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When uploaded to Netflix, an episode of the educational children's show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" cut out a segment saying that chromosomes determine one's gender.
[...] While noncontroversial at the time, the 1996 segment appears to contradict Netflix's new series "Bill Nye Saves the World."
The new show endorses a socially liberal understanding of gender, under which gender is defined by self-identification rather than genetics and there are more than just the two traditional genders.
People, people, people... Say it with me: The Internet Never Forgets.
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Netflix Edits 'Bill Nye' Episode to Remove Segment Saying Chromosomes Determine Gender
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 05 2017, @03:35PM (1 child)
Good points but I have a nit to pick.
In some languages, there are more than two genders to which nouns are assigned.
Isn't neuter more accurately described as an absence of gender, rather than a third gender?
Hell, for some wacky reason the German word for "girl" is neuter (das Mädchen).
The bottom line is that we should not confuse the name 'gender' for biological sex, because grammatical gender is merely a way for partitioning reality into different sets of things on a grammatical basis.
- are there languages with more than 3 genders [quora.com] (yeah okay hardly a reputable source lol)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 05 2017, @05:59PM
Isn't neuter more accurately described as an absence of gender, rather than a third gender?
No, that comes from confusing grammatical gender with sex.
Gender etymologically [etymonline.com] is related to genre and ultimately to Latin genus. It just means "class" of things. That's it. It used to just mean grammatical classification. In English it came to have reference to male/female sex in the 15th century, but it wasn't until the 20th century that it really became strongly associated with that (and even then, it was originally used as a sort of humorous way of saying "sex" once "sex" became more of a "dirty word" in polite conversation).
Anyhow, historically and etymologically, gender was primarily a classification scheme for words, not a reference to biological sex. As such, neuter words definitely have a gender, i.e., classification.