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Comment by derleth | Hacker News Reader

> That is all very well, but where do the hermaphrodites go?

Wonderful question. Really. I just have two things which will make it more effective:

1. The preferred term is 'intersex' now. I know, but using the word everyone else is using makes people less likely to get angry.

2. Transsexual people are a broader category of people who will be impacted by what you bring up. The number of people who are born with an indeterminate sex (intersexed, that is) is a lot smaller than people with gender dysphoria, or feeling like they've been born into a body of the wrong sex. Trans people are still a minority, but they're a larger minority, and a more vocal one, so people are more likely to care about them. It's not the way things should work, but it's the way they do work.

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I was being purely biologically functional rather than asking the question in terms of the broader gender groupings and social terminology because it provides the stronger point.

When you get into gender, the argument can still be forced into a binary perspective by not getting much further than agreeing that some boys can be like girls and some girls like boys.

If you are forced to take into account the full spectrum of physical biology however, it becomes obvious that the issue is far more fundamental than the social labelling. Biology is messy and doesn't care much for people's ideas on exclusive differences.

> When you get into gender, the argument can still be forced into a binary perspective by not getting much further than agreeing that some boys can be like girls and some girls like boys.

Except if you do this, you can't really say you're segregating by gender or by sex. You have to say you're segregating by learning style, which isn't what the article's about.

True, from a perspective that accepts that arguments where gender is different from sex are valid (which I do). I am aware however that not everybody agrees with that viewpoint and so I went with something that is much harder to deny as it does not rely on accepting other people's opinions of what goes on inside their own head, but can be directly observed instead, which makes it much harder to bullshit around.

edit - what I am essentially getting at, I guess, is that I don't think that using a more inclusive argument would have made the argument stronger. It would have made it nicer, but not more effective. Those who already agreed with the point will applaud it even more if it is couched in their preferred terms, but those who disagree will either get put off by the language or try and argue about the definition of the group, which is much easier despite being larger, precisely because it is not as well defined.

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