I'm bringing up Religion here to show an example of how grammatical gender systems may result in the opposite of what one would expect from social gender. I am also being anthropologically descriptive in this post and am purposefully avoiding modern politics.Salmoneus wrote: ↑07 May 2022 13:26Just to be clear, because this is a common misconception: cross-linguistically, "gender" in the linguistic sense has nothing to do with "gender" in the sociological sense.teotlxixtli wrote: ↑07 May 2022 04:17 Masculine/feminine gender always seemed pedestrian to me, but I’d include them if the culture that spoke the language had more than two (either a third gender or distinct category for trans folks or something)
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Both Christian and Jewish Ecclesiastical/Religious Law has traditionally recognized only Biological Gender, yet the treatment of Intersex people is different. Jewish Law recognized them as a Third Biological Gender, while (AFAIK) Christian Canon Law forced them to choose a Binary Gender.
Now, if grammatical gender was correlated to social gender, one would expect Medieval Christianity, whose language of education was Latin, which has a neuter gender, to be more accepting of Intersex, while Judaism, whose language of education was Hebrew, having only grammatical Masc and Fem to be less so, and yet we find the opposite.
EDIT: I am also tempted to bring up Tamil, since it has Human Msc, Human Fem, Animal, and Inanimate grammatical genders, and yet Tamil culture has recognized a class of people who are basically Intersex+Non-Binary (Possibly +Trans, the term does not seem to map well on Western terms) called Tirunar/Aravaani. However, it seems that the Tolkāppiyam mentions a special grammatical gender for "Aravaani" people, though on second thought, the Tolkāppiyam may be being perscriptive, not descriptive, in this case. I would need to see further clarification.