"Wants Women to Stop Silencing Themselves"? Really?
That, and your comments on linguistics, reminds me of an old joke, possibly from my father -- gawd rest his soul, but half Irish if I'm not mistaken -- on that point: "Why is a language called a 'mother tongue'? Because father never gets a chance to use it ..." 😉🙂
But worth subscribing to weigh in -- whole concept of "gender" is such a toxic dog's breakfast, largely because so many are using quite contradictory definitions for both "sex" and "gender". I'd had occasion recently to read a bit about the US laws on Title IX which linked to a NY Times article which underlined the point:
NYTimes: "A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. .... The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined 'on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.' The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times."
Seems that the Times is changing their definitions in midstream -- always a hazardous operation. Too many seem to take sex and gender as synonyms which compounds many problems -- far more useful to define the terms as referring to entirely different kettles of fish -- "sex" to denote reproductive abilities, and "gender" to denote various sexually dimorphic personality traits, "morphs", roles, behaviours, and stereotypes.
In a note from our sponsor, my attempt to put the latter on something of a more scientific footing:
"Wants Women to Stop Silencing Themselves"? Really?
That, and your comments on linguistics, reminds me of an old joke, possibly from my father -- gawd rest his soul, but half Irish if I'm not mistaken -- on that point: "Why is a language called a 'mother tongue'? Because father never gets a chance to use it ..." 😉🙂
But worth subscribing to weigh in -- whole concept of "gender" is such a toxic dog's breakfast, largely because so many are using quite contradictory definitions for both "sex" and "gender". I'd had occasion recently to read a bit about the US laws on Title IX which linked to a NY Times article which underlined the point:
NYTimes: "A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. .... The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined 'on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.' The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk0.KYsD.39mnfFJ_CE3m&smid=url-share
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX#Impact_on_American_schools
Seems that the Times is changing their definitions in midstream -- always a hazardous operation. Too many seem to take sex and gender as synonyms which compounds many problems -- far more useful to define the terms as referring to entirely different kettles of fish -- "sex" to denote reproductive abilities, and "gender" to denote various sexually dimorphic personality traits, "morphs", roles, behaviours, and stereotypes.
In a note from our sponsor, my attempt to put the latter on something of a more scientific footing:
A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum; Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics; https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum