Typically I hear "male" and "female" used to describe sex, though it would be somewhat awkward to use them as nouns rather than adjectives.
If someone advertises as, say, "a man seeking a woman" in the local paper I think they probably are going to checking genitals. A very key reason why we have genders is specifically to advertise what genitals someone has, because that is need-to-know information for pregnancy and then building up a family.
That is a good argument for not trying so hard to overload the same terms.
If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them. No-one is hiding information about their genitals by identifying as a particular gender. Don't make unwarranted assumptions and you won't have any problem. (That said, the false conception that trans people are tricksters lying in wait to ambush you with their unexpected genitals is a pretty big component of trans panic transphobia.)
If, as GP suggests, the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
Yeah, I'm totally gonna ask all my Tinder matches about their genitals. Not creepy at all.
From the gay side of things, I've never had the experience of finding out that someone was trans only at the point where they took their clothes off. I find it difficult to believe that this is a common enough occurrence that it's actually causing people significant problems in their dating lives.
It's not universal, but I've had conversations with quite a few trans people who considered it transphobic to care about genitals in dating.
That's just an anecdote, but as a more public example: consider that dating apps/websites let you select gender identity but don't have space for identifying physical sex characteristics, even though that is a primary selection criteria for many people. I consider this pretty ridiculous when a lot of these sites have a box for height/weight and even star sign.
> If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them.
I think part of the problem is that you can't. There are lots of trans people that would be offended by such a question (and if they aren't, then why not just communicate it publicly in the first place!)
> the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
It's needn't be about pregnancy and families. It may simply be about attraction. For example, I'm attracted exclusively to biologically female people. I know from my past life experiences that this rule holds consistently, so if I'm looking for a sexual partner, then I don't want to waste my time making an emotional connection with someone who I then later find out isn't sexually compatible with me.
I agree that the general prudishness of dating and dating apps (especially for straight dating) makes this all more difficult than it needs to be. But as far as trans people are concerned, all I really see here is a lot of unnecessary worrying about improbable hypotheticals that aren't even that bad if they actually happen.
Very few trans people are likely to do a 'surprise reveal' because they know all too well that this can have disastrously violent consequences in a heavily transphobic society.
You claim that nobody is hiding information about their genitals. But while we can debate the semantics of "hiding", there are certainly lots of people who are not being open about that information. And I am arguing that the world would be a better place if everyone was just open about their genitals (and indeed their hormones).
It shouldn't need to be a big deal. There's nothing shameful about having genitals that don't match your gender identity (and that would not put me off dating someone).
Are large numbers of cis people really finding that trans people are contributing substantially to their difficulty in finding a suitable partner? I see no evidence of it. This concern is almost always raised in rhetorically heated threads about trans identity, in the service of a particular argument – but almost never in threads about dating.
and there are plenty of ways to build a family outside of cis-het sex.
and who hides such an important part of their identity from their partner? This isn't som Nip/Tuck tv drama
I'm not at all as well versed on it as I should be and I'm working to understand it better as time goes on, but the distinction was made using existing language to avoid overloading, and later generations already understand the distinction pretty intuitively.
I'm not sure that's a contradiction so much as it's trying to weave through people's own synonymizing of the two terms where a distinction is being made. I hear your point though.
This is one of the closest-to-perfectly-binary phenomena that exists in nature.
Frankensteinian surgical mutilation is not really "changing genitals".
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21526-gende...
Gametes are not "several bimodal spectra." They are a single binary. And they are what define male/female.
Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.
I find it useful to separate the concepts, and others do too. You might not find that useful, but you should be aware language is evolving towards those definitions recently.
What does manly mean? Because Bill Gates does not seem to be missing features that I find typical of males in the US. Otherwise, I would say pretty much all male office workers and many other males are as “manly” as Bill Gates”, at which point I figure the word loses utility.
Compare, say, Brad Pitt to Bill Gates. Or The Rock to Peewee Herman. There are differences between how closely those people fit the archetypal mold of "manly".
I'm comfortable saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is manlier than I am. He ticks more of the boxes we associate with "man", culturally. He's muscular, successful, attractive, tough, etc. I've got a bit of a spare tire, I'm pretty soft, etc.
He and I both are male, and about the same degree of male. We both have penises, etc.
In this way we can use "man" to describe our features that are culturally associated (ruggedness, toughness, cigars and whiskey, etc.) from the biological features (penis, testicles, body hair, etc.)
The language is 'evolving' only among a very small subset of people on earth who happen to believe they are the 'social vanguard', that doesn't make them so.
The response to the linguistic disassociation between the obviously inexorable relationship between gender and sex is, I would guess, considerably bigger and I don't think this argument is going to be won but the language antagonists. I think society is going to accept trans people, which is good ... but I suggest we're never moving away from classical gender terminology.
The rest of the world is coming online very quickly and they want nothing to do with our linguistic wars. They'll change their language when they start using 'Latinx' (a term invented by 'colonialist progressives') in Mexico which is to say, probably never.
And by the way that's perfectly fine. Paradoxically, in many other parts of the world trans people are far more commonly accepted and have been for some time, lo and behold, they use 'men and women' in the common sense, without any problem at all.
In Canada, they fight over whether the stop signs should say 'STOP' or 'ARRET' (aka English or French) because that's how rich and prosperous they are, they can afford to inflate ideological inanities to the level of material concern.
People use the words in the manner I describe. People use the words in the manner you describe. Both usages exist and are common, albeit in different areas.
I'm not denying people use the language in the manner you describe, I'm saying people additionally use it in the manner I describe. And since language is descriptive, not proscriptive, we need to understand both usages exist and be able to recognize both, even if we disagree with them.
"Conceived male" or "Conceived female" (leaving out the case of genetic abnormalities) seems better to me.
It's on the birth certificate, so it is assigned. There are some efforts to remove it, so perhaps that will change.
Has a penis -> Boy
Has a vagina -> Girl
Of course that is not a designation of what gender identity the person will adopt, and perhaps change more than once, over the course of his or her lifetime.
There are lots of kids born with ambiguous & differing genitals where parents & doctors make an assignment for that kid outside the womb.
also ignores a lot of different chromosomal and hormonal differences outside the norm.
This sounds suspicious. I don't really believe that the ambiguity is actually that ambiguous to the point where it's actually hard to decide.
Or that such "assignments" can be made without ending with suicide.
It's not like biological sex is actually defined by visible members - it's a chromosome thing.
Well for one, it'd cause dysphoria, not necessarily suicide. Some people feel bad their whole lives without killing themselves.
But the main point is, that's why doctors shouldn't do these assignments. Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
Do they ACTUALLY do them, though? I've read about some freakish case when a child was mutilated during circumcision, and the doctor had advised to bring up the child as a girl, but I am having a hard time believing that this is a common practice, that just doesn't pass my sanity check.
> Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
It's not like anyone actually "decides" these things, but rather has to live with what nature gave you. One can surely try to cosmetically "fix" this and strive for social acceptance, but this won't change medical facts. And theoretically it shouldn't, if we actually distinct between biological sex and gender.
It seems to me that most of all the confusion and the fixation on genitalia comes from people not actually truly believing gender to be an actual social construct.
Otherwise, HRT would be sufficient in 99.9% times and SRS wouldn't even be a thing.
I don’t think most people would argue against medically intersex people identifying outside of traditional norms, which I would imagine is a small subset of people identifying as trans.
But thank you for illustrating OP's point.
If we are separating gender and sex, then gender references need to stop using words referring to sex, because the vast and overwhelming majority of English speakers understand words like man/woman in sexual terms.
But oh well.