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Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't post unsubstantive comments, especially not in flamewar territory.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608057 and marked it off-topic.

Irony can be substantive. My comment was a laconic way to respond to the parent. Essentially what i said is "categorizing people like products in aisles brings unhappiness, let's stop doing it by NOT creating a label for the people who categorize". On its own my comment is useless, so i 'll remove it.

Sure, but in its effect, which is what we care about, that's a distinction without a difference. The internet can't handle that kind of sublety—at least not without a lot more context.

Labels are just an easy way for people to dismiss each other. Let's not.

There isn't a label for "these people" but their agenda is called "identity politics" and it often operates on the same scientific level as creationism.

Categorization is important. Those who wish to use such categorization as a means to discriminate are not important, and should not be given any services until they change their ways. If society went back to this simple structure, (plus our educational system would recognize this instead of co-opting it) then this would change. But we're now in a more complex age. Good luck with that.

The problem is we can't really categorize people in the past. Was the Chevalier d'Eon[0] for instance a straight man who cross dressed, a homosexual man who dressed in feminine clothes as an expression of his homosexuality, or transgender? Karl Heinrich Ulrichs[1] is often thought of as one of the first homosexual activists but the word homosexual didn't exist at the time, he coined the phrase Uranian to describe himself and identifed as a female psyche in a male body, so should we say he is gay or transgender? Trying to retrospectively put people into categories that didn't exist when they were alive is impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_d'%C3%89on [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Heinrich_Ulrichs

Those were the historical examples of a Hermaphrodite. "Uranus was both man and woman."

But neither of those sources bother with real Greek Mythology, just their poor interpretation of such.

Source: JCL 4th level.

I disagree. I think "description" is important, and some words facilitate communication.

For example, I consider "heterosexual" and "homosexual" mostly as categorization words, as they tell you almost nothing about a person.

On the other hand, if we used words like "penis-loving" and "vagina-loving", which are descriptions, we'd get along much better. I'm pretty sure I have more in common with vagina-loving women (i.e. bisexual women and lesbians) than with only-penis-loving men (gay men).

>On the other hand, if we used words like "penis-loving" and "vagina-loving", which are descriptions, we'd get along much better.

I think that would just be confusing, as you're conflating very different things. I'm gay in terms of who I'm actually attracted to, but I find both penises and vaginas sexually interesting. Similarly, gay men aren't necessarily particularly into penises and straight men aren't necessarily particularly into vaginas. (With regard to the latter, witness all the nasty misogynistic things straight men are liable to say about them.)

I'd also point out that as a gay man I'm far more attracted to transguys, who generally have vaginas, than I am to transwomen, who generally have penises.

So in short, describing my sexuality in terms of which genitalia get me going would be very misleading, and I'm not an isolated case.

> I'm pretty sure I have more in common with vagina-loving women (i.e. bisexual women and lesbians) than with only-penis-loving men (gay men).

How many of either do you know and / or call as friends?

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