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Comment by Djvacto | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any more information on the abortion policy you're using as a comparison?

Tried to guess which country you were referring to but couldn't find concrete info after a bit of googling.

I don't think the comparison between using more inclusive language to refer to people, and you being forced to abandon your beliefs, makes much sense. Putting aside potential issues with beliefs and their effect on a person's treatment of those around them, no one is forcing you to stop believing whatever it is you believe.

Potentially limited may be how you treat or talk to people, but that is a separate limit than what you are allowed to believe, since once it becomes words or actions, now it's not just in your head but out in reality and potentially affecting others.

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This is in Argentina.

MY MISTAKE: apparently the law does allow a doctor to say no for his believes. I cannot edit the previous post.

Again, so this people today say that you have to say "les", what prevents me from saying I am not filling included, I want everybody to start saying "lus" or "chimichangas" for that matter? The problem for me is that they force you to behave however they want you to behave.

Honestly though, in my day job I've been trying to eschew gendered pronouns across the board - my coworker's gender is not relevant to them being my coworker. For a long time we've promoted gender as the single most defining trait as a person in a way we don't promote with height, weight or even skincolor. It's Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith that are used as common forms of address - but not Tall Smith or British Smith. I'm pretty much done with such an emphasis being placed on gender in common social interactions, the only thing it's relevant to is who's going to sleep with who which isn't really something I want to discuss at work anyways.

Mr. and Mrs. are not adjectives, though.

Mr. and Mrs. are both honorifics that are technically nouns - but they definitely modify the noun that comes after them which is one of the uses of an adjective. I can talk about the white house and the red house - just like I can talk about Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith.

There are plenty of other words (including adjectives) that you can use as honorifics - you've got Little John (and Lil Jon), Short Bob and Tall Bob.

I think it's fair to move away from Mr. and Mrs. being as prominent as they are.

> but they definitely modify the noun that comes after them

One of the two nouns is an appositive, but it's never been too clear to me which is which in English grammar. In my native tongue it definitely doesn't seem to be the case that Mr. modifies Smith, as our equivalent to Mr. is a common noun that is used to refer to any male human.

In English the word serves double duty (and does other stuff) - "Hey Mr., can you tell me which way it is to the subway station" is a perfectly natural sentence. They can even be anonymized nouns (similar to la blanca - referring to a white house depending on context) - "Oh, I was going to wait to open the bottle until the Mrs. gets back". Lastly you've got the example I had in my prior comment "Oh sorry, I actually wanted to speak with Mrs. Smith - can you put her on the line?" where it is functionally, I think, an adjective though the dictionary considers it a noun in that usage.

Academically speaking, my understanding of the linguistics at play are that there are biases embedded deep within the gendering of specific words, even.

There is a real gap in the archaic forms of Romance languages when it comes to the level of gender sophistication that was in the even more archaic Latin.

Modern languages are evolving rapidly and it is entirely within the realm of reasonableness to expect that humanity will tend towards meta-evolving it’s own languages.

But I am not well read in linguistics and suspect that Noam Chomsky has already written a book on this topic.

>Do you have any more information on the abortion policy you're using as a comparison?

No, s/he doesn't because is talking nonsense: conscientious objectors rights/persons are protected in Argentina by its Constitution and plenty of case law.

Re: Abortion: Doctors can (and have) very much deny to perform or "facilitate" abortions on moral or religious grounds but by law ("Ley del Aborto") they also have the legal obligation to refer the woman/patient WITHOUT delay of any kind to another doctor or another hospital (mostly public ones) to have the procedure.

My bad, apparently you are right. Doctors can say they don't want to do an abortion.

Just no need to be smartass about "nonsense". I read it somewhere and I don't follow all the news all the time.

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