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Comment by heelhook | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project description but not on the project name, weird.

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It's probably a cultural thing. "Gender Machine" doesn't invoke the great James Brown song.

I had a friend who insisted "gender" should be used for linguistic use (for example cheese being masculine in French) and "sex" for the boy/girl-ness of a person.

Determining the boy/girl-ness of a chicken is called "sexing" the chick. I see "sex machine" as a machine that sexes by name.

This product is used for linguistic purposes, not for deciding whose head to cut off.

'Male', 'female', and 'androgynous' are sex designations while 'masculine', 'feminine', and 'neuter' are terms of gender.

The code is using the gender of a reference to determine the sex of the referent.

So you could say that they're both right.

"Sex Machine" is a whole lot sexier. It gave me a chuckle.

In other news, searching for "Gender Machine" on Google gives me NSFW ads for sex machines.

On the one hand, gender corresponds to identification and behavior, which this predicts (more so than biology). On the other hand, this produces binary output[0], and sex is more generally accepted to be binary than gender.

So, I think 'sex machine' is appropriate.

[0] Okay, three options, but 'andy' really corresponds to 'unknown', not 'person of androgynous gender'.

Sex isn't binary as binary as you'd think. There are people with ambiguous genitals, so that doesn't work. There are people with genitals that don't match the sex of the rest of their body. Genes then? There are people that have male genes and female bodies, and vice versa. There are people with both male and female genes (XXY).

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