4 ms·

> This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. That may seem reasonable, and I cert

by bloak 2y ago

> This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. That may seem reasonable, and I certainly wouldn't want to argue against it, but I've seen enough discussions around these questions to know that what's written there is not entirely uncontroversial. Firstly, even an indisputable fact can be offensive if you mention it in a context in which other people consider it to be entirely irrelevant. Secondly, some activists vehemently deny the existence of "biological sex". They insist on talking about "gender assigned at birth" instead. I can tell you from experience that arguing with those people is not always productive. Thirdly, although standard English uses two different pronouns for people, "he" and "she", so gender is an undeniable social fact in any community that speaks standard English, some languages (probably most languages) don't have gender so "gender" isn't such a simple factual thing in those communities. You may be able to infer gender from roles in society, behaviour or clothing styles but it's less clear.

GoblinSlayer 2y ago
Do you mean English has gender? Then what languages lack gender?
- bloak 2y ago
  Yes, though perhaps I'm not using the best terminology. English doesn't have "grammatical gender", so a noun like "table" or "wisdom" doesn't have a gender like it would in French or German, but there's a distinction in pronouns ("he" and "she") which many (perhaps most) languages don't have. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a list of languages that lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of. It would be nice to have such a list, or to refine the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... so that it contains that information. Finnish and Hungarian lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of, and so does spoken Chinese or old Chinese: I'm told that gender was introduced into the modern written language by Europeans. (I have often heard Chinese people say "he" instead of "she" or vice versa when speaking English. I don't think I've ever heard a French or German person make that mistake. I'm thinking of cases in which the speaker knows the gender of the person being referred to but is making a language error. I don't mean cases in which people incorrectly guess the person's gender, which is also interesting, but a different kind of error.)
viraptor 2y ago
I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect. 1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You could do by constantly talking about cars, but it has no effect on the word "car". 2. In that case cis/trans still exists in terms of changing the gender. 3. Have you got a source for that? I won't pretend I'm a linguist, but most language families I'm aware of certainly have at least 2 genders. Many have 3. Quite a few assign genders to objects as well. Wikipedia lists just a few examples and some of them are further qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles... Even English is a qualified entry on that list and yet we have no issues taking about it. Coming from a way more gendered language natively, I can tell you it only makes this situation harder. English didn't have to deal with a "women are doctors now, but doctor is a male word" issue. I can have a whole conversation about someone in English and you wouldn't know their gender, but in other languages I know, I couldn't say a single sentence without it.
- bloak 2y ago
  You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine. Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).

by bloak 2y ago

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

Do you mean English has gender? Then what languages lack gender?

bloak 2y ago
Yes, though perhaps I'm not using the best terminology. English doesn't have "grammatical gender", so a noun like "table" or "wisdom" doesn't have a gender like it would in French or German, but there's a distinction in pronouns ("he" and "she") which many (perhaps most) languages don't have. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a list of languages that lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of. It would be nice to have such a list, or to refine the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... so that it contains that information. Finnish and Hungarian lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of, and so does spoken Chinese or old Chinese: I'm told that gender was introduced into the modern written language by Europeans. (I have often heard Chinese people say "he" instead of "she" or vice versa when speaking English. I don't think I've ever heard a French or German person make that mistake. I'm thinking of cases in which the speaker knows the gender of the person being referred to but is making a language error. I don't mean cases in which people incorrectly guess the person's gender, which is also interesting, but a different kind of error.)

viraptor 2y ago

I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect. 1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You could do by constantly talking about cars, but it has no effect on the word "car". 2. In that case cis/trans still exists in terms of changing the gender. 3. Have you got a source for that? I won't pretend I'm a linguist, but most language families I'm aware of certainly have at least 2 genders. Many have 3. Quite a few assign genders to objects as well. Wikipedia lists just a few examples and some of them are further qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles... Even English is a qualified entry on that list and yet we have no issues taking about it. Coming from a way more gendered language natively, I can tell you it only makes this situation harder. English didn't have to deal with a "women are doctors now, but doctor is a male word" issue. I can have a whole conversation about someone in English and you wouldn't know their gender, but in other languages I know, I couldn't say a single sentence without it.

bloak 2y ago
You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine. Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).