Prescriptivism is Passé
“The definition of a woman is an adult human female.”
How silly. How misguided. How fucking dull.
There is no objective definition of a word. A word is a label which describes a concept in order to have efficient communication. It is subject to change, once that definition is no longer useful for conveying an idea, and we make up new ones all the time: ‘telephone’, ‘Wi-Fi’, ‘internet’, ‘Einsteinium’, ‘Kaikaia gaga’, ‘wankstain’, and, yes, ‘cis’, to name a few. Though cis is Latin, meaning ‘this side of’, and then that concept was incorporated into chemistry, and then relatively recently became useful when speaking about gender because ‘trans’, meaning ‘the other side of’ was already in use. So, if you have an issue with ‘cis’, take it up with the Romans.
We make up words for new concepts, but we also change the meanings of words, particularly if they’re social constructs and society goes through a change: the idea of a weekend, race, bad vs good behaviour, marriage, religion, what a citizen is, the measurement of time in general…
Take, for example, the ‘second’. There is no real reason why a second should be a second long. We just decided it was that way and standardised it to make calculations easier. We decided to divide the day into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. I won’t go into the full reasons why, though there are some fascinating speculations to do with Babylonians liking the number 60, and Egyptians using constellations to measure time at night, but our units of time used to be pretty flexible back in the day. Hours were of varying length. Some cultures had different units altogether. The time of year and your latitude on Earth had enormous impact. Eventually we decided to define it as 1⁄86400 of a day to make it easier.
Except we don’t. As clocks got better at keeping time, we changed the definition to make it a fraction of a year because that was more dependable. Then we figured out atomic clocks — measuring time by atomic vibration — and now the second is ‘the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at a temperature of 0 K’. And even then, atomic clocks have discrepancies, so several clocks around the world are adjusted to agree with each other. And leap seconds are sometimes added or taken away to agree with astronomical time.
So, the length of a second is entirely socially constructed, and has changed many times, yet it is inarguably real, as we use it all the time. It’s likely that the definition will change again to reflect the use of optical lattice clocks (which I don’t understand, but it doesn’t matter — apparently they’re more reliable).
And there are so many other examples. Marriage used to mean the union between a man and a woman, but no longer. The meaning of ‘literally’ depends on how much of a pedant you are.
I find it extremely odd that the ‘gender criticals’ who often claim to want to remove gender altogether, as they consider it purely a patriarchal construct, cling so hard to the “adult human female” definition. Even if they consider the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to sex, not gender — and they don’t, as we don’t test the sex of everyone we meet — and sex to be immutable — it’s not — it still makes no sense to protest the changing of a definition.
What we consider a crime, and even what we consider a crime to be, changes. Pluto’s status as a planet changes, seemingly arbitrarily, but it matters to some people. We don’t even have a proper definition for a species and yet we give names to all of them.
We assign definitions to words based on how useful that is to us, to convey meaning. It’s useful to describe two men in a committed legal partnership as married. It’s useful to talk about racism and racial prejudice because it exists, even if it isn’t based in any scientific fact. It’s useful to call a trans woman a woman, because that is what she is, that is what she identifies as, that is the role she fills in society.
“But words still mean something. If words don’t mean anything, I’ll just call this orange an apple then, shall I?”
You are welcome to give a different name to anything you want, but you will not be understood unless enough of society changes with you, therefore it isn’t useful. If enough people do adopt a new word, then it becomes ‘real’ and means something — that is how colloquialisms are made. Enough of society has moved on to the concept that men and women are broad categories made up of cis and trans people, and that there are people who don’t consider themselves either, that it is useful to use these terms.
There’s a historical example of when trying to prescribe a system didn’t work; the French tried to decimalise time — 10 hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, 100 seconds a minute. It didn’t catch on. Neither did ‘fetch’.
The difference between that and the terms denoting gender is that most people already consider ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to gender. A homosexual man is attracted to men, and a heterosexual man attracted to women. Which of those is attracted to the trans woman? It’s not the gay guy. If ‘man’ and ‘woman’ referred exclusively to chromosomes or genitals, you wouldn’t have lesbians in relationships with trans women, trans men with gay men or straight women, straight men with trans girlfriends, etc.
To suggest that ‘woman’ means ‘adult human female’ isn’t useful. It was useful enough, in the past, when trans people weren’t as visible. Not anymore.
“If you change the definition of woman you erase the concept of a woman.”
Nonsense. If that were true, then there would be much graver consequences to certain languages not having terms for some concepts. English doesn’t have an exact equivalent for schadenfreude, and yet we still feel it. It doesn’t cease to exist; we just borrow words from other languages or use several words to fill the gap. The marriage example works well here too: just because gays can now get married doesn’t mean that straight marriage no longer exists.
Women will still exist, cis women will still exist — the differences in experience of the world between cis women and trans women will still exist, trans women just won’t be misgendered and segregated in casual conversation.
I can only assume the anxiety around this comes from perceived harm or bigotry. The data doesn’t support the notion that there is harm in calling trans women ‘women’. In fact, if mental health is improved for transgender individuals when they are treated as their gender, and there is no risk to cis women as a result of accepting trans women as women, there is no harm.
The only possible explanation left is bigotry.
