The meaning of words changes over time
Yet another man telling us yet again that we have to accept the “new” meaning of the word that names us. Language changes, you fools! Live with it!
Funny how he’s not talking about people with XY chromosomes. Funny how people like him always know which people to lecture and bully.
Not important for her to define “woman”, I’m sure the 6-3/5-4 majority will remind her soon enough.
Ugh. Yglesias is one of the hordes of know-it-all college boys who discovered blogging back in the day. I decided that he was a crank and a shill when he came out in loudly vocal support for a full invasion of Iraq saying that it should be wiped off the earth, or something similar. Expressed, of course, from the warmth of his cozy armchair (no doubt), with a piping hot mug of coffee at his side. I felt the same about Christopher Hitchens and his full-throated approval of waterboarding at the time, but at least Hitchens had the intellectual honesty to undergo the procedure himself, after which he changed his opinion completely and firmly stated that “waterboarding is torture”. Yglesias has just skipped off to greener pastures, it seems, without a care in the world.
This always drives me crazy. Just because words change over time, it doesn’t follow that any particular change is a good one or the right one or – most of all – is inevitable.
The idea that nobody has any say in the mystical, fated shifting of definitions is an astonishing one.
I guess he’s not a biologist, as he doesn’t answer the question of what a woman is either. As for his “tactical retreat” on the issue of trans women in sport, I know a tell when I see it and when someone is huffing and bluffing,
The issue that Yglesias doesn’t acknowledge is that women are defined as a class based on their sex, which is a material reality that has consequences for all those who are members of said class. Gendered concepts like pink is for girls, blue is for boys, etc. don’t magically change one’s actual sex if a girl wears blue or a boy wears pink. So the legal concept of what a woman is matters greatly to women who are seeing men now entering women’s private spaces, women’s sports, and women’s politics. If your legal description of women includes men in it then legislation like Title IX no longer is based on sex, and this has real-world consequences for women.
J.A.
Yes. There are two issues, here. The first is the point you make very well: that class membership has consequences.
The other is that the classification is not arbitrary. Gender is a social construct, which means it makes sense only within a cultural context. Sex is a scientific construct, which means it makes sense regardless of cultural context. If aliens observe us, chances are that sex is one of the things they will notice. They’ll be able to sort us out accurately into our separate corrals for the appropriate probing.
So we need the word because it matters but also because the category it describes is accurate.
I don’t know why I’m preaching to the choir, though.
Well demanding that words be given new meanings that vitiate the old ones is an even worse basis for a political ideology, particularly when this imposed redefinition is based on, and defended by, lies and bullying.
As Dr. Jane Clare Jones has pointed out, words and concepts are tools which we use to describe reality. Using words and concepts in a way that obscures or inverts the connection that they’re supposed to have with reality, fucks up our ability to get shit done.
I have been seeing a lot of sites online that state very adamantly that humans are not sexually dimorphic. My response to that is always WTF? Of course we are. Men are larger than women; women have different sexual structures and functions from men; lots of differences, including in our urinary processes which can make it difficult for pregnant women and men with prostate problems – they have different problems, and those problems cannot be treated the same way.
To say this is to beg the question. They are stating this as a means to prove that TWAW, which is to say, they are using the idea of TWAW to declare no sexual dimorphism, because if Lia Thomas and Veronica Ivy are women, then, well, how can you tell women from men? You can’t. Then they turn around and use this claim to “prove” TWAW. What astonishes me is how many people can’t see that.
We may not be as dimorphic as the chimpanzee, but we are still dimorphic. (Which is a better word than ‘binary’ in this context. TAs can’t even get that right. If I were going to be an NB, I’d actually have to be an ND, non-dimorphic.)
Yes, but it does not matter that a kid doesn’t know the technical details of what a woman is, just as it does not matter for any other word. Kids – and adults for that matter – use all sorts of words without knowing the technical details of the thing being referenced. That’s just how language works – people use the vernacular language with meanings determined by common use, and science discovers details about those things independently of the common use.
Just as irrelevant is the timeline of our increases in knowledge. Yes, many years ago our knowledge of the differences between the sexes was crude. Gross anatomical features were known, the rest was guessed at. And… so what? Over time, we filled in many technical details about sex and sex differences and genetics and etc.
Those observations are irrelevant to the fact ‘woman’ refers to people that are female, and the uterus and XX chromosomes come from the female side of the sex divide. Notice that this argument, this scepticism, stands out as an exception carved out of normal behaviour to common-use words and their history. Imagine Yglesias tweeting about another word to see how ridiculous the argument is:
“Let’s do annoying philosophy of language stuff.
Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it’s obvious — a star has nuclear fusion and stellar nucleosynthesis.
But kids who don’t know what nuclear fusion is use the term “star” perfectly well, and English word “star” long predates anyone knowing about stellar nucleosynthesis.”
Matthew Yglesias possibly thinks he is being clever, but he is bullshitting. Unfortunately, he has fooled even himself. “Annoying sophistry of language” would have been a more accurate introduction to that tweet.