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Comment by EnergyAmy | Hacker News Reader

That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.

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It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.

Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.

Men are adult human males. Women are adult human females. If you want to talk about the social roles that men and women occupy, you should use the appropriate words, which are not "men" and "women".

What words would they be?

FWIW, I try to use "male/males" to refer to sex, and "man/men" to refer to gender, since AFAICT, there are no terms that clearly refer to gender.

"mascs" and "femmes" are ones that I have seen used.

"men" and "women" should not have their meaning diluted. They already have the meaning of "male" and "female".

We dilute, pervert, change, invert, transform and reshape the meaning of words all the time, throughout history and across languages. I don't see anything special about the words we use to describe sex and gender.

We can change "war" to mean "peace", "freedom" to mean "slavery", "ignorance" to mean "strength", and "man" to mean "woman". We shouldn't, though. Some meanings are worth preserving, because they have deep legal implications.

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