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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

" a profit maximizing firm should not discriminate between workers of equal productivity based on immutable characteristics "

Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable. But whether it is or isn't doesn't seem to make discriminating by it better or worse. That makes immutability a poor discriminator of tolerable discrimination.

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> Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable

Actually I don't think anybody's debating that - transexuals say that they were born as whatever gender they identify with, they just say it doesn't match what their body looks like. Everybody seems to agree that it's immutable, even if there are people who can't seem to quite agree on how it's identified.

No. There are many who argue that it is entirely up to you who you want to be. And you can always change your mind.

Which assumes there isn't a biological motivation behind the gender most people wish to identify as. Or that we have some sort of free will independent of what motivates our choices.

That position seems to discriminate against gender-fluid people.

> Actually I don't think anybody's debating that

In LGBTQ+ circles, everyone is debating everything all the time, and that's one of the problems when trying to assess their positions.

Many other characteristics are technically mutable - you can change your place of worship, you can chemically alter your skin color somewhat, you can have surgery to look younger or older, etc. However, we still consider them "immutable" characteristics insofar as we consider that employees should have zero right whatsoever to request that people change them unless they themselves want to.

"should" here refers to predictions derived from rational behaviour, I think. In other words, if you want to maximize profits, you pay the same for equal-productivity workers. (If you paid two different wages you could just lower the higher wage, since you're able to hire equal-productivity people at the lower wage.)

I believe the idea with gender being immutable is that people who transition to another gender are doing so to align their gender with what they believe it should be. In this way it is immutable; a person assigned male at birth, who later transitions to female, is no less female than someone assigned female at birth since neither truly chose to be female.

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