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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean biological purpose? This may be the wrong question to ask; gender is arguably to a large extent part of _culture_, which is more or less the stuff that we've built on top of biology.

There's no _biological_ reason that ancient Celtic women were allowed own property while contemporary ancient Roman women were a literal possession of their father or husband and ancient Greek women weren't really allowed leave the house; that was _culture_. (Simplified example, btw; there were edge-cases where Roman women were essentially emancipated, say, and Celtic and Greek practices differed dramatically by region, but even within a pretty restricted time and area of the world there were massive differences in how this all worked)

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I understand that historically. However, I would argue that those restrictions were actually by sex as changing gender was not really an option back then. Even if one tried, I assume most cultures would still enforce those ideas based on sex.

We have very few restrictions on gender today, and the ones we do have still tend to exclude transgender individuals (combat roles, some levels of some sports, some bathrooms). So I'm having trouble understanding in general what a tangible benefit would be. For example, what changes for a man that dresses to look like a woman if they say they are a man vs they say they are a woman (or some other identity)? Are all the physical attributes and actions the same? If someone wants to be a specific gender that's fine, but does that actually change anything they could or couldn't do as their prior gender in today's world?

Quite a few places have gendered dress codes (still!), among other things. And you appear to be talking mostly about the US and similar countries, much of the rest of the world is different.

Yeah, I am mostly taking about US and similar countries. But changing gender in one of those other countries would likely be moot, right?

Hmm, I haven't really seen gendered dress codes aside from schools (which could/should be rewritten to be gender neutral) or the "entertainment" industry (which is likely to descriminate regardless of dress code).

> But changing gender in one of those other countries would likely be moot, right?

Things are more complicated than you might necessarily expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_Iran

(It's not just Iran; a number of countries, often extremely conservative countries, have _some_ form of cultural recognition of non-gender-normative people. Hijira in India would be a more complex example.)

> Hmm, I haven't really seen gendered dress codes aside from schools (which could/should be rewritten to be gender neutral) or the "entertainment" industry (which is likely to descriminate regardless of dress code).

Ever been in a non-casual office?

Interesting.

I am in an non-casual office. There isn't a strict dress code, just that it's "business appropriate".

> I assume most cultures would still enforce those ideas based on sex.

Hijra is a third gender used by people in India that was first documented several thousand years ago [0]. There are similar third genders in other Southeast Asian countries.

Galli: a priest/priestess in Hellenistic Greece and Rome that wasn't considered to be man or woman [1].

Muxe: third gender of Mexico that may have pre-dated Spanish colonization [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muxe

Very interesting. Thanks!

Also common in Polynesian cultures - see Faʻafafine from Samoa, Fakaleitī from Tonga, Māhū in Hawaii and Akava'ine in Cook Islands. See also brotherboy and sistergirls which is found across Australian Aboriginal cultures.[4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faʻafafine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakaleitī [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māhū [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akava%27ine [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/sistergirls-and-broth...

and, the five genders of the Bugis society (Sulawasi).

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

I grew up travelling about the Indonesian and Torres Strait | Northern Australia islands since the 1960s tagging along with family doing logistics across the region .. no one local bats an eye about others with odd genders, skins, totem animals, etc .. it came as a surprise some decades later that an outraged mindset existed.

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