Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Why doesn't English have genders? Well... it did!" video.

  1. modern English does not even "kind of" have genders because of the pronouns, English instead divides pretty much all living things by their physical number, age and sex (the number of divisions made in practice varies based on a whole bunch of factors, you'd be surprised how long the list can get for one kind of farm animal), using a different word for each relevant combination, and the pronouns reflect this. A lot of ignorant people have put about a large amount of of confusing stupidity due to a combination of not being able to get their head around this fact and the fact that English uses the word "gender" for four very different but tangentially related things: Grammatical gender, (an agreement system used in many languages. what gender a word has is usually more down to it's pronunciation or spelling than any real association with a given sex), biological sex (because the word "sex" was becoming badly overloaded, while prudes and immature idiots were making life difficult for the bureaucrats of the time about it), specific social constructs (gender roles. the individual responsible for most of the nonsense surrounding this was a journalist who later admitted to pretty much fabricating the bulk of it in order to meet a deadline. didn't stop various factions latching onto the idea and exploiting it to the hilt for various ends), and what ultimately amounts to an aspect of neurology and psychology (gender identity. transgender people and the like. I'm of the opinion that a lot of baggage and nonsense could have been avoided if a better term had been chosen, because malicious and/or stupid actors on all sides of That issue have run the ability to use the terms to conflate the concepts into the Ground in their rhetoric. often actually undermining their own point if the listener actually applies an ounce of logic to the argument... not that most do, tribalism and ideology being what they are).
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