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IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...



I don't think 'people' is really an edge case.


It is newspeak to avoid saying „pregnant women“.


Personally I think women are people.


So you're saying the CDC should not cater to the edge cases? Where are we drawing the line? 10% of the population? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%? That last one is still thousands of people. Does your opinion hold for all edge cases or just those involving gender identities?

If there is a place I'd expect to "cater to edge cases" including those that only make up a fraction of a permille of the population, it'd be the CDC because they have to address hundreds of millions of people so even a one-in-a-million edge case still represents hundreds of people.


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> Some men can be pregnant

Only if you define man in a way such that any person can claim manhood.


Not necessarily. Unless otherwise asked, I, like the vast vast majority of people, classify others as men or women or non-binary based on their presentation, because it's the only thing I have access to. If someone wears masculine clothes, and masculine style, and has a masculine name, and I knew nothing else about them, I would obviously say he is a man. If I later find out he was born female, I wouldn't suddenly start thinking he is a woman.

On the other hand, if someone dresses and styles themselves in a typically feminine way but tells me they use masculine pronouns, I will of course by reasons of politeness call them by their preferred pronouns, but privately I would find it hard not to consider her a woman who prefers masculine pronouns.


That's just daft though. Defining women and men in terms of clothing, haircuts and other adornments is awfully regressive. It's like 1950s-style sexist stereotyping all over again.


Well, it's all you've got, ultimately. You can't categorize people just on their word, and you can't categorize them based on any of the biological criteria since you don't know what their chromosomes or hormones or genitalia are when you see them.

And it's not purely about clothes. Even if you look at people adopting more clothing styles traditionally associated with their other gender, say Harry Styles at awards shows, they do not style themselves exactly as the other gender would. Ultimately gender is a social construct, and that involves some shared performance that we each choose to adopt when defining ourselves in relationship to everyone else.


Men can not be pregnant, that’s what makes them men


So if, say, George Clooney announced tomorrow that he is a trans man (assigned female at birth) all along and is pregnant, would you consider him a woman?

Not to mention, women who got a histerectomy can't be pregnant either, does that make them men?


Are you claiming manhood is defined by what it isn't?


What an absurd complaint. "Expectant mothers" is much less direct and more euphemistic than "pregnant people".

That's not catering to edge cases; it's just clear, easy to understand communication.




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