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VoiceOfRa comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (263)
Because the map is not the territory? You can argue that they are the same thing, but the fact that they use the same word isn't sufficient.
That doesn't mean it's a property that babies have. They might have the property "will be gay when they hit puberty", but that's a different property. A six-month old baby might have a gene that will give her a speech defect, but for now she speaks just as well as every other baby her age.
I don't think this is true, but I'm not an expert.
That's an argument for bringing our map closer to the territory, i.e., applying the word "gender" in humans to the same concept we use for animals. Not for completely messing up our map.
I'm not aware of the word "gender" being commonly applied to non-human animals for any concept, other than grammatical gender. You might be thinking of the concept usually referred to as "sex".
If you want to follow that distinction, then I agree that "gender" doesn't point to anything real aside from what is commonly pointed to by the word "sex". Heck when "gender" first became used in its non-grammatical meaning, it was a euphemism for "sex" since the latter had acquired a meaning (as [Edit: an act]) that made it not necessarily SFW.
A pedantic correction: "gender" appears to have had that non-grammatical meaning since the 15th century (and has also had an NSFW meaning as a verb since even earlier) but (if the OED is to be trusted, which usually it is) it's true that "gender" became widely used to mean males/females collectively in the 20th century because "sex" was too distracting. (It wasn't "sex" as a verb, though, but "sex" as a noun meaning "copulation".)
That "i.e." is doing an awful lot of work. I don't agree that the map is messed up, and moving a label doesn't necessarily bring it closer to the territory.
Above you said:
So what did you mean by that?
Tapping out.