Parents who are gearing up for college application season will be cheered to learn that Ivy League graduates frequently ask local friends if their 6th grade gender-typically dressed boy-girl twins are identical or fraternal. Due to the parents having attended Harvard and our location being proximate to Harvard, many of the folks asking this question have at least one Harvard degree.
[This would not be a poor reflection on $500,000+ in education (private school plus Ivy League tuition) if we assume that the questioners are refusing to make cisgender-normative assumptions. The twins could have been identical (though they do look different) and then one decided on a gender transition. Separately, why isn’t it “sororal twins” as an alternative to “identical”?]
According to the wikipedia page on Twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin) sister-sister dizygotic twins are referred to as sororal by those who don’t find the mouth movements required uncomfortable. Unless of course you mean that this article only uses sororal as an alternative for dizygotic in which case I would suggest it’s because identical describes the genotype and when the term was derived the gender was determined based on appearance. Calling a pair sororal asserts nothing about the genotype other than that they both carry XX genes.
>Separately, why isn’t it “sororal twins” as an alternative to “identical”?]
I think you mean why isn’t sororal, meaning sisterly, used in place of fraternal, which means brotherly.
I have to own up to making a similar comment about a friends new borns. My excuse is that I ( obviously) wasn’t really paying attention to what I was saying. ( I am not an Ivy League graduate, but I did really well on Weekly Reader tests in the fourth grade)
A Harvard grad and a Chicago grad (both identifying as male) visited the urinals. The Chicago grad finished up and headed straight for the door.
“At Harvard we learned to wash our hands after using the restroom.”
“Well, at the University of Chicago we learned not to pee on our hands.”
Mememe: By “alternative to” I meant “When the twins are not identical”.
philg, using either “sororal” or “fraternal” as terms to describe non-identical twins, let us consider the odd linguistic situation they inhabit in contrast to the term “identical”.
Both “fraternal” and “sororal” are latinates for brotherly and sisterly — they stem from the blood relationship between siblings. Common usage of both terms is to describe relationships between people who are not related, yet have an emotional closeness.
So our common usage of fraternal (which can refer to a male-male or a female-male sibling relationship, while sororal only tefers to female-female) describes an intimacy resembling that between siblings born and/or raised together. Remember that these are latinates — adoption was common Roman practice, and the marriage of first cousins was considered an ideal union. First and foremost, remember that common usage denotes a closer than ordinary relationship.
But in the special use case of twins, “fraternal” and “sororal” are only used in contrast to “identical” and in this case they indicate a relationship less close than the alternative.
Why don’t we use “sororal” more often? Because not everyone is such a smarty-pants.
I am unsure as to what gender typical dress is any more. Overalls are considered feminine dress by the middle-school set in New York.
Hair length has become the best indicator of gender identity, especially among younger people.
Those identifying as male hardly ever have long hair, and those identifying as female almost always have long hair. In this age of supposed gender fluidity, the gender segregation of hair fashion is remarkably strict. Short hair and heavy keychains are the standard uniform of the butch lesbian. In urban areas, all men have short hair. Women wear their hair long.
I wonder if your friends’ children’s haircuts allow room for ambiguity.