zlacker

Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.

>>Energy+(OP)
> Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures

Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

>>Energy+(OP)
Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.

What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.

Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.

>>sofixa+Ng
That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.

>>Energy+dO1
It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.

Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.

>>PaulDa+SQ1
Men are adult human males. Women are adult human females. If you want to talk about the social roles that men and women occupy, you should use the appropriate words, which are not "men" and "women".

>>Energy+Cx2
What words would they be?

FWIW, I try to use "male/males" to refer to sex, and "man/men" to refer to gender, since AFAICT, there are no terms that clearly refer to gender.

>>PaulDa+4S2
"mascs" and "femmes" are ones that I have seen used.

"men" and "women" should not have their meaning diluted. They already have the meaning of "male" and "female".

>>Energy+N83
We dilute, pervert, change, invert, transform and reshape the meaning of words all the time, throughout history and across languages. I don't see anything special about the words we use to describe sex and gender.

>>PaulDa+Nz4
We can change "war" to mean "peace", "freedom" to mean "slavery", "ignorance" to mean "strength", and "man" to mean "woman". We shouldn't, though. Some meanings are worth preserving, because they have deep legal implications.