The difference is that words like “marriage” (in the context of gay marriage) and “male” (in the context of whether or not transgender men can be called “male” and “men”) are words that have enormous societal and cultural weight and meaning, words that people want the right and recognition of having access to and being described by.
That’s very different from whether we should take the narrow technical term “gender-typical”, which has a specific meaning, if one that a fractional percentage of the general population would be able to define, and use it to describe a related-but-distinct concept.
So somehow society has survived after expanding the meaning of words that “have enormous societal and cultural weight and meaning” but will somehow break down if the meaning of ‘gender-typical’ gets expanded?
The sentence also does not say “As the left-handed sister of a transgendered brother” but I would not assume, on the basis of the absence of the term “left-handed”, that the sister necessarily writes with her right hand.
“It doesn’t say X so it is not-X” doesn’t appear to me to be a reasonable approach to interpreting sentences, even where “X” is an uncommon condition.
That’s not quite right. “Male / female” have always had two possible meanings: gender and sex. In languages with linguistic gender (such as French and German), entire animal species are labelled as male or female, regardless of the biological sex of the individual, as are types of inanimate objects (which have no sex). What happened was that we decided that social labeling of human individuals should be determined by gender identity, rather than biological sex, and so in terms of social categories the word “male” should be interpreted as gender rather than sex.
Are you suggesting he has to justify his feelings of offense to you?
Anyway, “cis” will do a similar job to “gender-typical”, so I guess we’ll see how the language evolves and which, if either or something else, survives.
Seems to me they lobbied to become a THIRD gender, so they wouldn’t consider themselves male nor female, so not sure how this is relevant to asking anyone in the US 100 years ago what being a human male meant.
Third gender or not, since they still have penises,* it would invalidate “a person with a penis” as a workable definition of “man.”
*I’m assuming, based on the primitive state of sex change surgery in 1915.
She was burned for behaving like a man and wearing men’s clothing ; which challenged dogmatic gender roles.
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*I’m assuming, based on the primitive state of sex change surgery in 1915.
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Hijras have been a thing for thousands of years. They’re really quite fascinating.
Another example would be the two-spirit people among Native Americans : women and men who lived somewhere in-between genders, mixing them or alternating between both.
They would. Because 100 years ago, a question about whether a person belonged to the category “human male” was understood to be a question about that person’s sex. But gender is separate from sex; traditionally in English, ships are female-gendered despite not having a sex, and cats are female-gendered unless it is necessary to specify that they are male-sexed. But now we are moving towards an understanding that the correct criteria for human social interaction is gender, which through historical reasons happens to use the same terms as sex does.
So if you ask modern people how to identify a human whose sex is male, “A person born with a penis” would be a pretty good answer (the various intersex conditions are for the most part very rare, so the vast majority of penis-bearing newborns are in fact male, and vice versa). But this thread is about people in the social category of male, which is not defined by penis ownership.
I didn’t say that the modern definition of male was defined by penis ownership whether in a social category or any other category. I said in the past, the definition of male was “having a penis” and that definition has changed. This was in response to those suggesting that using ‘gender-typical’ would be too hard because OH NO we would have to expand the definition of a word.