Re: [OT] Grammatic gender

[Wols Lists]

On 16/11/17 13:58, Karlin High wrote:
> On 11/16/2017 7:45 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Personally, I don't think that micromanaging gender identities is going
>> to help anybody deal better with who and what they and/or others are.
> 
> "Shifts in terms have an unfortunate side effect. Many people who don't
> have a drop of malice or prejudice but happen to be older or distant
> from university, media and government spheres find themselves tainted as
> bigots for innocently using passe terms such as "Oriental" or "crippled."
> 
> "Arbiters of the changing linguistic fashions must ask themselves
> whether this stigmatization is really what they set out to accomplish."

As I found out on Groklaw whenever the topic of race came up. As far as
I can tell, the word "Black" is extremely offensive in America,
certainly it triggered instant censorship on Groklaw.

So what am I supposed to do? Over here, blacks are not "African
Americans", they're not American, and would object to the word African
especially as many are Caribbean - as am I except that I'm white.

I now use the term "Politically Correct" as an insult :-)

Oh, and as to the original German court ruling, as a Scientist I have to
argue that they got it right. I know of NO definition that can be
accurately used to determine a person's gender other than what they
define themselves as.

Something as simple as genotype, we don't have two, we have four (the
minor two are rather unusual, admittedly). We don't have two phenotypes,
we have three (the third being very ambiguous in more ways than one :-).
And there is no perfect correlation between genotype and phenotype -
even within out standard "two of each" model, there is no guarantee the
genotype and phenotype match.

Cheers,
Wol