To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Also known as "testicular feminization syndrome" if I remember my undergraduate medical genetics courses correctly. It turns out that phenotypically many of the traits currently considered highly desirable in women in our culture are expressed more highly by possessors of this karyotype.

Chances are that many of us that have admired a super-model for their "obviously" "female" characteristics have been appreciating exactly this phenotype!

The contention that "man" is a biologically defined as opposed to socially is not really tenable and the fact that it should matter so much to anyone as opposed to how the human performs as a colleague speaks volumes about the problem.

I think I see what's happening here. In the United States, which is where I live, there is no established social norm for how gender is indentified. Each person is left to their own methods of determination. From your post it sounds like you use a person's self-identity to evaluate the gender. If a person self-identifies as a woman then they are a woman. Am I correct that this is your viewpoint? In that sense I could see how the statement could be offensive for the reason you stated above.

From my point of view gender is defined by ones physiological and biological makeup, not ones sense of self-identity. Tang could self-identify as a woman and even go so far as to have surgery to alter her appearance and it would not change my interpretation of her gender. If I were to meet her I would address her with a feminine pronoun as she has requested in her blog[1] and would treat her as a woman. Yet if the question of her specific gender was raised I would not be able to say honestly that she is female because the criteria that I use to establish gender would say categorically that Tang's gender is male. From my viewpoint, it is a fact, not an opinion, that Audrey Tang is male. Biological science has not yet reached the point at which that fact could be changed.

In my case I didn't find the original poster's statement to be offensive because the statement made an empirical observation. It is demonstrably true given my criteria for what constitutes gender. I interpreted the poster's quotes as a means to emphasize the word 'she' because the written word lacks the auditory and visual cues that face to face communication has. I percieved the emphasis on that word to say, "I'm using this pronoun although I know it's not correct."

1. http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2005/12/runtime_typecas.html