All about the x
Gender-neutral language outrage ensued.
Streaming platform Twitch has backtracked on a new policy to change its spelling of “women” after criticism from transgender communities.
Oh good, it’s extremely urgent to have “transgender communities” in charge of what language we can use. Women, on the other hand, can be ignored. [whispers: they’re just Karens.]
The company had said it would use the term “womxn” in order to be more gender neutral in its language.
How can you be “gender neutral” about women? That makes no sense of any kind. “We will use the term ‘mushrooms’ in place of ‘women’ in order to be more gender neutral.”
Ben Hunte has “analysis” for us.
Many social media users are still confused about who exactly Twitch’s “all the womxn” approach was actually aimed at. Trans women call themselves women, and many have fought to do so. Non-binary individuals do not refer to themselves as women at all.
And women? What do they think? Oh who cares – certainly not Ben Hunte, who doesn’t mention the stupid little pests.
I’m just confused by all this.
I remember some feminists trying to get “womyn” going as a thing in the 80s or whenever, on the grounds that “women” implied that women were just some other form of men. I admit I never delved into the arguments for it, so it’s possible there was a more substantive case, but it struck me as rather silly at the time — were women treated better in non-English-speaking countries where the terms for women and men were not so closely linked? And if you believed we needed to change “women,” why on earth would you pick a homonym that nobody will be able to distinguish in spoken form, and that even in written form will just remind everyone that it “used to be” spelled “women”?
My impression is that this notion died a merciful death at some point in the last couple of decades. But now someone is dragging it out again in a slightly different form, but claiming that it’s a gender-neutral term? We have a gender-neutral term for human beings — “people.” Hell, throw in “persons,” “humans,” and even “folks.”
If the notion is that “womxn” is supposed to represent the set of women plus some “women-adjacent” people, yeah, big shock that this is a “solution” that doesn’t please anyone.
Bizarre. The ‘woman ==> womxn’ push originated from trans and enby activism in the first place, specifically to enlarge the category of ‘woman’ to include non women. But of course as Hunte points out – accurately for a change – if TWAW, then there is no need for the broadening of woman. This strikes me as the inevitable consequence of the entire movement having an underlying logic that is …chaotic. To put it charitably. Add to this a dash of the right hand not talking to the left, and the inevitable result is that some disparate elements of the movement will clash.
So, not bizarre at all I suppose.
That’s how I remember it too – “womyn” decades ago, and always an eyeroll (for me at least), but it was a feminist suggestion, and it was not “womxn.” The latter is much newer, and you’d need to be a peacock to have enough eyes to roll.
But what do the Latinx womxn think about thxs?
How do you pronounce “womxn” anyhow? Throatwobbler mangrove, perhaps?
Trans activism has always been ripe for purity spiral: it was always going to end up with exchanged accusations heresy, and excommunications.Not simply because of the chaotic nature of the foundational “thought.” The trans umbrella includes so many disparate “identities” that the chances of all of them seeing eye-to-eye on everything all the time are practically nil. Some of those who have roped in would not necessarily see themselves as trans, but have been transed notwithstanding. People with DSD (differences in sexual developmen), sometimes called “intersex,” have had their experiences and vocabulary appropriated against their wishes by trans activists. This allows TAs to use the formulation of sex being “assigned” at birth, and underlies, along with clownfish, and other non-mammalian examples, the TA claim that sex is a “spectrum.”
If the goal is to find a word for female humans that doesn’t contain “man”, etymology is our friend. “Woman” descends from “wyfman”, with “wyf” being an old Germanic root for “woman”, and “man” originally meaning “person”. So “woman” originally meant something like “woman-person”. Today of course “wyf” lives on as “wife”, and also “midwife”. I doubt anyone wants to refer to all women as “wives”, but maybe bring back the old spelling, pretend that the Great English Vowel Shift never happened, and pronounce it “weef” (or “whiff”).
Alternatively, we could go back to the old Indo-European root for woman which gives us “gyn-” in Greek and “queen/quean” in English, so all women would be “queens”.
Or, you know, we could just limp along with “woman”.
Sex is a spectrum in the sense that it’s smeared out and a bit complicated (mosaicism being the cause of much of that ambiguity) but that doesn’t mean that the shorthands of “male” and “female” aren’t useful.
Sex being a spectrum certainly doesn’t allow for male == female. You can still cut a spectrum in half and it’s not a circle.
I’ve been around feminism enough to commonly see women, wimmin, wombyn, womyn, and of course, womxn.
I have a slight soft spot for wombyn (and it pisses off the trans), but generally, women is fine.
Wombyn? Sorry for this but it looks like it should be the proper term for a female Womble. Or maybe the receptacle used by the Wombles for the litter they pick up. I shall have to ask if ever I find myself on Wimbledon Common.
Since womb is pronounced “woom”, I’ve never made that association myself.
“Gyne” would be a nice term for “woman”. For prosodic reasons, it would nice to have a one-syllable word for adult female human.
Also, @Holms #2
the broadening of woman, really?
Arcadia, that’s why I said ‘looks’ like rather than ‘sounds’ like.
WaM, #8: there is a possible alternative to ‘woman-person’ for ‘wyfman’. In his book The Tribes of Britain, the archaelogist and historian, David Miles, writes that wif/wyf was an Anglo-Saxon word for weaving* and so a ‘wif-man’ was a weaving person. It was applied to women because the manufacture of textiles was almost always performed by women. ‘Spinster’ comes from the same time and referred to those involved in spinning yarn, only later becoming a word for an unmarried woman. Tools associated with textile manufacture are regularly found in graves from that period, and only ever in the graves of women.
In contrast, an Anglo-Saxon man was a ‘weap-man’, a weapon-person. No surprise as to what is commonly found in their graves.
* possibly also linked to ‘weft’, the horizontal threads in woven fabric.
AoS,
That’s the first I’ve heard of “wyf” deriving from “weave”. A couple of notes: “wyf” has cognates in several other Germanic languages, all referring to women in some way (sometimes derogatory, alas), so it’s likely that it precedes Anglo-Saxon times. The etymology is unclear; here’s what the Online Etymological Dictionary says:
“Weave” derives from a different IE root, (h)uebh- “to weave;” also “to move quickly”, that has cognates in Sanskrit and Greek. The Old English form was “wefan”. So Miles’s etymology seems suspect at best.
‘Latinx’ makes a sort of backhanded sense. It de-genders latino/latina, but has no functional use in speech. From there though, its a short step to randomly tossing ‘xs’ around to make things look woke.
And I think the neologisms should all be pronounced ‘chumly.’
John, one of the problems I’ve always had with “Latinx” is that it makes a sort of backhanded sense in English. In Spanish, it makes ningún puto sentido. (Excuse me, ningún putx sentidx?)
The letter X is barely above K in terms of frequency in Spanish, and K only appears in loanwords. The letter X is rarely pronounced in Spanish the way it is in English (KS), and there only in loanwords; it’s more commonly pronounced as Z, S, TH, H, even SH. It appears as the final letter in only a couple dozen words, and most of them are simple Anglicisms. Not one of those words lacks a vowel before the terminal X, because as such a word is unpronounceable in Spanish. It’s orthographical vandalism.
These are reasons that “Latinx” is used much more by Anglos about Latinos than by Latinos about themselves, making it an exonym.
@Papito #17
Did you mean “punto” instead of “puto”?
Colin Day,
Ni puta idea. :)
Re “x”, in most Iberian languages (i.e., Portuguese, Catalan, Basque) it stands for “sh”, and apparently that was the case in Castellano a few centuries back.
I’ve heard that in Argentina some have taken to using -e as a neuter ending, so they would say, e.g., “latine” (though I’m not sure that “latino” is a useful concept outside of the US).
Latinx clearly rhymes with stinks.
I thought “blog” was a horribly ugly neologism when I first encountered it, but I seem to have gotten used to it at some point.
Banichi,
Generally I’ve heard Latinx pronounced “latinecks” (which I just noticed rhymes with rednecks).
As for “blog”, at least it fits the phonotactics of English, as well as spelling conventions; Latinx doesn’t follow any recognizable spelling conventions in English (though that hasn’t stopped the Brits from writing “gaol”), and it doesn’t follow the spelling conventions, phonotactics, or morphology of Spanish. (Kind of like “xe” and “xir”; my main objection to those when I first encountered them was that I have no puta idea how to pronounce them.)