Comment by Volundr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Volundr | Hacker News Reader

I read this whole article, and I find the entire premise... strange. It seems like she feels like all of this language is to pretend "biological males" can have babies, in fact she even says at one point:

> And if being a trans-inclusive feminist means re-embracing classic female self-negation to make biological men happy (didn’t we all agree this was bad decades ago?), then I’ll gladly trade in my feminist card so long as I can stop pretending that Lia Thomas is a feminist hero.

Yet it seems pretty clear it's the opposite. The point of not inherently assuming pregnant people are women is to avoid misgendering trans men who happen to be pregnant and calling them women. Given that she goes out of her way to indicate her support for the trans community, it seems like she'd also agree that trans-men should indeed be called men and not women.

There's plenty I can get behind in the article, plain language is almost always easier to understand than weird synonyms, and I don't think that a trans man is going to struggle with the fact that they will indeed have to give birth through their vagina, but the entire article seems to be railing against a pretense that isn't happening.

"It seems like she feels like all of this language is to pretend "biological males" can have babies"

That is EXACTLY the purpose of the language.

"The point of not inherently assuming pregnant people are women is to avoid misgendering trans men who happen to be pregnant and calling them women"

We don't need to modify the terminology for 99.99999% of a group to address the needs of the remaining 0.00001%.

Regardless of whether one agrees with it or not, the point is to include trans men, because they think that they're better described as men. If trans women were to get pregnant by some not yet existing medical procedure, why would they complain about being called women?

" because they think that they're better described as men."

Then why are they getting pregnant and having children? At least for the time they are pregnant and giving I will consider them to be women.

"Then why are they getting pregnant and having children?"

Because human being often desire to reproduce.

"At least for the time they are pregnant and giving I will consider them to be women."

Regardless of what you consider, trans men consider themselves men. Their circumstances and medical needs aren't the same since they typically take testosterone and look like average men.

Another reason I don't think your wording works is that the majority consider the concepts of "man" and "woman" to be permanent things.

"Regardless of what you consider, trans men consider themselves men."

I honestly don't understand why I have to care about that anymore than if they thought they were wolves.

Trans people are like 1% of the population. There’s 3 million of them in the United States alone. You’re literally talking about millions of people.

"Trans people are like 1% of the population"

Most numbers I have seen are more like 0.1%

What is ratio of women who give birth to trans men who give birth?

I’ll guess it is 99.9:0.01 or greater.

Does that seem a wise basis for which we should reform a language?

It is at least 1 million:1

I actually wasn't making any claims beyond noting that the author appeared to make an incorrect assumption about why people were using these terms, but when you put it that way...

Yes actually. Precision in language, especially when talking medical has significant value.

Language is often not precise, even in medical context (which internet articles are not a part of).

Law is often not just. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to fix the injustices.

As for internet articles somehow not being in a medical context, she literally talks about going to them to try to figure out if she has a life threatening condition or a fart. If that's not "medical" I don't know what is.

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