Trans women can't be women because I defined the word 'woman' to not include trans women. Take that, "trans cult"!
purplesagefem.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/a-ling...
purplesagefem.wordpress.comPosted Apr 18, 2016, 6:35 AM UTC
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purplesagefem.wordpress.comA "linguistic analysis of women" that doesn't tell us that woman = womb + man? I am disappoint :(
More seriously, you can take the stand that woman can only mean people who meet some arbitrary criteria of womanness. Go for it. But you're not actually taking a bold stance against terrible linguistics, you're just being an asshole towards a tiny percentage of the population.
Also: Why do these people never whine about transgender men? Have you noticed that? It's all "MEN will invade women's bathrooms!" and "They want to MUTILATE little BOYS and cut off their PENISES" and "MEN can never be WOMEN!" and it's never women invading bathrooms or having genital surgery or "never being men". It's so freaking weird. And I mean, I invaded a man's bathroom just the other month because the woman's bathroom was closed and, when you gotta go.... But nobody screamed in terror as I darted in and out. (And unlike the women's room, there was a slim chance of seeing something. Why the hell don't urinals have stalls?)
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Why do these people never whine about transgender men?
Well, some of them do a bit - trans men are traitorous lesbians who betrayed women by pretending to be a man to gain male privilege, but Real Women(TM) aren't inherently dangerous rapists like men, blah blah blah. Behind the biological essentialist arguments (where you get the odd situation of red pillers and trans-exclusionary radical feminists basically agreeing with each other) I think there's a whole lot of fear of being attacked, which is pretty sad for everyone when you think about it.
Why the hell don't urinals have stalls?
Men's bathroom rules are super weird. Using a stall to pee means you're a wimp, but using a urinal next to someone else makes you an un-masculine creeper, except if it's busy like at a sporting event in which case it's OK even to be crammed right up next to each other at a trough urinal... If you're building a bathroom it's easier to copy what everyone else does than to try and not weird people out (like, unisex bathrooms are terrible and will be the downfall of society...except if they're single-occupancy disabled bathrooms. What?)
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Why the hell don't urinals have stalls?
Probably because it's cheaper to build them that way, but I wish they did. Some at least have dividers, but it's still a struggle to make sure the guy you're peeing next to knows you're not trying to look at his dick.
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I've been thinking for the past 15 minutes of what a "woman" is, and all I've got are the terribly circular:
A woman is an adult human whose gender identity is that of a woman.
what even is a woman? what even is a man?
I don't envy the lexicographers.
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It is a bit circular, yes, but the truth is that all other definitions implicitly leave some people out - and I'm not even just talking transgender people. There are people whose chromosomes are XY, but who have the outward appearance of being XX, and who never develop into male puberty. (And there are some who do develop into male puberty.) There are people with indeterminate genitals which could go either way if you eyeball them at birth. There are people who have some cells XX and others XY. There are people who are XX, but never go through puberty.
If we're using any sort of biological based definition, we're going to have some people who just don't fit.
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The conlanger in me wants to make up words for every single variation now.
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What a suspicious comment, surely they aren't a TERF...
Gender_Critical 134 41%
feminisms 105 32%
transgenderkids 54 17%
ActualWomen 11 3%
GCdebatesQT 10 3%
Oh..
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Social categories aren't easily definable, since a huge part of their definition is whether other people recognize the as such, and whether they see themselves a certain way. Socially constructed categories are just like that, and really a lot of words are like that. Another badlinguistics bit in the post is the expectation that words have (or should have) a 100% objectively correct definition.
That said, I think that for most speakers, there's a default or core meaning to "women" that means "an adult human with a vagina", with exceptions (people with vaginas who are not women) and extensions (people without vaginas who identify as women). Not saying that having this default is necessarily right, but it's how people actually think of it.
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So much of gender roles is acting to change how others perceive you.
How people act has changed over the years as well.
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Go full Judith Butler: a women is a person who performs the socially defined role of "woman" and is recognized by her community as doing such.
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So are closeted trans women not women while they perform the role of "man" and get recognized in her community as doing so?
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...maybe? I mean, the only reason I need to know if you're a woman or a man is so I can use the right pronouns. If you're in the closet, you... probably are okay with me using the wrong pronoun?
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Society doesn't recognize them as such. I guess that's where my nice neat definition becomes complicated, because there is definitely a neurological component to gender dysphoria. The catch is that how it is expressed is culture bound. It wouldn't be accurate to describe an Indian Hijra as a women, for instance. That's not how they view themselves and that's not how their culture has traditionally viewed them even though they probably experience a lot of the same things as a Transwomen here in the states. So I guess that the performative definition of gender might describe gender socially but not experientialy, if that makes any sense.
Maybe your first tautological definition wasn't so far off after all? Being human can get really complicated. Since there are many different contexts in which gender is experienced maybe one definition can't really explain all of them at the same time.
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The couple of dictionaries I looked at seem to go for describing the word 'woman' as 'female' + adulthood, and then for 'female' throwing it right back to 'woman'/'girl' and/or generalising a sex or gender from the common biological characteristics (which is an interesting way of leaving room for exceptions).
The Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary is my favourite with these wonderfully circular definitions:
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Not surprising that the article focuses on trans women and doesn't even mention trans men.
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Wow, her definition excludes a lot of 'birth' women! Post-menopausal or infertile women cannot longer give birth, women with alopecia don't have head hair, amptuees or women with a hysterectomy no longer have the required organs, And I know plenty of women with square shoulders and deep voices.
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Why is this bad linguistics? Because you can't win an argument by defining a word differently to your opponents and declaring that they're using it wrong, no matter how well you can spell 'lexicography'. Also because bleating "waah, we'll have no word for <thing> now!!" won't stop word meanings changing and won't stop people innovating new words if they're actually needed. Or, you know, using more than one word to describe something.
I came across this in [this r/gendercynical thread](https://np.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/4f7ngi/as_an_actual_linguist_this_had_me_dying/).
Oxford Dictionary defines it as:
Coincidentally, "female" is defined as:
Merriam-Webster is similar.
Woman:
Female:
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if your opponent is in fact using a definition of the word that isn't supported by the major lexiconographers of the world, then pointing that out as a counterargument has merit.
Of course, one might argue that popular usage is well on its way to changing the official definition as such, but you would need to provide evidence in order to win a debate, no?
In the specific context of a specific field (feminism) and at a time of social change, general dictionary definitions aren't necessarily all that useful, especially when you're talking about the people who are more outside the most common experience. But, that said, dictionaries vary more and give more room for the exceptions than you suggest. And the article doesn't point to other definitions, it attempts to negotiate its own.
I don't believe that wording is exclusive of people who are not able to "bear offspring or produce eggs", just that it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the sex. The same dictionary defines an arm as:
That's got less wiggle room than the quoted definition for 'female', but I don't believe anyone would take that definition to exclude arms whose hands were lost or never present.
In the OxfordDictionaries.com entry I'm assuming you're quoting it also says:
There are a lot of things that are characteristic of women, some of which the article clumsily goes into before rejecting them for a pure genetic definition.
The OED definition for 'sex' includes this non-reproductive sense:
with this quite amusing example quote from 1997:
So clearly that definition was prepared with the assumption that part of the concept of 'sex' are other qualities like external presentation, not just internal reproductive ability. I personally (as someone who hasn't formally studied feminism, but who has studied elsewhere in the social sciences) would use 'gender' here but I also recognise that the OED is a descriptive dictionary and in general usage still today sex and gender aren't clearly delineated.
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