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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

All the fluidity and tension created by gender makes me think why don't we just get rid of it? Stop making children conform to social norms/behavior/dressing/everything based on their sex. Drop all social expectations of gender and let people do whatever they naturally want to do. But then we're just left with sex, which is basically where we started. So what the hell is gender?

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Sex/gender together cover, as I see it, three main areas; all of which are complicated, but misery of which haven't been recognized as such (or even recognized at all) until fairly recently.

The first is biological (usually called "sex"), chromosomes and various traits. This is often percieved as being strictly binary, but it's not: the genetic traits and other features typical of one sex or the other don't always spread together, and often the most superficially obvious ones don't match the ones that have broader impact. So that's complicated in ways that are often not recognized.

Then there is socially ascribed roles (this is ones of the things usually labeled "gender"); these are the expectations put on someone by society related to masculinity or femininity.

The there is one's own perception of one's own masculinity or femininity (this is sometimes also referred to as "gender", but often, and more clearly, "gender identity").

This is complicated, because it shaped by lots of things, including social gender stereotypes, and whether they align our conflict with ones current socially ascribed gender.

Reading this article made me realize I have no idea what "gender" is. It used to be synonymous with what parts and chromosomes you have, where there are no questions of "I identify as XYZ," but now what the hell is it really? All the fluidity and tension created by gender makes me think why don't we just get rid of it? Stop making children conform to social norms/behavior/dressing/everything based on their sex.

You may be interested in a book titled The medical invention of Sex. One wonders just how much this is a social notion.

'Gender' does not have consistent usage in the English language, aside from the grammar sense of masculine/feminine words.

Aside from that, it's sometimes used to describe a performed social role, or more broadly anything that communicates "masculine" or "feminine". Sometimes it's used to describe an objective, distinct axis of male/female from the "parts and chromosomes". Sometimes it's used as a synonym for "sex", either out of puritanism or to stop people from answering "yes, please". Some assert that applying "gender" to people or any non-grammar usage is an error.

Just to make things more complicated, large groups of people have attached political significance to one or another of these definitions and assert that the others are Wrong and/or Ignorant.

It's a mess of recent vintage that apparently only English speakers have to suffer from.

Bible talks about man and woman. I suppose this doesn't help.

But there are some other religious topics that got to a point (after a long long painful way) where they are treated like metaphors or simplification (like the genesis) because science brought another explanation.

Gender will probably get to this point. But not in the near future, I think.

Gender is - or was - convenient. With binary genders you have a convenient model to categorize people into different groups, in the same way that you can categorize by age, skin color, language, homeland, or religion. Politically, categories are mostly used to drive up the "us vs. them" tension factor that unifies groups, and pushing for harder-edged definitions of gender and gender roles is a convenient way to politicize just about everything in a human life. Further, it naturally works out that your voting bloc floats at around 50% when you appeal to the gender binary, which helps sustain the division in a way that you can't get with things like "race" or "religion".

Of course, one of the truisms of data modelling is that it never captures 100% of the system, and it's guided by your expectations of what the system will look like. Our push to digitally model everything exaggerates all the points of breakage. In the same way that you end up with people whose legal name are flagged fake by Facebook, or reverse image searches that think black people are "gorillas", you end up with a lot of data points that are bad fits for a model of binary gender.

This is not a huge surprise when humans are equated with other mammals in all their variety. But we have the problem of being emotional, well-socialized, and biased first, and smart second. So we're probably just going to have an extremely long culture war to rethink this categorization, with specious arguments trotted out at every turn.

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