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Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

> There's no such thing as the "male gender"

Maybe it's a cultural thing but here in the UK at least I think male and female are seen as genders... What word should the parent commenter have used? "man gender" is not grammatical, so I can only think of one other option; "male".

(edit: and in case I'm misunderstood, I don't mean any kind of subtext on the wider debate here, I'm just asking because I think 'male' is a gender and am confused).

(edit: right, found this: http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html so basically it's the difference between sex and gender. I wasn't acutely aware that the words male vs masculine carried such an important distinction. I'm not sure if they are commonly used in that distinct way).

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The poster was just trying to find something to attack.

If you read the wiki article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender

You can see the following quote: _Depending on the context, the term may refer to biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), ..._

LGBT has a tendency to use the term gender to mean gender roles, where the lines are a bit more obscure. I believe psychologists do as well.

But in every day vernacular, gender refers to sex for most people, and as the wiki article suggests, it's completely acceptable to use it in that manner.

I'll repeat what I said before, the poster was just looking for something to attack.

Thanks for asking, it's an important point:

In U.S. medical and feminist academics (and elsewhere,) "male/female" refers to sex: XX/XY chromosomes and the resulting organs, body type, etc, resulting in human sexual dimorphism, to which there are rare, exceptional cases, where the person is called intersex.

"man/woman" are common terms colloquially referring to male/female people (you probably know this). In the context of certain feminisms, the words refer to people born male or female, and then raised into the gender roles defined by society as appropriate for male and female people. These gender roles are what are invoked by words like "manly", "womanly", "sissy", and other "gendered" words and insults.

In other feminisms, the words refer to people who "identify" as one or the other, where this identity is either "innate" or otherwise fluid or something. Full disclosure, I sympathize with the former sort of feminism, so I'm not exactly the best person to give a comprehensive synopsis here.

Judith Lorber's "Gender Inequality" is a book that goes over individual feminist movements and waves, without necessarily pushing any of them on the reader. It's not too long, I recommend it.

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