Samantha Niblett MP thinks it’s bad to know what a woman is.
That’s a tad disturbing.
How dare women know what a woman is? The impudence is shocking.
Women who know what women are are stuck in their ways. Good, unstuck, civil women like Samantha Niblett know that some men are women and some women are men: that’s the only right way to understand the matter. Thank you for keeping it so very civil.
To be honest, I don’t think it’s a matter of a woman knowing what a woman is. It’s not obvious to me why being a woman would give anyone particular insight, or immunity from error. (Of course, the same applies if you drop the first syllable of the word “woman”.)
I’d used to think that it was a matter of being a competent speaker of English. And for some people, for whom English isn’t their native language, it might be.
But that won’t explain anything about what’s happening in the Anglosphere.
For that, you have to accept that Niblett is articulating a worldview that knows exactly what “woman” means, and has made a decision to un-word it.
And even that is sometimes perfectly legitimate. Words do change their sense; sometimes that’s just random semantic drift, but sometimes it does reflect a conscious change of useage.
The problem is that “woman” has a niche in the language, and that prising it out of its niche does not make the niche go away. This is the basic incoherence of the TRA position: they need “woman” to mean something, so that there’s something for men who claim to be women to claim to be. But once they admit that it does mean something – that it hangs together with the rest of English in a certain way – then they sooner or later have to admit that it can’t be something one is simply by stipulation.
(You can, and probably should, admit that there’re ambiguities in the word, because natural languages work like that. The girl/ woman distinction is a good example of that: there could be genuine unclarity about whether someone is a woman on that front – and there’s room for self-stipulation there. “Adult human female” won’t cut it, either, because even “female” has possible ambiguities: does it mean someone with two X chromosomes? A Y but an inactive SRY gene? Often these two things will amount to the same, but they might not. And which is the correct use of “female” is a linguistic, not a scientific question. But even there, we can say that there could in principle be a way to settle the matter, by looking at the way the word sits in English. And if there are irreducibly marginal cases, then… well, fine. Even there, though, we wouldn’t be entitled to wage a war on the very idea that the word has a meaning. Exceptional cases show that there is some rule to which they are the exception. Niblett would still lose the argument.)
This point reminds me that there was an overhaul of the meaning or usage or implications of the word “woman” way back when the second wave started. Feminism Mark 2 was very up front about demolishing the taboo on the word, which had been treated as a tad rude and crude. You were supposed to say “lady” – unless of course the woman in question was conspicuously beneath you in the social hierarchy.
The problem is that “woman” has a niche in the language, and that prising it out of its niche does not make the niche go away.
Another problem is that the definition of a woman is based on biological reality, and biology cannot operate if woman is a spectrum (or man). It is important medically. It is important socially and politically. But biology does, in fact, have a say in its use, and we are being told no, it doesn’t. Is woman a gender? Is it a sex? Is it a gender that relates to a sex?
In biology, it is horribly useful, partially because of that word ‘human’. When we say female, we refer to any species that has two sexes. That includes animals, plants, algae, fungus, but not bacteria. When we say ‘woman’, it is referring to a human female, and that usage is handy. It keeps biology more succinct, especially if everyone understands it the same way. That can be important for a couple of reasons. It keeps us from being so pompous. It makes our papers shorter, and since scientific journals make the author pay for the printing, that’s important. It makes us more easy to be understood. It saves time when preparing speeches or lectures.
I must admit, I am sick to death of all the linguistic parsing of the word ‘woman’. There is only one level where that is, or should be, relevant, and that is in linguistics. It’s like philosophy; some of it matters in real life, but some of it is just important to philosophers. Same with science…
I think it is time to stand up for the dictionary definition (before the bastardization of the dictionary) and the traditional usage. Yes, words change. Some words don’t. Some words are important enough to continue having meaning without constant ‘evolution’ – which is not what’s happening here. This is more like linguistic husbandry than linguistic evolution, where someone forces the change they want and everyone else just has to accept it.
Woman means ‘adult human female’. We can parse the word adult into a thousand little pieces, and not agree, and that’s fine. Figure out who is a woman, and who is a girl. But there is not really any reason for calling a man a woman under any convoluted definition of a word everyone has understood for a long time, a word people still understand, even those who won’t admit they understand it or know what it means.
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