there usually aren't forms to fill out for those situations ... and
> even there, whether they've thought it out consciously or not, it's more
> often a combination of sex+gender that matters, rather than solely sex.
I'm afraid I don't understand how you are using the terms.
Does "sex" mean something like "do or don't your cells have a Y
chromosome," or perhaps "do you have the reproductive organs that
normally go with XX or with XY?" In which case you are presumably using
gender either for "do you choose to present yourself in a way that would
make people think you are XX or XY" or something else along those lines
that is more nearly behavioral than biological?
> >I don't know if you've noticed, but in California, official forms all
> >have "other" as a choice along with "male" and "female."
>
> This is a good step. (Neither sex nor gender is binary in humans.)
> It's not a _perfect_ solution ("other" can be somewhat ... well,
> _othering_), but it sure beats invisibility.
>
> Note that "other" here cannot be a euphemism for "trans", since a
> majority of trans people _are_ male or female
I'm assuming that "trans" is short for "transsexual," and means someone
who starts out apparently of one sex (genetic or reproductive
organs--usually but not invariably the same), feels himself to be of the
other, and ends up presenting as the other, with or without surgery to
alter physical characteristics.
I don't know what your "are male or female" means. Are you talking about
genetically male or female, in which case, so far as we know, almost all
trans people are male or female, or do you mean "present as" or some
other category definition?
> (and some genderqueer or
> other non-binary gendered people don't identify as trans ... and on
> those occasions when you're talking about sex instead of gender, most
> peope who are not unambiguously male or female don't identify as trans
> AFAICT). If the form is asking for 'gender' most trans people can still
> check 'male' or 'female' as appropriate. If the form asks for 'sex',
> then when the individual filling it out doesn't have a clear alignment
> between their sex and their gender, they're usually left trying to guess
> whether the form-designer really did mean 'sex', or actually meant
> 'gender' and used the wrong word out of ignorance.
"Out of ignorance" takes it for granted that your word usage is
objectively true, hence anyone who disagrees is making a mistake rather
than speaking a slightly different ideolect.
> Note also that there are a fair number of people out there who _think_
> their sex is unambiguously male or female only because they haven't
> experienced any medical conditions that would lead to having tests done
> that would reveal their actual sex yet ... or because their parents
> chose to hide from them that they were assigned male or female (and
> possibly "corrected" thus) shortly after birth when a doctor noticed
> they were intersex. IIRC, that's something like half a percent of the
> population, which is a lot of people. Then again, in most of the
> situations where they're being _asked_ their sex, their guess is
> probably good enough.
I'm guessing from context (confirmed by a quick google) that you are
using "intersex" to mean what's traditionally referred to as
"hermaphrodictic." As you probably know, given the rest of your post,
there are also people who are genetically neither male nor female in the
normal sense of the terms--neither XX nor XY--or who are genetically one
but to all appearances the other. I think those are rarer, but don't
actually know.
...
One more general comment. You give a figure of half a percent. I don't
know how accurate that is, but will assume it's right.
In language, and in thought, we routinely use binary categories for
things much less binary than that. Tall/short, old/young, true/false.
Doing so simplifies conversation and thought. Such simplification
carries a cost in precision, but precision has its own costs--if you
speak precisely enough you will never be able to finish a sentence.
Hence part of the effect I get from your post is "because these
questions are of great importance to a relatively small number of
people, everyone else is obliged to modify his use of language to take
account of them, even though they are only very rarely relevant to most
people."
At a slight tangent, one of my interests over the last year or two is
the history of Jewish law, which I now include in a course I teach.
Traditional Jewish law, going back more than two thousand years, takes
account of the existence of hermaphrodites in its rules--is in that
sense non-binary in its classifications. It also mentions another
category, whose meaning is not entirely clear--"tumtum." The conjecture
I have seen is that it refers to people whose sex cannot be determined,
due to some physical condition whose nature is not entirely clear.
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
Google any unfamiliar terms if I don't want it to be twice as
long. Note that most of the new-to-you terms have at least
a couple decades of usage behind them.
Although this is long, I am glossing over or simplifying
several points to avoid turning this into an entire book.
(Though I've been encouraged to write such a book in the
past ...)
In article <ddfr-B77D26.0...@news.giganews.com>,
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>In article <in3i72$624$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
>
>> > The question should be which sex you are.
>>
>> No, not usually. Sometimes (most often in medical contexts) yes, but
>> most of the time gender is what really matters unless folks are being
>> (a) obnoxiously nosy, (b) annoyingly ciscentric, or (c) both. Sex also
>> matters to many people in very personal, very intimate circumstances,
>> but there usually aren't forms to fill out for those situations ... and
>> even there, whether they've thought it out consciously or not, it's more
>> often a combination of sex+gender that matters, rather than solely sex.
>
>I'm afraid I don't understand how you are using the terms.
Sex refers to the body -- a cluster of related but not always
agreeing physical attributes, including morphology, karyotype,
and physiology. Each of these can be clearly male, clearly
female, neither, or ambiguous. And when one is clearly male,
another can be clearly female or ambiguous. For example: the
Croatian (IIRC) woman with female morphology, female physiology,
and a history of normal menarche and menopause with two pregnancies
(and one successful birth in between), whose karyotype turned out
to be XY/XO mosaic. Her karyotype is ambiguously male, and
everything else about her body is unambiguously female. I'm
not sure what her sex ought to be technically classified as,
but I'm comfortable labelling her sex female-with-a-footnote.
Gender is a property -- or cluster of properties -- of the
intelligence inhabiting that body (or if you consider intelligence
merely an epiphenomenon of the body, substitute "the intelligence
arising from that body's brain"). The _person_, their consciousness,
their soul, their mind, their self-aware selfhood -- pick your
model / metaphor / nomenclature as you will; in most ways of thinking
about persons as individuals who experience things, there's an
applicable construct. That Croatian woman's _gender_ is unambiguously
female: she was assigned female at birth, raised female, thought
of herself (probably still thinks of herself) as female, presents
as female, occupies female social roles (wife, mother), and had
apparently never questioned that identity nor found it an uncomfortable
fit. With such an alignment between her assigned gender, herperceived
gender, her gender presentation, and her sense of her own gender
(her 'gender identity'), we can also say that she is 'cisgender'.
It's worth noting that gender identity carries an intensity as
well as a type -- it can be useful to think of it as a vector.
In the model Sandra Bem used for the Bem Sex-Roles Inventory[1],
there are two axes: degree of masculinity and degree of femininity.
So a 'weakly gendered' person doesn't really feel their gender
very intensely, whatever it is, and may have trouble understanding
why gender is so important to those who feel it more strongly.
Like one of my ex-girlfriends, they're comfortable going along
with whatever gender society assigns them not because it coincides
with their gender identity (it may or may not), but because their
gender identity is weakly perceived and doesn't feel important
to them. If such a person were to wake up to discover they'd
had a magical sex-chsnge overnight, they wouldn't find that
particularly distressing. They often have trouble understanding
why transgender people are so bothered by gender.
In contrast, 'strongly-gendered' cisgender people would find such a
magical transformation to be a nightmare of cognitive dissonance.
If they gave a good imagination, contemplating what that would be
like can give them some appreciation for what transgender people
experience in real life. (Similarly, for a trans person, waking
up to discover such a transformation could be a huge relief from
what had been an ongoing stressor.)
For a weakly-gendered cisgender male, being perceived as having
some feminine traits is no big deal emotionally (though depending
on his social environment it may be a big deal tactically). For
a strongly-gendered cisgender male, being perceived as having
anything remotely feminine about him is a huge insult that needs
to be addressed.
Consider for a moment the Classic Oversimplification of a
generalized trans woman: typically described as "a woman in
a man's body". This is someone who has enough male sexual
characteristics to have been assigned 'male' at birth and
constantly pushed into male gender roles, but who is strongly
gendered female, so the labeling as, and trappings of, male
gender chafe -- she experiences 'gender dysphoria'. Similarly,
For a strongly-gendered trans man, being thought of as womanly
is every bit as irritating as it is to a strongly-gendered
cisgender man ... but until he takes steps to alter his
gender presentation and possibly his anatomy, everyone
around him perceives him not just as feminine, but as
female.
Another difference: it's easier to change one's sex than to
change one's gender. Sex can be corrected with a combination
of surgery and hormone therapy. I don't know of any way to
intentionaly change one's gender.
Aspects of gender include gender presentation, gender roles,
stated gender-label preference (e.g. "please call me Ms., not
Mr."), and -- the central issue -- gender identity. The others
are aspects of how the person interacts with society and
consitute how one 'performs' gender; the person may have some
control over them (or they may be imposed by circumstance);
they can be pretended ... but gender identity, the gender
one "feels", the gender one knows oneself to be, determines
which gender performance is comfortable and which feels like
a disguise. When I speak of what gender someone "is", I'm
referring to gender-identity, not gender-performance. In this
thread before now, and after now, I have been and will be using
'gender' to refer to gender identity, unless modified by some
other tag (i.e. gender performance, perceived gender,
gender presentation, etc.)
Gender identities other than 'male' and 'female' include
agendered (someone who for whom 'male' and 'female' _both_
feel Wrong), intergender, bigender, 'third gender' (which
may mean different things to different people who identify
as that), and various flavours of genderqueer. (I'm pretty
sure this is _not_ an exhaustive list.)
'Transgender' is usually assumed to include all of those,
as well as male- and female-gender people whose gender
does not match their sex (or their gender-assigned-at-birth),
but there's some disagreement within the trans-and-gender-variant
community as to whether all of the non-binary-identified folk
should be automatically classed as transgender, or just some.
I've also seen some people include intersex under the trans
umbrella, but not many, and that's an even more contentious
move. (Many intersex people also identify as trans but many
do not.)
[1] A flawed model, but far, far more useful than simple polar
concepts of gender or a one-dimensional scale of gender. Then
again, the BSRI measures gender-roles according to the norms of
a particular culture, more than gender-identity per se.
>Does "sex" mean something like "do or don't your cells have a Y
>chromosome," or perhaps "do you have the reproductive organs that
>normally go with XX or with XY?" [...]
You're already a step ahead of a lot of people there, in that
you're considering that there could be multipe choices for what
attribute to use to determine sex (most people dragged into this
topic pick one attribute and assume it's the "obvious" one until
contradictions pop up). Yes, as described above, it means
_"something_like"_ karyotype or which reproductive organs are
present, but it's not binary -- not only can each aspect be
potentially ambiguous, but aspects of equal importance can
disagree. So when we _do_ talk about _sex_, *context* *matters*.
Most of the time, we're not really interested in sex anyhow,
just gender, and when we are interested in sex it's most often
just because we're nosy! But let's look at some of the times
when we really do care about sex.
Let's start with potential romance / a potential tryst. Some
folks care quite a lot about what they're going to find in
their partner's underwear if things do get that far, and even
people who don't care that much may have different preferred
acts to go with different bodies. Assuming that person A finds
person B's _gender_ attractive (because otherwise we probably
won't get this far in the first place), A may well care what
external sex organs and secondary sexual characteristics B
has. B's karyotype probably doesn't matter, and likely isn't
even _known_ (just guessed at based on the odds). B's gonads
probably don't matter at this point either. For example, I'm
attracted to women, and to women's bodies[2]. If the woman I'm
flirting with is XY with CAIS and has one or two testes hiding
somewhere in her abdomen, then (a) I'm not likely to even
suspect, (b) she may or may not know this about herself and
isn't likely to tell me, and (c) I won't care anyhow -- she's
a woman with, for sexual purposes, a woman's body. For our
purposes at the time, she's simply female. Not "ambiguously
female", simply female.
Now let's look at trying to start a family. All of a sudden,
her infertility matters (and is likely to be the way we find
out she's an XY with CAIS, if her parents hid it from her --
which is apparently not uncommon). Sexually she's still female;
_reproductively_, not quite. Looks like we'll have to adopt.
Until we shifted from a mere mutual-pleasure context to a
reproductive context, her karyotype was irrelevant. So while
her "sex" has not changed, which aspects we consider relevant
have.
Next, let's turn our imagination to a doctor's office. The
doctor may well need to know her patient's physical sex,
depending on what the patient is there for. (A broken arm?
Sex isn't really significant. A urological complaint? It
probably is.) Here's the thing: even for the doctor, _which_
attribute(s) of the patient's sex matter will depend, again,
on why the patient is there (or on the potential side effects
of treatments the doctor is considering). Sometimes the only
aspect that matters is "can the patient become pregnant" (e.g.
when condidering prescribing a drug with a high likelihood of
causing birth defects). Sometimes all that matters is the
patient's hormonal balance. Sometimes all that matters is
whether the patient has a prostate gland. Sometimes it
matters whether the patient has undergone SRS (sex reassignment
surgery); sometimes it doesn't. The doctor will _want_ to know
all of this just in case any of it becomes relevant later,
but as for how the patient's sex affects the current treatment
(or diagnosis) _today_, well that may not be the same from
one encounter to the next even if the patient's sex doesn't
change in between.
(The doctor will still need to know the patient's _gender_.
First off, for politeness -- using the correct pronouns and
honorific when referring to or addressing the patient. And
possibly for medical reasons as well: is gynecomastia a
side effect to be countered, or a desired outcome?)
And then there's _legal_ sex. *sigh* This'd be a lot less
tangled if (a) lawmakers didn't feel the need to put sex/gender
restrictions on marriage, (b) could keep gender and sex straight,
(c) understand that not everyone is male or female, or (d) agree,
from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, which aspects of sex matter in
what situations and what the legal requirements are for changing
on's legal sex. Even within one country, the US[3], a person
can be legally one sex in one state and a different sex as soon
as they drive across a border to another state! Or within one
state, they might be one sex on their driver's license and another
sex for the purpose of determining whom they're allowed to marry.
For the most part I'd like to avoid trying to untangle legal
sex for now, and just point out that as a concept it exists,
that it doesn't always line up with physical sex _or_ gender,
and often doesn't even agree with itself.
[2] I honestly don't know how I would react to learning that
a woman I was about to become intimate with had a penis. I've
thought about it, but I won't really be sure until/unless I'm
ever in that situation.
[3] Admittedly a large and complex country. But still ...
[...] >In which case you are presumably using
>gender either for "do you choose to present yourself in a way that would
>make people think you are XX or XY" or something else along those lines
>that is more nearly behavioral than biological?
I'm mostly using it to refer to something innate and internal
to the psyche, though in larger contexts (like my "what the
heck is gender" paragraphs earlier) the term can also refer
to aspects of gender expression (gender performance, behaviour,
gender presentation, social role, and explicit verbal statements
about one's gender).
Where you suggest "behavioral", that term implies to me a category
that straddles that internal-to-the-psyche / external-and-observable
line, so I'm not comfortable labelling it that. But obviously when
we do talk about the observable signs and signals of gender, how we
determine someone else's gender, and the outward _effects_ of a
person's gender identity, we will hav e to mention performance,
presentation, etc. For the purpose of this discussion, I'd like
to use 'gender' to refer mainly to gender-identity, and treat all
the external signifiers of it as related phenomena rather than
constituents of it. (Yeah, it's not _quite_ that clear cut, but
I think that's the simplification that'll be most useful right now.)
>> Note that "other" here cannot be a euphemism for "trans", since a
>> majority of trans people _are_ male or female
>
>I'm assuming that "trans" is short for "transsexual," and means someone
>who starts out apparently of one sex (genetic or reproductive
>organs--usually but not invariably the same), feels himself to be of the
>other, and ends up presenting as the other, with or without surgery to
>alter physical characteristics.
"Trans" is a (usually intentionally, sometimes not) ambiguous
abbreviation for both 'transsexual' and 'transgender'. (I assume
that by now everyone has picked up from context that it's antonym
is 'cis', which can be expanded to either 'cissexual' or
'cisgender' depending on context.)
'Transgender' is an "umbrella term" generally considered to be
a superset of: transsexual, transvestite, transgenderist[4],
two-spirit, berdache, drag king, drag queen, intergender, bigender,
genderqueer, agender, third-gender, and anyone who has a history
of trans experience. But there are some caveats: some transsexual
people object to transsexual being considered a subset of transgender,
and some people feel the transgender label no longer applies
post-transition, nor the transsexual label post-surgery (while still
others use 'transsexual' _solely_ for those who have already
undergone SRS). So woman who has undergone SRS might describe herself
as 'a trans woman' or as 'a woman with a trans history' (NB.!! She
will most often simply describe her self as a woman, with no modifiers,
except in those particular contexts -- such as academic discusions of
kyriarchy or reciting her life story -- where distinguishing between
cis and trans is _relevant_[5]). And then there are the vocal "HBS"
folks, which is rather a can of worms. And as I mentioned above,
some people consider intersex to be an additional subset of transgender,
but I consider that a bit of a political/linguistic land mine.
Some transgender people identify simply as transgender, not as
anything more specific, because they haven't found a more
specific label that feels like it accurately describes them,
but their experience still falls wthin the range that is trans.
IN GENERAL, interpret and use 'trans' broadly; when a more
specific context is required, choose a more specific phrasing.
When contest suggests that a speaker may intend a narrower
scope (such as meaning transsexual, not all categories of
transgender) and the context isn't sufficient to determine
which meaning is intended, ask. (Uh, as you did here, yes.)
If someone who would be considered trans under a broad definition
requests a not-present-tense-trans label ("formerly trans",
"of trans history"), adapt or negotiate some sort of temporary
shared semantics to use. Most of the time when you're talking
about gender in general, trans rights, etc., the broadest
definitions will work. When it turns to a discussion of who
is or isn't trans, and the interpretation of phrases such
as "cissexual but transgender", that's when the fine points
are likely to arise. Those conversations happen more often
within the trans community than elsewhere.
Most trans people see themselves as men or women -- thus still
binary-gendered, still male or female -- just not the same gender
they were initially assigned. A significant minority consider
themselves to be neither male nor female, both male and female,
or in between male and female. If we limit the scope to
transsexual people rather than transgender people as a whole,
the fraction that identify as either male or female is even
higher.
Since it wasn't clear whether the forms referred to were looking
for physical sex, legal sex, gender, or different things on
different forms, it made sense to use 'trans' deliberately
ambiguously, since the statement was true either way and I
wasn't sure which sense was most applicable.
[4] This term may be obsolete. I haven't encountered it "in
the wild" for a decade or two. It used to refer to someone who
'transitions' (lives entirely in a gender counter to that assigned
at birth, full-time) but chooses not to have SRS. I think such
people are now simply considered transsexual, covered under the
"it's none of your business whether I've had surgery or not"
clause.
[5] In contexts where a cis man would _not_ prefix 'man' with
'cis', a trans man should not be expected to say 'trans'; when
a cis woman would simply say 'woman', a trans woman would be
expected to do likewise. Properly, specifying 'cis' or 'trans'
only applies when we're specifically talking about gender as a
general human phenomenon, or when we're specifically contrasting
cis and trans experiences, discussing prejudice, talking about
an individual's medical history, etc.
>I don't know what your "are male or female" means. Are you talking about
>genetically male or female, in which case, so far as we know, almost all
>trans people are male or female, or do you mean "present as" or some
>other category definition?
To take what you appear to have meant: that depends on whether
the form in question is asking for sex or gender. If the form
says 'gender' and actually means 'gender', then the answer would
properly be based on gender-identity -- what the person sees
themself as -- but will more likely be based on presentation
anyhow because of timidity when one is still presenting as the
assigned wrong gender.
If the form says 'sex' and means 'sex', then the answer will be
the simplest _known_ fit to the person's physical sex (as noted
a few times so far, there are sometimes surprising discoveries to
be encountered down the road), or their legal sex, depending on
why the form is asking / what kind of form it is. But to reiterate
a point made above: _genetic_ sex is (a) often not the most
relevant, and (b) is usually not even known, just guessed.
"Genetic sex" is a poor shorthand!
(A frustratingly common scenario is having to fill out a form
where, regardless of which term is printed, it's not at all
clear which concept is _intended_.)
>> (and some genderqueer or
>> other non-binary gendered people don't identify as trans ... and on
>> those occasions when you're talking about sex instead of gender, most
>> peope who are not unambiguously male or female don't identify as trans
>> AFAICT). If the form is asking for 'gender' most trans people can still
>> check 'male' or 'female' as appropriate. If the form asks for 'sex',
>> then when the individual filling it out doesn't have a clear alignment
>> between their sex and their gender, they're usually left trying to guess
>> whether the form-designer really did mean 'sex', or actually meant
>> 'gender' and used the wrong word out of ignorance.
>
>"Out of ignorance" takes it for granted that your word usage is
>objectively true, hence anyone who disagrees is making a mistake rather
>than speaking a slightly different ideolect.
If their idiolect doesn't match the usage in any dialect, I'm
comfortable labelling their usage a mistake. When we get into
conflicts between dialects, I'll grant that a longer view may
be warranted. I'm using the terms the way *people who discuss
sex and gender in depth in English* use them. I am aware that
in the general population the two terms are often conflated or
misunderstood, but in those contexts where the difference
between the concepts matters (i.e. when it's not completely
obvious that only one of them could reasonably be intended),
it makes sense to push the more useful terminology. I'm not
aware of any dialect of English that switches 'sex' and 'gender'
or has a different term that denotes what I'm calling 'gender',
after studying and talkking about these things for decades.
(If such exist, I stand ready to learn.)
I don't often see both concepts labelled by the same term;
mucch more common (IME) is to find what I'm calling 'sex'
labelled by one or both words, and what I'm calling 'gender'
completely ignored. I feel quite comfortable calling that
condition 'ignorance', at least when the concept arises and
folks have no handy way to discusss or think about it.
(The one good thing about ignorance, of course, is that it's
curable.)
>I'm guessing from context (confirmed by a quick google) that you are
>using "intersex" to mean what's traditionally referred to as
>"hermaphrodictic."
_Was_formerly_ referred to as hermaphroditism -- that term has been
out of favour for quite a while, at least in the US. For a while
the term 'true hermaphrodite' was used to refer to a couple of
specific intersex conditions; I'm not sure whether it still is in
the medical literature or not -- I haven't encountered it in a while.
Instead, nowadays I sually see specific conditions named.
>As you probably know, given the rest of your post,
>there are also people who are genetically neither male nor female in the
>normal sense of the terms--neither XX nor XY--or who are genetically one
>but to all appearances the other. I think those are rarer, but don't
>actually know.
When you describe XX/XY as the "normal" sense of 'male' and
'female', we are definitely stepping into dialect/idiolect
issues. For many people, the "normal" meanings of 'male' and
'female' are "penis present" and "penis absent". For a smaller
numnber (based on years of watching people wrestle with defining
sex in online conversations) it's "absence of vagina" and
"presence of vagina", or "presence of testes" and "presence
of ovaries". All of these, of course, are every bit as
problematic as "XY" and "XX".
>One more general comment. You give a figure of half a percent. I don't
>know how accurate that is, but will assume it's right.
I'll look that up again later, and report back.
>In language, and in thought, we routinely use binary categories for
>things much less binary than that. Tall/short, old/young, true/false.
>Doing so simplifies conversation and thought. Such simplification
>carries a cost in precision, but precision has its own costs--if you
>speak precisely enough you will never be able to finish a sentence.
That's actually why I consider "male", "female", and "other"
on a form to be a good step and a useful one: _that_ is itself
a simplification, but trying to enumerate all the possible
genders is guaranteed to take up too much space _and_ leave
some people out ... trying to come up with a less detailed
taxonomy of gender that still conveys more than "other" will
involve inventing more terms and is extremely likely to
confuse some trans people and annoy others with how the broad
categories are delineated ... and letting gender be a free-form
fill-in-the-blank field works in some contexts but leads to
reporting problems in others. So "male/female/other" neither
forces people into a binary that doesn't fit, nor bogs us down
in a paralyzing degree of precision.
I'm not sure it's the ideal solution, but I do think it's a
useful one despite my distate for being "othered".
(One refinement I'd like -- I don't know whether CA.US does
this or not -- is to make those heckboxes instead of radio
buttons in online versions of the forms. The other refinement
I'd like to see on forms that ask for sex or gender in general,
is to simply make that field _optional_.)
>Hence part of the effect I get from your post is "because these
>questions are of great importance to a relatively small number of
>people, everyone else is obliged to modify his use of language to take
>account of them, even though they are only very rarely relevant to most
>people."
Half a percent was my recollection of the number of intersex
people. There are many more transgender people than that,
just counting the ones who speak openly about it. (Accurate
numbers are hard to come by, but we know our count is low.)
IIRC, there are more intersex people in the US than wheelchair
users, but we (rightly, IMO) see fit to mandate wheelchair ramps
and curb-cuts. There are even more trans people. And educating
folks about the difference between gender and sex seems as though
it should cost a lot less than curb-cuts.
>At a slight tangent, one of my interests over the last year or two is
>the history of Jewish law, which I now include in a course I teach.
>Traditional Jewish law, going back more than two thousand years, takes
>account of the existence of hermaphrodites in its rules--is in that
>sense non-binary in its classifications. It also mentions another
>category, whose meaning is not entirely clear--"tumtum." The conjecture
>I have seen is that it refers to people whose sex cannot be determined,
>due to some physical condition whose nature is not entirely clear.
I appreciate knowing about that. Thanks for mentioning it.
David Friedman
dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
> This is going to be long, and I'll have to count on y'all to
> Google any unfamiliar terms if I don't want it to be twice as
> long. Note that most of the new-to-you terms have at least
> a couple decades of usage behind them.
Not a problem. A careful and interesting discussion.
...
> Another difference: it's easier to change one's sex than to
> change one's gender. Sex can be corrected with a combination
> of surgery and hormone therapy. I don't know of any way to
> intentionaly change one's gender.
I don't think "sex can be corrected" is unambiguously true--as you point
out, there is a range of definitions of sex. As far as I know, there is
currently no way of converting someone who is biologically male into a
reproductively functional female, although I wouldn't be astonished if
that changed sometime during this century. Of course, we usually think
of barren women as women, so one could argue that a biological male who
has been suitable altered is really a woman, but my guess is that a lot
of people wouldn't use the language in that way. I also don't know
enough about the current state of the relevant medical technologies to
know how close to an initially biological woman such a person would be
in other ways--able to nurse an infant, for instance.
...
> And then there's _legal_ sex. *sigh* This'd be a lot less
> tangled if (a) lawmakers didn't feel the need to put sex/gender
> restrictions on marriage, (b) could keep gender and sex straight,
> (c) understand that not everyone is male or female, or (d) agree,
> from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, which aspects of sex matter in
> what situations and what the legal requirements are for changing
> on's legal sex. Even within one country, the US[3], a person
> can be legally one sex in one state and a different sex as soon
> as they drive across a border to another state! Or within one
> state, they might be one sex on their driver's license and another
> sex for the purpose of determining whom they're allowed to marry.
A few years back, one of the students in my "Legal Issues of the 21st
Century" class did a good paper on how sex was treated in various legal
contexts. It's webbed:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/21st_century_issues/l
egal_issues_21_2000_pprs_web/21st_c_papers_2002/Kirkpatrick.htm
It inspired me to discuss the question of ambiguous sex a little in my
_Future Imperfect_, a book that grew out of that course.
...
> >"Out of ignorance" takes it for granted that your word usage is
> >objectively true, hence anyone who disagrees is making a mistake rather
> >than speaking a slightly different ideolect.
>
> If their idiolect doesn't match the usage in any dialect, I'm
> comfortable labelling their usage a mistake.
But that isn't the case. A large fraction of the population is unaware
of the complications in the definition of sex that are central to your
whole discussion, hence use terms like "male," "female," "sex," and
"gender" in the context of a world view in which everyone is
unambiguously male or female. Their language does not make those
distinctions. There are lots of distinctions your language (or mine)
could make and doesn't, including ones where the map we are using is in
some circumstances misleading. That doesn't mean that we are misusing
language or making a mistake.
You might defend your "out of ignorance" as meaning "if they knew as
much about the subject as I do, they would use language in the way I
do," but even that is wrong--because someone who knew everything you
know but didn't find it useful to make the distinctions you make,
perhaps because much of his audience didn't know those things, perhaps
because it would add unnecessary complication to what he was saying or
writing, would not be speaking out of ignorance and would not be making
a mistake.
Or in other words, to me your view of how other people ought to speak
seems intolerant and imperialistic--if they don't use the terminology
that is useful to you, they are wrong, ignorant, mistaken.
> When we get into
> conflicts between dialects, I'll grant that a longer view may
> be warranted. I'm using the terms the way *people who discuss
> sex and gender in depth in English* use them.
That I can well believe. But such people are a tiny fraction of the
population.
Should I claim that almost everybody who uses the word "efficient" is
wrong--because that is not the way in which economists use it? Almost
everyone who uses the word "significant" is wrong, because that is not
the way statisticians use it? In both of those cases, the "error" causes
significant problems when people outside the specialist group are
talking about that group's subject. That isn't a reason why everyone
else must use, or even understand, the technical meaning.
> I am aware that
> in the general population the two terms are often conflated or
> misunderstood, but in those contexts where the difference
> between the concepts matters (i.e. when it's not completely
> obvious that only one of them could reasonably be intended),
> it makes sense to push the more useful terminology.
It is of some worth to push it--but, as I said earlier, precision has a
cost. Sometimes the cost is greater than the value.
> I'm not
> aware of any dialect of English that switches 'sex' and 'gender'
> or has a different term that denotes what I'm calling 'gender',
> after studying and talkking about these things for decades.
> (If such exist, I stand ready to learn.)
I don't know of any either. But I think the most common dialects treat
the two words as roughly equivalent, outside of the grammatical context.
...
> >I'm guessing from context (confirmed by a quick google) that you are
> >using "intersex" to mean what's traditionally referred to as
> >"hermaphrodictic."
>
> _Was_formerly_ referred to as hermaphroditism -- that term has been
> out of favour for quite a while, at least in the US.
Again, I think you are taking the linguistic conventions of a particular
small community as if they define usage in general.
> For a while
> the term 'true hermaphrodite' was used to refer to a couple of
> specific intersex conditions; I'm not sure whether it still is in
> the medical literature or not -- I haven't encountered it in a while.
> Instead, nowadays I sually see specific conditions named.
>
> >As you probably know, given the rest of your post,
> >there are also people who are genetically neither male nor female in the
> >normal sense of the terms--neither XX nor XY--or who are genetically one
> >but to all appearances the other. I think those are rarer, but don't
> >actually know.
>
> When you describe XX/XY as the "normal" sense of 'male' and
> 'female', we are definitely stepping into dialect/idiolect
> issues.
I specified "genetically neither ... ."
> For many people, the "normal" meanings of 'male' and
> 'female' are "penis present" and "penis absent". For a smaller
> numnber (based on years of watching people wrestle with defining
> sex in online conversations) it's "absence of vagina" and
> "presence of vagina", or "presence of testes" and "presence
> of ovaries". All of these, of course, are every bit as
> problematic as "XY" and "XX".
Yes. But none of the the others would be described as the genetic sense
of male and female.
> >One more general comment. You give a figure of half a percent. I don't
> >know how accurate that is, but will assume it's right.
>
> I'll look that up again later, and report back.
>
> >In language, and in thought, we routinely use binary categories for
> >things much less binary than that. Tall/short, old/young, true/false.
> >Doing so simplifies conversation and thought. Such simplification
> >carries a cost in precision, but precision has its own costs--if you
> >speak precisely enough you will never be able to finish a sentence.
>
> That's actually why I consider "male", "female", and "other"
> on a form to be a good step and a useful one: _that_ is itself
> a simplification, but trying to enumerate all the possible
> genders is guaranteed to take up too much space _and_ leave
> some people out ... trying to come up with a less detailed
> taxonomy of gender that still conveys more than "other" will
> involve inventing more terms and is extremely likely to
> confuse some trans people and annoy others with how the broad
> categories are delineated ... and letting gender be a free-form
> fill-in-the-blank field works in some contexts but leads to
> reporting problems in others. So "male/female/other" neither
> forces people into a binary that doesn't fit, nor bogs us down
> in a paralyzing degree of precision.
Yes. And for many purposes, I agree that making the question an optional
one is a sensible way of reducing the problem. Indeed, "male, female, do
not choose to answer" strikes me as better than "male, female, other."
...
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote
thoughtful commentary on my really long explanation ...
This is just a brief note to say I'm not ignoring your
response and the criticism and additional information
therein. I've just got other stuff on my plate today.
A proper response (much shorter than my last one) soonish ...
Keith F. Lynch
> Hence part of the effect I get from your post is "because these
> questions are of great importance to a relatively small number of
> people, everyone else is obliged to modify his use of language to
> take account of them, even though they are only very rarely relevant
> to most people."
Exactly. Remember, this started when I objected to Joy's seeming to
imply that the unmodified language is objectively incorrect.
Keith F. Lynch
> k...@KeithLynch.net (Keith F. Lynch) wrote:
>> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Twenty years is plenty of time to learn a language.
> Not for me it isn't. I've been trying to learn German for at least
> 20 years, and I still can't hold a conversation.
How long did it take you to learn English?
Can you read German? After about six months of study, I can read
Spanish pretty well, but still can't yet follow spoken Spanish in
real-time.
> At school, science subjects and maths were no bother, things like
> geography and history I could limp along in, but languages were a
> closed book.
I was good in all school subjects except gym. However, I never had a
foreign language class.
Steve Coltrin
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> k...@KeithLynch.net (Keith F. Lynch) wrote:
>>> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Twenty years is plenty of time to learn a language.
>
>> Not for me it isn't. I've been trying to learn German for at least
>> 20 years, and I still can't hold a conversation.
>
> How long did it take you to learn English?
Language acquisition becomes much, much more difficult past childhood.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press
David Friedman
dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
> In article <ddfr-A2F6D1.1...@news.giganews.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote
> thoughtful commentary on my really long explanation ...
>
> This is just a brief note to say I'm not ignoring your
> response and the criticism and additional information
> therein. I've just got other stuff on my plate today.
> A proper response (much shorter than my last one) soonish ...
I'll wait--it's an interesting conversation.
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> How long did it take you to learn English?
>
Still learning.
> Can you read German? After about six months of study, I can read
> Spanish pretty well, but still can't yet follow spoken Spanish in
> real-time.
Only really slowly with a dictionary in hand.
Keith F. Lynch
> very intensely, whatever it is, and may have trouble understanding
> If such a person were to wake up to discover they'd had a magical
> sex-chsnge overnight, they wouldn't find that particularly
> distressing.
I think I'm weakly gendered in that sense. If I woke up female
tomorrow, I think my main concern would be whether people would
recognize me, the same as if I woke up still male but with a different
face. The one time in my life someone said she had though I was
female, I wasn't at all bothered. (I had left my seat on an
inter-city train, and the woman who then sat down next to that
seat guessed my sex based on the book I had left on the tray
table. I think it was something by Stephen Jay Gould.)
But of course I can't really be sure unless it happens.
Gender dysphoria is far from the only form of body or mind dysphoria.
Probably the most common kind is age dysphoria. Many old people think
of themselves as young, and want others to think of themselves as
young. And I think of myself as hirsute, and wish that others saw me
that way. But if I were to attempt to pass as hirsute by wearing a
toupée, I'd just be a bald man wearing a toupée, a figure of ridicule
for anyone who realized I was wearing one.
A more distressing example, for me, is honesty dysphoria. I see
myself as honest, and want others to see me as honest. And I really
*am* objectively honest. This goes to the core of my being much more
than my sex, hairiness, race, nationality, or anything else about
me. And I think it has more of an effect on how others treat me.
Fortunately, most people see me as honest. The state, of course,
officially does not, nor do those who are compelled to treat the
state's opinions as gospel.
(Curiously, "honesty dysphoria" gets no Google hits.)
Do people have the right to be treated as whatever and whoever they
want to be seen as? Or do people have the right to treat others
however they please? Both rights cannot always apply. Should the
dividing line be biology? If so, that means an old person has no
right to be regarded or treated as young, and a biologically male
person has no right to be treated as female.
Phrased another way, who gets to decide who is allowed in the ladies'
bathroom?
Another example is a trans-black (i.e. white) person who hangs out
with blacks, uses black slang, and listens to black music. If he uses
the N-word, as many cis-blacks do among themselves, how are cis-blacks
likely to respond? Do they have a right to respond that way?
> For a strongly-gendered trans man ... but until he takes steps to
> alter his gender presentation and possibly his anatomy, everyone
> around him perceives him not just as feminine, but as female.
You're begging the question by using male terms for this person.
I hope I'm not coming across as a bigot. I'm willing to address
someone however they wish to be addressed. But my mental image of
them will be of whatever sex they appear to be. Maybe I shouldn't
categorize people by sex, but I do. Even people with ambiguous names
whom I only know online and have never met, even if it means I have
to guess.
I'm not willing to condemn someone who refers to a "strongly-gendered
trans man" as a woman.
> Since it wasn't clear whether the forms referred to were looking for
> physical sex, legal sex, gender, or different things on different
> forms, it made sense to use 'trans' deliberately ambiguously, since
> the statement was true either way and I wasn't sure which sense was
> most applicable.
If the forms are for identification, then they're probably looking
for appearance.
> I'm not aware of any dialect of English that switches 'sex' and
> 'gender' or has a different term that denotes what I'm calling
> 'gender', after studying and talkking about these things for
> decades.
Some dialects may deny that "gender," in your sense, is even a valid
concept. Just as most people, I think, would deny that "trans-youth"
(an old person who regards himself or herself as young, and wants to
be so regarded by others) is a valid concept, or that such people
should be spoken of and treated as young. People who prefer such
dialects presumably believe that everyone should play the hand
they're dealt.
> (One refinement I'd like -- I don't know whether CA.US does this or
> not -- is to make those heckboxes instead of radio buttons in online
> versions of the forms. The other refinement I'd like to see on
> forms that ask for sex or gender in general, is to simply make that
> field _optional_.)
I think that most people who would check both or neither would do so
by mistake. Also, if it's to be optional when applying for identity
documents, should hair color, eye color, age, height, and weight also
be optional?
> Half a percent was my recollection of the number of intersex people.
> There are many more transgender people than that, just counting the
> ones who speak openly about it. (Accurate numbers are hard to come
> by, but we know our count is low.)
I wouldn't be surprised if estimates for nearly every kind of person
are low. I for one have never met a normal person. I've met people
whom I thought were normal, but only until I got to know them better.
> IIRC, there are more intersex people in the US than wheelchair
> users, but we (rightly, IMO) see fit to mandate wheelchair ramps
> and curb-cuts. There are even more trans people. And educating
> folks about the difference between gender and sex seems as though
> it should cost a lot less than curb-cuts.
Interesting comparison. But I think it also matters how much a person
would be inconvenienced by the lack of an amenity.
Keith F. Lynch
> Language acquisition becomes much, much more difficult past childhood.
So I've heard, and there are plenty of anecdotes, but there seems to
be a lack of hard evidence.
Keith F. Lynch
> k...@KeithLynch.net (Keith F. Lynch) wrote:
>> How long did it take you to learn English?
> Still learning.
Me too. Some of the words in Glenn's long message were new to me.
What I meant was, how long did it take you to become fluent in
the language?
>> Can you read German? After about six months of study, I can read
>> Spanish pretty well, but still can't yet follow spoken Spanish in
>> real-time.
> Only really slowly with a dictionary in hand.
I wrote a C program that turns every word in a document into a link to
its Wiktionary definition. Would that be useful to you?
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> Steve Coltrin <spco...@omcl.org> wrote:
> > Language acquisition becomes much, much more difficult past childhood.
>
> So I've heard, and there are plenty of anecdotes, but there seems to
> be a lack of hard evidence.
I saw a summary of one rather elegant piece of evidence. Someone looked
at migrants from the West Indies, some of whom came from English
speaking and some from non-English speaking islands. If the came to the
U.S. younger than about thirteen, both groups did about equally well
here. Older than that, the migrants from the English speaking islands
did noticeably better.
That's from memory, and I'm afraid I can't give you a cite, but I
thought it was a clever idea.
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> But my mental image of
> them will be of whatever sex they appear to be.
I was discussing the conversation with my wife. Her comment was that
many men would be very upset to discover that the person they were
making advances to on the assumption that the person was a woman had
actually been born male and "converted" to female with or without
surgery. From their standpoint, that would amount to discovering that
they had been about to have a homosexual affair--and many, perhaps most,
heterosexual men find the idea of having a homosexual affair unpleasant.
So I think that for many people, "what you were born" is the defining
characteristic.
Kip Williams
>> Can you read German? After about six months of study, I can read
>> Spanish pretty well, but still can't yet follow spoken Spanish in
>> real-time.
>
> Only really slowly with a dictionary in hand.
If I'm part of the conversation, the speaker makes allowances for my
deficiencies. I enjoyed talking to Spanish speakers who didn't know
English, and they were just grateful to meet someone who spoke even un
poco. At least my pronunciation's good — I may sound like an idiot, but
they can tell what I'm saying.
Kip W
Jette Goldie
>
> Gender dysphoria is far from the only form of body or mind dysphoria.
> Probably the most common kind is age dysphoria. Many old people think
> of themselves as young, and want others to think of themselves as
> young. And I think of myself as hirsute, and wish that others saw me
> that way. But if I were to attempt to pass as hirsute by wearing a
> toupée, I'd just be a bald man wearing a toupée, a figure of ridicule
> for anyone who realized I was wearing one.
you surprise me - I had a mental image of you that included a full head
of longish hair, somewhat shaggy and in need of a trim.
--
Jette Goldie jette....@gmail.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfette/ http://wolfette.livejournal.com/
("reply to" is spamblocked - use the email addy in sig)
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> Me too. Some of the words in Glenn's long message were new to me.
> What I meant was, how long did it take you to become fluent in
> the language?
I'm sure some people would say I'm not fluent in English even now when
I'm in my fifties. Certainly, some Americans can't understand me when I
speak.
At school, O-level English was divided into two exams, English Language
and English Literature. Whereas I got through English Literature - not
great performance, but I did better than scrape through - I failed
Language and that was necessary for university entrance and had to re-sit
it, when I did scrape through, much to my English master's surprise.
Paul Dormer
Williams) wrote:
> At least my pronunciation's good _ I may sound like an idiot, but
> they can tell what I'm saying.
As I tend to learn new English words from books, even my English
pronunciation can be wrong. Imagine my embarrassment when, in my
thirties, I used the word "epitome". (I'd also heard a word that I
thought was spelt "epitomy", but hadn't connect the two.)
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> I wrote a C program that turns every word in a document into a link to
> its Wiktionary definition. Would that be useful to you?
Not really. Tend not to do lots of reading from a computer screens, and
Google translate is good enough for my purposes. Reading books and CD
notes is another matter. And signs and notices, of course, when I'm in
Germany. Isn't there a smartphone app that will translate signs for you?
But I don't even have a laptop, let alone a smartphone.
Of course, I haven't spent every day of the last twenty years trying to
learn German, but every so often I get enthusiastic and get out the books
and teaching programs and get stuck in. After a couple of weeks, I find
I can't pick up a copy of Goethe's Faust and read it from cover to cover
and get disheartened, and stop for several months.
As it happens, I did learn C many years ago when my boss told me I was
about to work on a project in C which I didn't know. But there was a
copy of Kernighan and Ritchie in the office so I sat down and read that
and a couple of days later, I was writing C programs. Now, if only
learning German could be like that.
Kevrob
> Paul Dormer wrote:
> >> Can you read German? After about six months of study, I can read
> >> Spanish pretty well, but still can't yet follow spoken Spanish in
> >> real-time.
>
> > Only really slowly with a dictionary in hand.
>
> If I'm part of the conversation, the speaker makes allowances for my
> deficiencies. I enjoyed talking to Spanish speakers who didn't know
> poco. At least my pronunciation's good — I may sound like an idiot, but
> they can tell what I'm saying.
>
>
I occasionally get calls at work from folks who are most comfortable
speaking Spanish. I learned some in school (2 years in High School,
and the equivalent of years 3 & 4 over 2 semesters in my Freshman year
of college.) 35+ years on, through disuse, and largely because I've
never lived anywhere I'd be immersed in the languague, I can't carry
on a decent conversation.
I have memorized the useful phrase, "Lo siento, pero me hablo
solamente un poquito de espanol."
.
Once that is understood, if the caller has some English, we can often
communicate in a rudimenary fashion.
I took my 2 years of high school Latin starting when I was about to
turn 14, and started the Spanish when I was almost 16. That late
start learning a foreign language is typical for a AUSA- born Boomer,
though I knew some kids my age who went to the local government
schools who got as much as a 4-year head start on their Spanish or
French.
Kevin
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
<6143dc28-0131-40e5...@l18g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
kev...@my-deja.com (Kevrob) wrote:
> ... I knew some kids my age who went to the local government
> schools who got as much as a 4-year head start on their Spanish or
> French.
My UK state primary school started kids on French at seven. Didn't work
in my case, though.
--
John Dallman, j...@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
Keith F. Lynch
> Isn't there a smartphone app that will translate signs for you?
So I've heard. I don't know whether you have to type in what the sign
says, or whether you just point the phone's camera at the sign. The
latter would be truly impressive.
> After a couple of weeks, I find I can't pick up a copy of Goethe's
> Faust and read it from cover to cover and get disheartened, and stop
> for several months.
Would you be willing to sell your soul for the ability to do so? :-)
At least you've set an almost-realistic target. I tried reading Kant,
in English, and couldn't make any sense of it. I figured I had gotten
a bad translation. But I later heard that it's even more impenetrable
and incoherent in the original German.
> As it happens, I did learn C many years ago when my boss told me I
> was about to work on a project in C which I didn't know. But there
> was a copy of Kernighan and Ritchie in the office so I sat down and
> read that and a couple of days later, I was writing C programs.
> Now, if only learning German could be like that.
German, like English, has a much larger vocabulary than C. Of course
there's a big difference between being able to write "Hello world" in
C, and being able to write -- and more importantly, read -- non-trivial
C programs in a reasonable amount of time. Not many other programming
languages have an obfuscated code contest. (MUMPS probably could.)
I can write "hello world" in German ("Hallo Welt"), but I don't count
that as knowing the language.
I wonder what the easiest and hardest programming languages to learn
are, and what the easiest and hardest programming languages to write
in are. Intercal is relatively easy to learn but very difficult to
write in. Lisp is trivial to learn (if the parentheses balance, it's
a valid program), but of average difficulty to write in.
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> I wonder what the easiest and hardest programming languages to learn
> are, and what the easiest and hardest programming languages to write
> in are.
And to read. I've seen APL described as a write only language.
Cryptoengineer
> In article
> <6143dc28-0131-40e5-aed5-087103a4f...@l18g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
>
> kev...@my-deja.com (Kevrob) wrote:
> > ... I knew some kids my age who went to the local government
> > schools who got as much as a 4-year head start on their Spanish or
> > French.
>
> My UK state primary school started kids on French at seven. Didn't work
> in my case, though.
I have the same problem. I lived in various European countries from
age 7 to 21, had formal education in Latin, French, and German, but
failed to learn a second language. I could always get around from day
to day in the places I lived, but never even approached fluency.
I wish it were otherwise.
pt
Keith F. Lynch
> I'm sure some people would say I'm not fluent in English even now
> when I'm in my fifties. Certainly, some Americans can't understand
> me when I speak.
Given the name of your country, you have a better claim to be speaking
the language correctly than Americans do. (I'm assuming your
countrymen can understand you.)
> At school, O-level English was divided into two exams, English
> Language and English Literature. Whereas I got through English
> Literature - not great performance, but I did better than scrape
> through - I failed Language and that was necessary for university
> entrance and had to re-sit it, when I did scrape through, much to
> my English master's surprise.
I don't notice many spelling or grammatical errors in your text, which
is more than I can say for some posters here. Some might say your
last sentence was run-on.
Keith F. Lynch
> As I tend to learn new English words from books, even my English
> pronunciation can be wrong. Imagine my embarrassment when, in my
> thirties, I used the word "epitome". (I'd also heard a word that
> I thought was spelt "epitomy", but hadn't connect the two.)
That's one advantage of going to cons, talks, and other in-person
events -- hearing how words and names (e.g. "Vinge") are pronounced.
I'm having a lot more trouble with Spanish proununciation than
spelling. I have access to unlimited Spanish text, which I can read
at my own speed, but spoken Spanish is all too fast for me.
When my next-door neighbors are loudly arguing, perhaps I should pound
on the wall and ask them to *please* argue more slowly. :-)
Keith F. Lynch
> you surprise me - I had a mental image of you that included a full
> head of longish hair, somewhat shaggy and in need of a trim.
Just so long as it's not a Charles Manson look. Yes, I'm a man with a
full head of hair, trapped in a bald man's body. I'm glad you can see
the true me. :-) Seriously, though, I've never had long hair except
for a couple years in the late '80s, and even then, I kept it neat,
not shaggy. In my high school yearbook, I'm only one of two or three
males with short hair, contrasted with than a thousand with long hair.
I have standard male-pattern baldness. I'm far from hairless. But
when I comb my hair, I don't need a mirror to find the part.
I cut my own hair.
There are pictures of me, and my apartment, at
http://KeithLynch.net/pics/
I'm not actually a very visual person. I asked myself what my mental
image of you is, and I find that I don't have one. You're just a
generic white female of indeterminate age, but that's not an image,
but just a set of labels.
Daniel R. Reitman
<k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>Steve Coltrin <spco...@omcl.org> wrote:
>> Language acquisition becomes much, much more difficult past childhood.
>
>So I've heard, and there are plenty of anecdotes, but there seems to
>be a lack of hard evidence.
May I suggest the feral child cases?
Dan, ad nauseam
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com (David Friedman) wrote:
> *From:* David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> *Date:* Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:46:25 -0700
>
> In article <inaimh$32s$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>
> > I wonder what the easiest and hardest programming languages to learn
> > are, and what the easiest and hardest programming languages to write
> > in are.
> And to read. I've seen APL described as a write only language.
Perl can be very, very obscure. I am reasonably familiar with it and can
write it quite clearly, but it says something about it that there is no
obfuscated Perl contest (as there is for C, and some other languages).
Mainly what it says is "this would be like nuking fish in a barrel".
For an example, there is a decryptor for the encryption used on DVDs
that is about a thousand characters of what looks like a cat dancing on
the keyboard, with extra attention being paid to the top row.
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
<655cc294-0b34-49b8...@e9g2000vbk.googlegroups.com>,
> On Apr 3, 1:58 pm, j...@cix.compulink.co.uk wrote:
> > My UK state primary school started kids on French at seven. Didn't
> > work in my case, though.
No, you don't, not if you can "get along" in the country. My French
vocabulary never got above 50 words. The idea was to get us while we
still had a child's natural ability to acquire language. Mine seems to
have stopped working well before then.
Daniel R. Reitman
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>. . . .
>At a slight tangent, one of my interests over the last year or two is
>the history of Jewish law, which I now include in a course I teach.
>Traditional Jewish law, going back more than two thousand years, takes
>account of the existence of hermaphrodites in its rules--is in that
>sense non-binary in its classifications. It also mentions another
>category, whose meaning is not entirely clear--"tumtum." The conjecture
>I have seen is that it refers to people whose sex cannot be determined,
>due to some physical condition whose nature is not entirely clear.
Query if Lewis was familiar with this classification.
Dan, ad nauseam
Daniel R. Reitman
Also that Hawaiian Creole and Nicaraguan Sign Language both developed
from pidgins within the first generation of exposure to young
children.
Dan, ad nauseam
Keith F. Lynch
> My French vocabulary never got above 50 words.
Maybe if you focus on just written French or on just spoken French.
As best as I can tell, they're completely unrelated.
I wonder what the record number of silent letters in a row is.
English has "Featherstonehaugh" (pronounced "Farnshaw" or "Fanshaw,"
but that's a special case. In French, such slurring is the rule, not
the exception.
Keith F. Lynch
> but that's a special case. In French, such slurring is the rule, not
> the exception.
)
(I can't stand unbalanced parentheses.)
Keith F. Lynch
> mke...@post.harvard.edu (Morris Keesan) wrote:
>> The OED gives "sex" as one of the meanings of "gender", with a
>> citation as early as 1387. I think that enough centuries have
>> passed since then for this to not be considered a neologism.
You don't mention that it says it's "now only jocular."
> 1387? That's recent history, isn't it?
> I note that Newcastle upon Tyne and the New Forest are both about
> three hundred years older.
We did the "what's the oldest thing with 'new' in its name" thread
already, in 2008.
Andy Leighton
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> In article <inaimh$32s$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>
>> I wonder what the easiest and hardest programming languages to learn
>> are, and what the easiest and hardest programming languages to write
>> in are.
>
> And to read. I've seen APL described as a write only language.
If you include esoteric (otherwise known as joke) languages then APL
is an also ran.
I would think that Whirl is one of the hardest to read. It only
has two instructions 0 and 1. These rotate a couple of rings -
an operation ring and a maths ring each of which have 12 sectors.
So in effect the programming language has 24 commands. The programmer
has to remember which sector is currently selected in each ring.
Brainfuck programs exist of just 8 characters.
Befunge is also horrible to read and write, and Trefunge is even worse
as it works in three dimensions. A slightly related language is Wierd
where the commands are determined by the change in direction of the
symbols. So for example the program fragment
***
*
*
*
****
contains 3 instructions.
Whitespace is interesting as only whitespace is important in the
program, all non-whitespace is ignored.
--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
Keith F. Lynch
> Whitespace is interesting as only whitespace is important in the
> program, all non-whitespace is ignored.
That of course means that the same text can simultaneously be a
Whitespace program to do one thing, and a program in any of the
many languages that ignore whitespace to do something else.
If the two programs can call each other recursively, and if they
both allow self-modifying code, you'll have a whole new level of
write-only. Or perhaps a kind of program that can, in principle,
exist, but that can neither be written nor read.
On second thought, isn't that pretty much how the genetic code works?
If so, no wonder that learning the complete human genome hasn't led to
any breakthroughs. It's the ultimate obfuscated code contest.
Steve Coltrin
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
> Maybe if you focus on just written French or on just spoken French.
> As best as I can tell, they're completely unrelated.
As I remember it [1], French was written phonetically a few hundred years
ago. Since then, the pronunciation has changed but the writing has
not.
[1] No, smartasses, I was not there at the time.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press
Joy Beeson
<k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> We did the "what's the oldest thing with 'new' in its name" thread
> already, in 2008.
So it's too late to enter "neolithic"?
--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.
Keith F. Lynch
> So it's too late to enter "neolithic"?
According to Wikipedia:
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in
the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 B.C.E. ...
but
The Neoproterozoic Era is the unit of geologic time from 1,000 to
542.0 ą 1.0 million years ago. ...
So I win.
But the original query was something that had "new" in its name from
the beginning. So of course it can't predate the English word "new."
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > Isn't there a smartphone app that will translate signs for you?
>
> So I've heard. I don't know whether you have to type in what the sign
> says, or whether you just point the phone's camera at the sign. The
> latter would be truly impressive.
Using the phone's camera is what I heard.
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> Given the name of your country, you have a better claim to be speaking
> the language correctly than Americans do. (I'm assuming your
> countrymen can understand you.)
Depends where in the country. As I'm sure I've mentioned, I was born in
London and still have a pronounced south London (or sarf Lundun) accent.
But when I was four, the family moved to south Durham in the north east
of England, where all the vowels are different and there are words not
used anywhere else in the country. So, I did sometimes have trouble
being understood.
I'm sure I've told the story of when I attended the European SF con in
Timisoara in Romania back in 1994. The organisers had got a big grant
for translation and had hired young women from the local language school
to act as interpreters for foreign visitors, including me. At the end of
the convention, she told me that for the first hour of speaking to me,
she couldn't understand a word I said. Then I met her tutor. He spoke
what could best be called accentless English. It wasn't RP (or BBC
English) but it wasn't an accent spoken in any region in the UK.
Thomas Womack
Moreover, the best translation apps can currently do this *for
Mandarin*; that is, I'm now in the part of the future where my phone
can read foreign languages vastly better than I can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc
Fifteen dollars, needs iphone 3GS or 4 (so I didn't have it when I
went to China last, but probably will when I next go)
Tom
garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk
> If I'm part of the conversation, the speaker makes allowances for my
> deficiencies. I enjoyed talking to Spanish speakers who didn't know
> they can tell what I'm saying.
>
I have found out that most grateful are Italians and Polish. Italians are
probably happy that they do not need to try English, and the Poles just
cannot wrap their heads around the fact that someone did take the effort
to learn (badly as it is) their language.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabík http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Keith F. Lynch
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Using the phone's camera is what I heard.
I wonder how it knows where in a busy scene the relevant sign is.
Do you have to stand right next to the sign, so it fills the field
of view? Does the camera have a zoom lens?
> Moreover, the best translation apps can currently do this *for
> Mandarin*; that is, I'm now in the part of the future where my
> phone can read foreign languages vastly better than I can.
Interesting. Is it pre-loaded with the hundred most common things
that signs say, or can it translate anything? How about hand-
written signs?
Keith F. Lynch
> As I'm sure I've mentioned, I was born in London and still have a
> pronounced south London (or sarf Lundun) accent.
I thought that in England, unlike the US, accents varied more with
social class than with location.
"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making
some other Englishman hate or despise him." --George Bernard Shaw
> He spoke what could best be called accentless English.
He was from Northern Virginia? :-)
Dan Goodman
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > As I'm sure I've mentioned, I was born in London and still have a
> > pronounced south London (or sarf Lundun) accent.
>
> I thought that in England, unlike the US, accents varied more with
> social class than with location.
Yes, no, and maybe. England has regional dialects (more variation than
in the US and Canada combined, actually.)
And there are class dialects in the US -- though they're regional/local
rather than nationwide.
--
Dan Goodman
dsgood at lj, dw, ij, fb, tw__
Cryptoengineer
> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > As I'm sure I've mentioned, I was born in London and still have a
> > pronounced south London (or sarf Lundun) accent.
>
> I thought that in England, unlike the US, accents varied more with
> social class than with location.
No. Regional accents are very distinct, and very varied. But at the
top strata of society, and among those who pretend to that, a regional
accent is considered a sign of low status. Such people adopt 'Received
Pronunciation' (aka 'BBC English') which is pretty much the same
across the country, and inculcated in the Public (ie, private) School
system.
A standard trope of British humor are the nouveau rich who either
persist in their regional, low class accent, or who try to speak RP
and get it wrong.
In 'To Sir With Love' there's a little scene where Sidney Poitier is
called a 'nob' (upper class person) by his East End students, because
he 'speaks posh'. Poitier, who is trying to convince the kids they can
make something of themselves, drops back into his born Jamaican accent
for a few sentences, to demonstrate that their (lower class) Docklands
speech is a social problem they can overcome, just as he did.
(ObSF: There's a similar scene in the new Battlestar Galactica)
pt
Keith F. Lynch
> England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
> Canada combined, actually.)
That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
Cryptoengineer
> Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
> > England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
> > Canada combined, actually.)
>
> That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
> corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
TWIAVBP, as Keith so often demonstrates.
In Somerset, England, Street and Glastonbury are small towns about a
mile apart. Natives can tell which town you grew up in.
Even in the US, you can have distinct accents within a city - Brooklyn
vs Bronx vs Lower East Side, for example. 'The opposite corner of
Virginia' is nearly 400 miles from Keith, which in Britain would be a
huge distance, dialect-wise.
pt
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
> > England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
> > Canada combined, actually.)
>
> That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
> corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
When we lived in New Orleans, we hired a local--a young black man--to
mow our lawn. I could understand him, my wife couldn't.
A similar situation with a London cabby, as I remember.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_
Jette Goldie
> Dan Goodman<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>> England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
>> Canada combined, actually.)
>
> That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
> corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
There are people from sections of my own city whose version of "English"
I can't understand.
--
Jette Goldie jette....@gmail.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfette/ http://wolfette.livejournal.com/
("reply to" is spamblocked - use the email addy in sig)
David Friedman
Jette Goldie <jgold...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 05/04/2011 02:35, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> > Dan Goodman<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
> >> England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
> >> Canada combined, actually.)
> >
> > That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
> > corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
>
> There are people from sections of my own city whose version of "English"
> I can't understand.
New Orleans has regional dialects within the city. Or at least, it did
when we lived there, and I expect still does.
Kip Williams
> On 05/04/2011 02:35, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>> Dan Goodman<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>> England has regional dialects (more variation than in the US and
>>> Canada combined, actually.)
>>
>> That's hard to believe, given that there are people in the opposite
>> corner of Virginia whose English I can't understand.
>
> There are people from sections of my own city whose version of "English"
> I can't understand.
We lived next door to a family with six boys in it. They were more like
a tribe in some ways. They had their own idiolect, with odd quirks of
grammar and pronunciation, which others in the neighborhood mocked.
Kip W
T Guy
> The OED gives "sex" as one of the meanings of "gender", with a citation as
> early as 1387. I think that enough centuries have passed since then for
> this to not be considered a neologism.
In fact, it would appear that enough centuries have passed since then
for the meaning of the word to change, rather like the meaning of the
word 'science.'
My view is that there is no point in having two words with identical
meanings.
Kip Williams
Ambiguity is the chief beauty of the English language, and confusion is
its best advantage. As a poet and jokester, I treasure both.
Kip W
Paul Dormer
Lynch) wrote:
>
> > He spoke what could best be called accentless English.
>
> He was from Northern Virginia? :-)
I recall that back in 1981 I was in New York and a film starring British
actor Michael Crawford had just opened in the US. He was playing an
American, less common back then, I guess. I was amused that the film
reviewer of the New York Times could write, apparently seriously,
"Crawford is British, but he has left his accent behind."
Tim McDaniel
Kip Williams <mrk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>As a poet and jokester
In previous centuries, that was so common that they wrote it
"poet a' 'ster" and then "poetaster". You should show your classiness
by using that term.
--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com
James Nicoll
I was informed by my exgf after my 50th birthday party that when my brother
and I talk with each other, the conversation is so highly compressed as to
be incomprehensible to outsiders. Useful to know.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
David Friedman
<a5ab1ba9-b930-4fa3...@f11g2000vbx.googlegroups.com>,
T Guy <Tim.B...@redbridge.gov.uk> wrote:
On the other hand, having two words with overlapping meanings is common,
and can be useful.
Consider that grammatical gender has something to do with sex, but isn't
called sex.
Kip Williams
> In article<OgFmp.313$cs6...@newsfe10.iad>,
> Kip Williams<mrk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> As a poet and jokester
>
> In previous centuries, that was so common that they wrote it
> "poet a' 'ster" and then "poetaster". You should show your classiness
> by using that term.
I prefer to write down to my audience, bless their hearts.
Kip W
Michael Stemper
"Heavy fog in Channel -- Continent cut off"
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
If this is our corporate opinion, you will be billed for it.
Robert Sneddon
<da74264f-d95e-46ff...@v31g2000vbs.googlegroups.com>,
Cryptoengineer <pete...@gmail.com> writes
>Even in the US, you can have distinct accents within a city - Brooklyn
>vs Bronx vs Lower East Side, for example. 'The opposite corner of
>Virginia' is nearly 400 miles from Keith, which in Britain would be a
>huge distance, dialect-wise.
First time I heard Billy Boyd, the actor who played Pippin in the Lord
of the Rings movie speak, I said "South Lanarkshire". Sure enough when I
checked his biography it turned out he had been born and raised about
ten miles south of where I had been born, that is North Lanarkshire.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
David Goldfarb
Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>actor Michael Crawford had just opened in the US. He was playing an
>American, less common back then, I guess. I was amused that the film
>reviewer of the New York Times could write, apparently seriously,
>"Crawford is British, but he has left his accent behind."
I watched four seasons of the new _Battlestar Galactica_ without ever
suspecting that Jamie Bamber, who played Apollo, was British.
--
David Goldfarb |
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | "It's flabby and delicious."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu |
Seth
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>In article <inaimh$32s$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>
>> are, and what the easiest and hardest programming languages to write
>> in are.
>
>And to read. I've seen APL described as a write only language.
Incorrectly, as it happens. There are those of us who can read APL.
I will admit that an obfuscated APL contest would be redundant.
Seth
Seth
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>But the original query was something that had "new" in its name from
>the beginning. So of course it can't predate the English word "new."
Something older than English could have "new" in its name from the
beginning of it having a name.
Seth
Daniel R. Reitman
<k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
><j...@cix.compulink.co.uk> wrote:
>> My French vocabulary never got above 50 words.
>
>Maybe if you focus on just written French or on just spoken French.
>As best as I can tell, they're completely unrelated.
>
>I wonder what the record number of silent letters in a row is.
>English has "Featherstonehaugh" (pronounced "Farnshaw" or "Fanshaw,"
>but that's a special case. In French, such slurring is the rule, not
>the exception.
A couple of others:
Marjoribanks
Cholmondley
And, of course, Raymond Luxury Yacht.
Dan, ad nauseam
Keith F. Lynch
> A couple of others:
> Marjoribanks
> Cholmondley
> And, of course, Raymond Luxury Yacht.
I seem to recall a legal case -- possibly an urban legend -- in which
someone was required to change his name to get an inheritance. So he
changed the prounciation but not the spelling, or perhaps vice versa.
So it was something like "Smith," pronounced "Jones."
David Goldfarb
Such as the city of Naples, which is a stripped-down form of "Neopolis",
"new city".
--
David Goldfarb |
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | Private .sig -- please do not read.
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu |
Keith F. Lynch
> Such as the city of Naples, which is a stripped-down form of
> "Neopolis", "new city".
Yes. I mentioned that in the 2008 thread.
Keith F. Lynch
> events -- hearing how words and names (e.g. "Vinge") are pronounced.
By coincidence, two of the characters in the novel I'm currently
reading discuss how Vernor Vinge's name is pronounced. No, I hadn't
read that before posting the above.
Thomas Womack
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> Paul Dormer <p...@pauldormer.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I wonder how it knows where in a busy scene the relevant sign is.
>Do you have to stand right next to the sign, so it fills the field
>of view?
The character needs to be reasonably large and reasonably central, I
believe.
> Does the camera have a zoom lens?
No, but I believe you can zoom in in software.
>> Moreover, the best translation apps can currently do this *for
>> Mandarin*; that is, I'm now in the part of the future where my
>> phone can read foreign languages vastly better than I can.
>Interesting. Is it pre-loaded with the hundred most common things
>that signs say, or can it translate anything? How about hand-
>written signs?
It looks as if it translates the few thousand most common characters;
it's a character-at-a-time analyser (the video shows them scanning it
one character at a time over a Chinese translation of Tolkien's 'all
that is gold does not glisten // not all those who wander are lost').
Only advertised to work with print.
Tom
Philip Chee
This sounds bad. Both Chinese and Japanese use two and four character
compounds pretty extensively, and four character phases are highly
idiomatic. There are some well known morphological analysers out there.
Hopefully this app uses one of them.
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
Keith F. Lynch
> It looks as if it translates the few thousand most common
> characters; it's a character-at-a-time analyser (the video shows
> them scanning it one character at a time over a Chinese translation
I thought it worked on numerous languages, not just Chinese.
Presumably it doesn't try to translate one character at a time when
looking a a sign in Spanish?
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
are taking longer than expected. But I've hit an "I think I need to
procrastinate a little while" point, so let me finally come back to
this ...
(I'm going to skimp on the editing and proofreading and hope for the
best, as a thunderstorm is threatening my Internet connection.)
In article <ddfr-A2F6D1.1...@news.giganews.com>,
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>In article <in5dha$jqi$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> dgl...@panix.com (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) wrote:
>> Another difference: it's easier to change one's sex than to
>> change one's gender. Sex can be corrected with a combination
>> of surgery and hormone therapy. I don't know of any way to
>> intentionaly change one's gender.
>
>I don't think "sex can be corrected" is unambiguously true--as you point
>out, there is a range of definitions of sex.
Good catch. I was using medical jargon when I spoke of "correcting"
sex, and really should have added a parenthetical comment to the
effect that I was doing so, and that with all the different aspects
of sex no medical "correction" would cover all of them completely.
>As far as I know, there is
>currently no way of converting someone who is biologically male into a
>reproductively functional female, although I wouldn't be astonished if
>that changed sometime during this century.
*sigh* True. And I have womb envy.
>Of course, we usually think
>of barren women as women, so one could argue that a biological male who
>has been suitable altered is really a woman, but my guess is that a lot
>of people wouldn't use the language in that way.
A great many people, and many governments, _do_ see a "suitably
altered" person as "really" the sex they were altered to. If
you strike the "really", which gets put in there most often when
someone's trying to rationalize prejudice, discrimination, or
transmisogyny, it's even more people. True, there are also many
people (and governments) who don't (especially with a usually
emphasized -- vocal equivalent of italics -- "really" in there).
Again, the context seems to matter for many people. Men who are quite
content to consider a post-SRS trans woman a woman almost all the time
may suddenly add a nervous, "but you know, not a 'real' woman", when
someone suggests dating her. This is transphobia. It's not the most
odious form of transphobia, nor is it rare, but it's an example of
transphobia nonetheless.
Also consider that many trans people "go stealth" after transition
(more so after surgery, I think), and do not advertise their trans
status ... so anyone who sees and interacts with them only _sees_
a woman or a man and "real" never gets thought of as a modifier to
attach or not. So if they're not giving that person sex-dependent
medical treatment or hoping to start a family with them, what's the
point of adding a "but not really" distinction to their perceived
sex or gender?
>I also don't know
>enough about the current state of the relevant medical technologies to
>know how close to an initially biological woman such a person would be
>in other ways--able to nurse an infant, for instance.
Even cis men can nurse infants if given the right hormones and the
right stimulation. As I understand it, the milk produced by men
tends to be inferior -- thin -- and much less of it than would be
ideal, but it can be done. Of course, barring being stranded
in the Arctic with an infant and no formula, most cis men would
have no reason to ever want to do this, so the possibility is not
often turned into actuality.
Given a trans woman with fully developed breasts, and normal female
hormones in her body for a long time, I would imagine that the
additional hormones to stimulate lactation would be rather more
effective than they are in a man. Probably every bit as effective
as the same hormones given to a cis woman (or arising naturaly in
a cis woman as a consequence of pregnancy). No, I haven't looked
this up yet; I'm going to assume that that the details aren't as
important as the general answer, here.
(Note that some cis women are unable to produce enough milk after
delivering a child, and most barren or childless-by-choice women
never find out whether they could produce enough milk, though it's
likely that most of then could. So even this example of "something
a 'biological' woman could do" is more of a distraction than a test.)
>A few years back, one of the students in my "Legal Issues of the 21st
>Century" class did a good paper on how sex was treated in various legal
>contexts. It's webbed:
>
>http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/21st_century_issues/l
>egal_issues_21_2000_pprs_web/21st_c_papers_2002/Kirkpatrick.htm
Got it open in my web browser to get back to a little later. Thanks.
>> >"Out of ignorance" takes it for granted that your word usage is
>> >objectively true, hence anyone who disagrees is making a mistake rather
>> >than speaking a slightly different ideolect.
>>
>> If their idiolect doesn't match the usage in any dialect, I'm
>> comfortable labelling their usage a mistake.
>
>But that isn't the case. A large fraction of the population is unaware
>of the complications in the definition of sex that are central to your
>whole discussion, [...]
Which is ignorance. Oh, it's not their _fault_ that they're ignorant,
given that most people are _taught_ an oversimplified idea of sex in
the first place, but what's the meaningful difference between "unaware
of the complications" and "ignorant of the complications"?
(Er ... one distinction did just cross my mind, but it's dialect-specific:
in at least one dialect 'ignorant' means something along the lines of
'disrespectful' and doesn't seem to relate to knowledge or the lack
thereof. I'm not speaking that dialect, and it only just now occurred
to me that that usage exists. Disrespect for trans people is often one
of the effects of ignorance about them, but when I say 'ignorance' I'm
talking about the lack-of-knowledge part.)
>hence use terms like "male," "female," "sex," and
>"gender" in the context of a world view in which everyone is
>unambiguously male or female.
But their very worldview is as wrong as that of a flat-earther.
The "everyone is unambiguously male or female" worldview is not
just a cultural convention; it's demonstrably mistaken. The
notion itself depends upon ignorance of the reality of how sex
works in humans, and of the reality that gender-identity is not
automatically aligned with sex.
It's not just about what words they're using, _it's_about_the_
_underlying_assumptions_ and the _harm_those_assumptions_cause_.
They harm people they don't even know exist, because their
worldview excludes those people, or they harm such people
deliberately because they do see them and don't like the fact
that what they see doesn't match their worldview. The argument
that I should refrain from educating them because "it's just a
different dialect" won't wash.
Once we're at the point of talking about the concepts, we might
as well use the same words other people have been using for
decades to talk about them.
>You might defend your "out of ignorance" as meaning "if they knew as
>much about the subject as I do, they would use language in the way I
>do,"
(or invent other language for the concepts)
>but even that is wrong--because someone who knew everything you
>know but didn't find it useful to make the distinctions you make,
>perhaps because much of his audience didn't know those things, perhaps
>because it would add unnecessary complication to what he was saying or
>writing, would not be speaking out of ignorance and would not be making
>a mistake.
And yes, there are times to let omissions slide. Even in this
conversation I've glossed over some bits because they'd add
more distraction than clarity. But when we're talking about the
phenomena of sex and gender themselves (as we are here), we do
need some words to talk about these things, and when we're
forcing folks to mislabel themselves because our forms don't
give them any way to answer honestly/accurately, or causing them
harm or hardship as a consequence of miscategorizing them, those
are not the times to say, "oh, but that specialist language is
too academic or too complicated or too distracting, for us to
talk about/think about these things now."
>Or in other words, to me your view of how other people ought to speak
>seems intolerant and imperialistic--if they don't use the terminology
>that is useful to you, they are wrong, ignorant, mistaken.
Yeah, I may be guilty of that sometimes, and will try to monitor
myself for it. But I do _not_ think that my insistence that these
ideas are important enough that we should _have_ words for them
and acknowledge that these things exist, is itself imperialistic,
or that my intolerance of willful ignorance[*] that leads to hurting
people is an intolerance I should be ashamed of. Plain ignorance
should be met with gentle education, and perhaps I am sometimes
insufficiently gentle. But is my attempt to educate ("Hey, you're
overlooking _this_ and here's some vocabulary for talking about
it") 'intolerant'?
[*] Note that with that phrase I'm calling out those people
who insist in the face of facts that they "know" better
than us that sex is really still simple and binary anyhow,
as opposed to the mere ignorance of those never exposed to
these ideas and facts, or never given any language with
which to express them, in the first place.
>> When we get into
>> conflicts between dialects, I'll grant that a longer view may
>> be warranted. I'm using the terms the way *people who discuss
>> sex and gender in depth in English* use them.
>
>That I can well believe. But such people are a tiny fraction of the
>population.
>
>Should I claim that almost everybody who uses the word "efficient" is
>wrong--because that is not the way in which economists use it?
_When_they_are_talking_about_economics_ and use the word "efficient"
in a way that's not how economists use it, yes.
I am ignorant of most of economics beyond a few general principles
and stuff I've picked up from reading Yaakov's blog and some of the
arguments in this newsgroup. And I darned well _expect_ to be
corrected if I'm talking to an economist about economics and get
the concepts or the terminology wrong.
>> I am aware that
>> in the general population the two terms are often conflated or
>> misunderstood, but in those contexts where the difference
>> between the concepts matters (i.e. when it's not completely
>> obvious that only one of them could reasonably be intended),
>> it makes sense to push the more useful terminology.
>
>It is of some worth to push it--but, as I said earlier, precision has a
>cost. Sometimes the cost is greater than the value.
"in those contexts where the difference between the concepts matters" ...
>> aware of any dialect of English that switches 'sex' and 'gender'
>> or has a different term that denotes what I'm calling 'gender',
>> after studying and talkking about these things for decades.
>> (If such exist, I stand ready to learn.)
>
>I don't know of any either. But I think the most common dialects treat
>the two words as roughly equivalent, outside of the grammatical context.
And despite my snark that started this subthread, yeah, there
are actually lots of times when I'll look at a sex/gender question
on a form, understand which one they really mean, roll my eyes and
say, "yeah, whatever". But my initial snark was in response, you'll
recall, to someone else's complaint about folks using 'gender' when
they mean 'sex', and I presented the flip side of that.
And as I've said, sometimes it does matter.
>> >I'm guessing from context (confirmed by a quick google) that you are
>> >using "intersex" to mean what's traditionally referred to as
>> >"hermaphrodictic."
>>
>> _Was_formerly_ referred to as hermaphroditism -- that term has been
>> out of favour for quite a while, at least in the US.
>
>Again, I think you are taking the linguistic conventions of a particular
>small community as if they define usage in general.
Er ... I thought I was using the language of the medical community
as well as the intersex community and the people-who-talk-about-gender
community. My understanding has been that some twenty-plus years ago
doctors (or at least those who _teach_ doctors and those who write
in medical journals) stopped calling most intersex people
'hermaphrodites', reserving the phrase 'true hermaphrodite' for one
or two specific intersex conditions; and then a few years after that
stopped using the term 'hermaphrodite' at all. Hmm. I need to dig
into the history there and see whether I've got that right. I do
know that medical use of the term 'intersex' goes back at least as
far as the late 1960s, but suspect that it hadn't started edging out
'hermaphrodite' yet by then. This will be an interesting test of
my Google-fu. (If anyone wants to do my homework for me, feel free;
otherwise, I'll try to get to that at my next procrastination break.)
Most people _not_ in the intersex-and-kin-and-allies-thereof
community or the trans-and-kin-and-allies-thereof community or
the academic gender studies field or the medical professions
... don't have occasion to think about or talk about intersex
phenomena very often unless they have some sort of intersex fetish.
Not that it never ever comes up; just that it won't come up often,
unless someone nearby (for a handwavy electronic-communication
related notion of "nearby") starts waving the idea around to make
it a freakshow or to instill xenophobia for political gain ... or
starts trying to educate folks as to prejudice they've been
unwittingly perpetuating because the people getting the short end
of it have been mostly invisible to them.
Just how "general" is "general usage" when it comes to the terms
'hermaphrodite' and 'intersex'? (Note that 'hermaphrodite' does
still have legitimate use in biology, for talking about species
where the species as a whole is hermaphroditic -- but that's a
specialist usage again.)
For the folks using intersex people as a freakshow or stirring
up discomfort for political purposes, I'm disinclined to respect
their usually-intentional choices of offensive terminology, and
the folks trying to educate are mostly going to use language
similar to mine.
To revisit this thought for a moment:
>Again, I think you are taking the linguistic conventions of a particular
>small community as if they define usage in general.
When the small community in question is the community of people
_described_ by those terms, shouldn't they get some say in what
they're called?
>> >As you probably know, given the rest of your post,
>> >there are also people who are genetically neither male nor female in the
>> >normal sense of the terms--neither XX nor XY--or who are genetically one
>> >but to all appearances the other. I think those are rarer, but don't
>> >actually know.
>>
>> When you describe XX/XY as the "normal" sense of 'male' and
>> 'female', we are definitely stepping into dialect/idiolect
>> issues.
>
>I specified "genetically neither ... ."
And I read hastily, overlooking that you were specifically
narrowing the focus to genetics there. Sorry.
>> >One more general comment. You give a figure of half a percent. I don't
>> >know how accurate that is, but will assume it's right.
>>
>> I'll look that up again later, and report back.
Looks like 1% of live births detectably intersex at birth, 0.1-0.2%
in categories that lead to corrective surgery (whether such surgery
is appropriate or not is a whole 'nuther minefield BTW), and I'm
not sure yet what the rate is for intersex conditions not detected
until puberty or later.
Backing up a bit in the thread ...
>> >In language, and in thought, we routinely use binary categories for
>> >things much less binary than that. Tall/short, old/young, true/false.
>> >Doing so simplifies conversation and thought. Such simplification
>> >carries a cost in precision, but precision has its own costs--if you
>> >speak precisely enough you will never be able to finish a sentence.
But when we put height on official forms, we don't write (or ask
people to write about themselves) "tall" or "short", do we? We
specify units of linear measure, or ranges thereof. And when we
ask for a general description (e.g. 911 operator asking, "Was the
person you saw tall or short?") we consider it natural and acceptable
to give a neither/between type of answer (911 caller answers,
"Middling"). When we're throwing around hypotheticals and abstractions,
we may sound as though height is a binary condition -- a person is
either tall or short -- but as soon as we start talking about real
people, we either make it fuzzy again, or we get much more precise
and toss in numbers. (Or try to cut it both ways and use even more
fuzzy categories: "really short", "short", "kinda short", "average"
"a little tall", "kinda tall", "pretty tall", "very tall", "freakin'
huge".)
When we segregate or sort people based on height -- which happens
oh so much less often than doing so on gender -- we either use
_relative_ height (tallER people in the back row, shortER people
in front, for the group photo) or we define a threshold to use
for the specific purpose ("you must be this tall to go on this
ride", "I need someone who can reach the top shelf in the file
room").
Yeah, we have language that describes these things as dichotomies
and we sometimes use that language. But we don't _act_ as though
these things are rigid binaries, we don't try to force people
into binary classifications that we pretend are universal (as
opposed to situational, like "to go on this ride"), and we don't
force people to pick one or t'other when filling out a form.
So no, we really _don't_ think of these as binary. Not when it
matters.
>> That's actually why I consider "male", "female", and "other"
>> on a form to be a good step and a useful one: _that_ is itself
>> a simplification, but trying to enumerate all the possible
>> genders is guaranteed to take up too much space _and_ leave
>> some people out ... trying to come up with a less detailed
>> taxonomy of gender that still conveys more than "other" will
>> involve inventing more terms and is extremely likely to
>> confuse some trans people and annoy others with how the broad
>> categories are delineated ... and letting gender be a free-form
>> fill-in-the-blank field works in some contexts but leads to
>> reporting problems in others. So "male/female/other" neither
>> forces people into a binary that doesn't fit, nor bogs us down
>> in a paralyzing degree of precision.
>
>Yes. And for many purposes, I agree that making the question an optional
>one is a sensible way of reducing the problem. Indeed, "male, female, do
>not choose to answer" strikes me as better than "male, female, other."
Uh, no, not really. Better would be four options, incorporating
both 'other' and 'choose not to answer' (though simply making the
field optional means 'choose not to answer' can be indicatedby
leaving the field blank). Depending on why they want to know,
'no answer' _may_ be just as useful as 'other' to the folks asking,
but for the person answering the question there's a difference between
"choose not to answer" and "I _can't_ answer because your form
assumes people like me don't exist". Yeah, it's not the most
pressing problem anyone faces, but it's part of the whole "thousand
papercuts" way that society grinds down folks who don't fit its
officially sanctioned categories. Why inflict that on anyone?
How much does it really cost to add 'other' to a form?
But I do agree that 'choose not to answer' should, in most
cases, be one of the options, whether explicitly listed or by
making the field optional.
--
D. Glenn Arthur Jr./The Human Vibrator, dgl...@panix.com
Due to hand/wrist problems my newsreading time varies so I may miss followups.
"Being a _man_ means knowing that one has a choice not to act like a 'man'."
http://www.dglenn.org/ http://dglenn.dreamwidth.org
D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>I was discussing the conversation with my wife. Her comment was that
>many men would be very upset to discover that the person they were
>making advances to on the assumption that the person was a woman had
>actually been born male and "converted" to female with or without
>surgery. From their standpoint, that would amount to discovering that
>they had been about to have a homosexual affair--and many, perhaps most,
>heterosexual men find the idea of having a homosexual affair unpleasant.
True. This is transphobia; more specifically, a particular
interaction of transphobia and homophobia.
>So I think that for many people, "what you were born" is the defining
>characteristic.
Er ... _if_they_know_ what sex someone was assigned at birth,
anyhow. If they don't know differently, they assume that the
person they're dealing with was assigned at birth to the sex
they currently perceibe that person as based on other things.
And while you did say 'many', not 'most', I do think it's
worth reinforcing that distinction:
Is this the most useful characteristic to consider definitive?
Is it even a reasonable one to pick, even if many men do seem
to do so to some extent? And do as many women as men think
this way? (I know that at least some women do so -- hence the
years-long kerfuffle about the Michigan Women's Festival, to
pick just the most prominent example. But casual observation
suggests that women are at least slightly less likely than
men to draw a hard line based on sex assigned at birth and
somewhat more likely to make the defining characteristic
either the current presence/absence of a penis or the gender
role most of the trans person's childhood was spent in.)
Also, this seems to vary based on other factors. How does the
percentage of men and women who feel sex-assigned-at-birth trumps
everything else change when the trans person they're thinking
about is a trans man instead of a trans woman? Does it matter
how stereotypically manly he looks, whether he has a beard, etc.?
While I can see a man contemplating having sex with an andogynous
trans man and considering that to be a heterosexual encounter
because he's "not really a man", I have a lot more trouble
imagining a heterosexual man (especially a homophobic one) even
being _attracted_ to a more typically masculine trans man in
the first place, whether he still has a vagina or not.
And since "what you were born as" can be ambiguous or even
misidentified, but the doctor is still going to put 'M' or
'F' on the birth records (the reason we who talk about this
stuff a lot say "sex assigned at birth" instead of "birth
sex" or "what you were born as"), are as many men freaked
out by the idea of discovering the woman they had been making
advances to had an 'M' on her birth certifiate but had her
ambiguous genitalia surgically "corrected" to female while
still an infant, after her parents and the doctors had had
some time to talk over the options, as they would be at the
idea of discovering she'd been raised as a boy and then
transitioned just after high school and had SRS at age 21?
More than that, is it useful, or even not-actively-bad, for
a society (or a legal system) to go with the definition these
many men use? If a trans person is living "stealth", should
official documents (or news reportage) "out" her or him
because they know that person's assigned-at-birth sex?
So yes,
>many men would be very upset to discover that the person they were
>making advances to on the assumption that the person was a woman had
>actually been born male and "converted" to female with or without
>surgery.
is a valid and too-dangerous-to-ignore observation, but what
does it mean in regard to how we _should_ define sex?
And there's an especially troubling aspect buried in that
unfortunately correct phrasing: "the person they were making
advances to" -- not "had just slept with", but "were making
advances to", _even_if_she_had_been_rebuffing_their_advances_.
I think this speaks more to their own fear of anyone having
the slightest excuse to accuse them of being even a little
bit gay, than about what it really means to be male or female
(though obviously these two memes are rather entangled).