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Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

> there's so many other rules that are uncontroversial (unless you find yourself in a position where you want to incite violence or advocate for child exploitation).

It's disingenuous to lump these together as equivalent to misgendering. Child exploitation and violence are against the law of pretty much all nations in the world, and there is a clear consensus. As well as harm caused.

That line hasn't been drawn yet for gender. For one it's not clear how many genders exist. Are they fluid day by day, can people change in and out of them at will. Do I misgender someone if I fail to keep up. Is this a biologically supported concept, should we really open the Pandoras box of forced speech, etc.. etc..

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> For one it's not clear how many genders exist.

It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.

I would think that the fact that people disagree on what the number is implies that it's not clear what the number is.

I am not taking a stance on gender numbers, but that exact argument is being used against climate change and vaccine safety.

Gender (ascribed or identity) is a social (ascribed) or subjective psychological (identity) construct, and biological sex is a matter of arbitrary line drawing across a field with multiple axes of variation. The number of any of the three that exist, or should be recognized as existing is not the same type of question as vaccine safety or climate change, and arguments that are perfectly valid for one of those types of questions are not for the other.

I would think that the fact that people disagree on whether the Earth is flat implies that it's not clear if the Earth is flat.

As someone who has studied biology, there are lots of edge cases where it is far from clear cut what biological gender a person is.

Very rare cases. And they still usually fall into male and female - XXY chromosomes are male for example.

Even XY chromosomes aren't invariably male (they aren't even “invariably male or infertile female”, as was believed until fairly recently.)

Particularly to those of us that have studied biology

When you say "studied biology" do you mean took a few general biology classes in college or did a PhD program in the relevant sub-field of biology?

I have a bachelors, though this stuff is pretty basic biology.

So how many genders do fungi have?

What in your studies of biology has taught you that human societies recognize two genders?

There are animals for example that have 2 sexes but more "genders" (to the extent that it is correct to apply this terminology) - e.g. Ruffs (a european bird) have several male forms that differ in size, plumage and sexual behavior ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff#Biology_of_variation_amon...).

Even if no similar mechanism exists in humans, there are social constructs that may serve similar roles - there are communities of "3rd gender" people in India for example, for thousands of years now.

There are human hermaphrodites.

About 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births [0.07–0.05%].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

So approximately 163 000 people in the US.

> It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.

Biology addresses sex, not gender (whether ascribed gender or gender identity), and there are vastly more than two ways in which the various biological attributes grouped under “sex” line up; which is why when (as is, to be sure, quite common) binary sex distinctions in biology and medicine are used they are drawn differently in different contexts.

I mean, there's documented cases of non-chimeric fertile females (in the sense of “people who produce ova and can reproduce with people who produce sperm”, which isn't the only biological definition of sex but is the one most relevant to fertility and reproduction) with 46,XY karyotype and normal male coding sequences in SRY and other genes associated with sex determination. Simplistic generalizations about sex and biology, aside from having dubious relevance to gender discussions, are pretty invariably factually wrong.

Actually, looking it back up,the particular example I was thinking of, while possibly non-chimeric, was still mosaic with about 80%/20% 46,XY/45,X in the skin but ovaries 93% 46,XY; at any rate, the idea that biological sex is simple and binary is pretty clearly not true except in loose approximation.

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/93/1/182/2598461

Given the rules specifically refer to "targeted" misgendering and deadnaming, I don't see how your concerns about "keeping up" are applicable. Seems clear to me how it works: Don't seek out some person on twitter and deliberately harass them with the gender they aren't and the name they don't have. Aside, lots of people in this thread appear to be reacting like this is a very complicated rule, but this doesn't seem like something that needs to be carefully interpreted against the standing fabric of society.

Toward your comment, can't we establish harm is caused by targeted misgendering/deadnaming by asking the transgender people who have been harassed by it how they feel about it? Doesn't that seem not even necessary? What line on harm needs to be drawn exactly before we can make a rule "don't deliberately harass transgender people on our platform via their dead identities."

Misgendering isn't about your ability to name someone's gender; it's just having the basic decency to use the pronouns they prefer and core empathy to realize some people may experience the world differently than you.

Just the same as it would be extremely annoying to work with someone that refused to use your name (and not at all forced speech to demand that they get it right; for many trans folx the old name is literally not their legal name anymore). Pronouns are a form of self expression, gender identity is real, and you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.

Rules enforcing some level of decency have a place on public forums (even if it's not as cut and dry as pedophilia or violent activity); that's why you're here being transphobic rather than /b/.

> you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.

Could you reference some of these stats? This argument comes up very often in discussions about trans peoples issues. But, not once have I seen or read someone citing a particular statistic or even pull up a number out of thin air. It is always claimed, there are stats showing increased violence against trans people. Where are the statistics?

Well, first off, the claim is not increasing violence towards trans people it's just there exists violence towards trans people and framing the debate as "let's talk about whether you exist" does little to help that.

As for sources, hard stats can be difficult for any hate crime (compounded by the fact homicide against trans individuals isn't often recorded as violence against their actual gender) and especially considering that the total trans population is small (and thus vulnerable to effects of small numbers) but the FBI hate crime database [0] and the NCAVP reports [1] are good places to start. Transequality center also collects good resources.

Somehow, I don't believe you've really wondered about this too much...

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-1.xls

[1] https://avp.org/resources/reports/

[2]https://transequality.org/issues/anti-violence

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