Discussion Main / Hermaphrodite

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To be a bit more polite than the troper above me, changing the title would not make sense. This is not a trope about intersex people. I repeat, this is NOT a trope about intersex people. It is about someone with both male and female reproductive organs which does not exist in humans. It's like someone claiming that 'vampire' is a hurtful word and offends them.

Also, just stating it can offend people once is enough explanation for the main page. TV tropes is not a soapbox or a public service announcement. Please do not treat it as such.

After looking at this article, it is not what amitraday is claiming at all. Just below the title 'hermaphrodite' it says 'aka: Intersex', clearly conflating the two. If you type 'intersex' into the Google custom search, this page shows up with the title 'intersex', and leads to a page that says 'hermaphrodite'. The opening text gives lip service to the admission that hermaphroditism and intersexuality are two different things, but they are not truly being treated as such. Also, throughout the article, intersex characters are included as examples. This is likely because there is no page actually given for intersex characters. Over winter break, I will attempt to create a page dealing with intersexuality, so this page can be fixed accordingly.

And regardless of anything, it's very likely that real intersex people are compared to these characters.

It's not even about sensitivity, it's about accuracy. Most media today utilizes the term 'intersex' and TV Tropes is lagging behind to not follow suit.

It'd be like having an article about black people with the N-word as the title. Or calling an article "All Faggots Love Theater." We all agree that's wrong, so let's not make an exception here.

Intersex and hermaphrodite are not synonyms. The ability of reproducing in two ways is the defining characteristic of hermaphrodites and what the term is used for. A trope about mere intersexuality is something completely different.

I'm resurrecting this thread to again strongly advise that the name of this article be changed. While there's been a range of opinions from users & moderators about this, I'd like to point to these articles published by the Intersex Society of North America: https://isna.org/node/16/ and https://isna.org/node/979/ (the latter of which is in support of a 2005 journal article proposing the same change in medical literature).

In short, there are 2 main arguments for modernising this: 1) As Biblius points out, accuracy - the term is long since outdated, both medically & in media, so the "scientific term" defense holds no water. 2) More importantly, respect - the intersex community are the ones who get to dictate what language gets used to refer to them. It's not the place of random forum users to dispute that, and those who do are simply being cruel.

Even if we don't rename this to be specifically about intersex people (which is odd since the description focuses a lot on intersex folk), we should avoid using outdated language with derogatory connotations, even if the page points out it's derogatory.