Featuring a panel of powerhouse womxn
Now you want to know what damn fool or set of fools was doing a Womxn’s Day Speaker Series, right? Well it was the Gates Foundation, blast their eyes.
We’re celebrating International Womxn’s Day by hosting the United Way’s Emerging Leaders 365 Speaker Series here at the Discovery Center, featuring a panel of powerhouse womxn who are entrepreneurs and doing incredible work to give back to our community. Moderator: Mika Yamamoto with Panelists including Laura Clise – Founder & CEO of The Intentionalist, Nourah Yonous – Founder and Executive Director at African Women Business Alliance, and Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno – Co Founder of Future For Us. Admission is a suggested donation of $10 to United Way’s Emerging Leaders 365.
STOP CALLING WOMEN WOMXN. Stop lumping women in with people who are not women by changing the E to X. Stop it. Women are not a formless lump of matter that anyone gets to redefine just by swapping out a letter or two. The word “women” is not up for grabs any more than the words “black” or “lesbian” or “working class” or “disabled.” Knock it off.
The Gates Foundation is about a 20 minute walk from where I live. Maybe I should go down there (it’s at the bottom of the hill) and yell at them.
Eh, I just want to know how to pronounce “womxn.” Is it wih-mux-in, wih-mix-in, wih-minxs, or something else? I mean, I still have figured out “Latinx” (la-tinks? la-tin-ex?).
I’m starting to feel like the generation of people who still clung to terms like “colored” long after everyone else had moved on — I’m getting too old to learn new words for everything!
Screechy, and in that case, there were good reasons for abandoning “coloreds”, but there is no good reason for abandoning women. And the words substituted for “colored” could be pronounced, and could still be used to describe a coherent group of people, and it was driven by the group of people it was describing. The words still meant what they meant, which is this group of people, without the need to add amorphous groups of people who do not belong in the group being described.
Thx wxrd womxn makxs mx wxnt tx vxmit.
lol
You’re not supposed to pronounce it. It’s the word “women” with an X drawn across it. The category formerly known as women, now obliterated.
I’m surprised they don’t just revert to the term “womyn,” given that it could easily be taken as inclusive of the ‘y chromosome.’ However, its original rationale — eliminating “men” — apparently associates it with TERFdom.
And feminism, and women – it could hardly BE any more transphobic.
Ms. Benson, your mentioning of the word “disabled” reminds me of something I witnessed several years ago, and which I think is apropos. I work sometimes with members and allies of the disability community, and there was one person who strove to be a true-blue ally, a young man who came to all the meetings, attended all the events, read all the radical disability writing, and so on. He was not disabled, at least he made clear that he did not identify as disabled.
This went on for some time – his committed attendance, his work as an ally – until, in my opinion, he decided that being an ally was no longer satisfying. One day, at a meeting of a specific disability activist group that I was also at, he announced that he was irritated by the chemical offgassing he could smell of someone’s new shoes. This was puzzling, as no one was, so far as they said, wearing new shoes, and this was an entirely new thing for him to mention. He explained that he now had Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a controversial diagnosis but kind of a hot area of discussion at the time in the activist disability community. Again, this is only my opinion, but I think the young man had decided he was tired of being only an ally, and needed to have a disability himself, and chose a disability that is 1) very hard to say is or isn’t an actual physical impairment; and 2) was then a popular topic and rallying cry for some activists (as it encompasses environmentalism, anti-capitalism, and disability).
So, maybe we do have to say “dixabled”.
Interesting anecdote, but my child-brain pronounced ‘dixabled’ as ‘dicks abled’, which struck me as a pretty good description of what ‘womxn’ represents to the category of women.