Merriam-Webster threatened with violence after defining female as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”
The highly influential English language dictionary now defines “female” as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. A California man was arrested and charged with making threats against Merriam-Webster Inc. for its inclusive language around gender.
Language is power, which is why the transphobes so desperately try to reduce gender to biological sex. Any acknowledgment of gender, gender expression or gender identity being real phenomena with real consequences for all, means an end to their hegemony.
A circular definition?
In case you wondered: Male is defined as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of female”.
If you think this leads to a circular kind of logic, you are absolutely right, because as far as gender goes, an insistence on there being only two genders will necessarily lead to definitions of male and female that depend on each other.
Men are “not-women” and women are “not-men”. This is how human language works (or at least Modern English).
People don’t judge you on the basis of your chromosomes
Social and cultural roles are not really based on concept of biology or genetics, but on how certain people are expected to behave and see themselves.
It is the expectations of others that force you to behave in a specific way gender wise, not your chromosomes. Indeed, people will treat you as a man or a woman even if they haven’t seen you naked – or studied your DNA.
These gender expectations vary wildly from culture to culture and from time period to time period, so it is impossible to get to a clear definition of what it means to be a woman that is true for all times and all cultures (or even within one culture).
The midwife ritual
The fact that doctors and midwives look between the legs of babies to define them as blue or pink does not change this. This is still a cultural ritual, and not a medical one, as the doctors and nurses are unable to see the gendered sense of self this baby is going to have in the future.
In the real world social and cultural gender is as real as chromosomes. The traditionalists therefore need to control language to make everyone think and behave as they want they you to.
This is why they so desperately try to connect gender to biological sex. They see this as a kind of firm ground from which to battle all the “gender radicals.”
So they take a cultural ritual (the one performed by doctors and nurses) and turns it into a pseudo-scientific fact, making the cultural and psychological side of gender “unreal” in the process.
It is not a perfect definition, though
To be honest, I am not too fond of the Merriam-Webster definition. I appreciate the “having a gender identity” part, but I do not understand why they had to relate it to the other gender. This makes gender very binary.
Note that the dictionary’s definition of “gender identity” takes the whole gender spectrum into consideration:
“a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female“
So a much simpler definition of female would be “someone who are having a female gender identity”, or “someone who deeply and consistently experience themselves as female”.
The attacker may go to prison
The transphobe attacking the Merriam-Webster company, a man called Jeremy David Hanson, wrote:
“I am sick and tired of these cultural Marxists denying science and destroying the English Language. Merriam-Webster headquarters should be shot up and bombed. Boys aren’t girls.”
The publisher closed its offices for a week because of the threat. Hanson faces up to five years in federal prison if convicted.
IllustrationDenis Novikov