Which is, of course, not always the case. But that is, in fact, also the whole point
A language does, necessarily,
have to "make sense". If it doesn't, you can't use it to discuss anything.
Let's just look at the present case: Ususally, you would have relatively clearly defined words like sex & gender,
you have male & female, obviously referring to biology, you have hermaphodites for very special cases
& you have sexual behavior to discuss whether someone is heterosexual, homosexual, transgender etc.
It's all very neat and clean, if you want to talk about how good looking that man over there is it's no problem,
if you want to talk about hermaphodites, it's also clear, if you want to talk about transsexual behavior
it's also fine.
Now, let's change the basic definition of some of those words. Let's simply change sex & gender to
refer to sexual behavior instead of (biological) sex. Now, if you want to talk with me about "how good
looking that man over there is", I don't know anymore whether you mean an actual (biological) man,
or maybe a woman. If you talk about "gender differences" I don't know whether you mean actual
differences like pregnancy or only behavior.
If you change the meaning of more words, you quickly arrive at a language that can simply not
anymore be used to meaningfully discuss anything at all. And then, sorry, I will simply switch to
another language that has not been stripped of its meaning.
A language might, as you rightfully say, not be completely rational, scientific, logical, but at its
very core it needs to be at least a little bit of that to be of any use whatsoever.
This whole argument is predicated on a number of faulty assumptions.
1) "Usually you would have relatively clearly defined words..."
Clearly defined by what? A dictionary? A dictionary is not an objective repository of the official meanings of every word as accepted by the speakers. It is rather a descriptivist snapshot of how many speakers of a language tend to use a word at the time when that dictionary was published. To assume that the dictionary is then end-all be all source of what a word
necessarily means, or that it is a prescriptivist cudgel with which to beat any unorthodoxy of colloquial, regional, or personal usage of a word or sets of words is to err tremendously.
Some elucidative food for though:
Is this blue or green?
Is this black or gray?
2) Words change in their meaning
all the time. It's kind of the way languages work. I mean I already took Valka to task over this very point a couple of posts up but everybody on the planet uses the word "you" incorrectly, if we're speaking from a grammatical, semantic, originalist perspective. Not only is "you" a plural form, but it is an objective form, viz., the form you use when the pronoun is acting as a direct object, indirect object, or object of a preposition. In literal terms, to walk around telling someone that "you went to the store", "you bought some milk", "you put them in bags", is a morphological equivalent of me saying "us went to the store", "us bought some milk", "us put them in bags", when referring to solely to myself. The language changed - not necessarily for any logical or rational reason; Hochdeutsch, Plattdietsch, Nederlands, and Frysk have all retained their 2nd plural equivalents (and indeed English had to reinvent new forms to refill the lost use-case, e.g. y'all, you guys, all y'all, etc), but because it's simply what languages do, often, and often without any rhyme or reason to it.
3) Trans is not a sexual orientation, and has nothing to do with sexuality. Zip. Zero. Nada. You can be trans and gay. You can be trans and straight. You can be trans and bisexual. You can be trans and asexual. I mean your position here is already faulty even without that. "Now, if you want to talk with me about "how good looking that man over there is", I don't know anymore whether you mean an actual (biological) man,or maybe a woman." How would you know this? You're taking an essentialist position that gender exists solely as a product of genitalia, and has nothing to do with social markers, signalling, or personal gender expression, so how do you know that man is a man unless he is nude? News flash: most humans cover their junk most of the time, so if we're defining gender purely on inguinal terms, we'd very rapidly run into some serious logistical problems. The point is, that you are correct in that language exists to facilitate communication, and it changes to reflect the milieu of communication of a particular period. Because it would be impractical to run around grabbing every person's crotch before applying a pronoun to them, we tend to go based on markers, and as psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and social theorists have developed a better understanding of gender and gender expression, and as that understanding has filtered down into the lay world, the way we approach those terms has changed. Scientifically.
4) This is the most crucial, and probably should have been first on the list, but the problem in question here actually has nothing to do with redefining gender. This is about developing a set of words or morphological meanings that capture both (or all) genders without specifying, hierarchizing, or preassuming them from the start. You could remove the gender spectrum, and impose the binary on the matter and you'd still have the same fundamental problem. How do you talk about an individual whose crotch you haven't felt up yet without: a) misgendering them, b) default to masculine signifiers, which is to impose a hierarchy of genders. The problem isn't fundamentally a matter of allowing for trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, etc.; it is, rather a problem of being able to in one word or one set of words express "male or female (or both or neither)". This problem is why the impersonal singular they is a thing, and has been a thing at least since the 14th century in English. This is why we've seen lexical changes in the language, e.g. mailman -> mailperson, fireman -> firefighter, congressman -> congressperson. This isn't always perfect from a pedantic etymologist [BUTTAPERTURE] perspective - senator is seen as an acceptable nongendered noun even though in the original Latin -or was a masculine agent suffix, and the female equivalent would have (had there been female senators in Roman times)
senetrix, but languages change, and what a word once meant or how a word was once used doesn't necessitate present meaning or present usage.
5) Again, this actually isn't about changing the language. This is about changing academic prescriptivist writerly convention. Writing != language. Academic [language] != [language]. Writing is prescriptivist. It has to be by definition. Language, that is, what people speak to one another in order to communicate, is not and cannot be prescriptivist.
