New definitions for "man" and "woman"
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In case you hadn't heard:
"Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of ‘woman’ to include trans women"
By Timothy Bella, Washington Post
December 13, 2022
A few paragraphs excerpted from the article:
“They carefully studied usage patterns of the word woman and concluded that this definition is one that learners of English should be aware of to support their understanding of how the language is used,” Sophie White, a spokeswoman with Cambridge University Press and Assessment, said of the editors’ decision in a statement to The Post.
In the Cambridge entry for “woman,” the longtime definition for the word — “An adult female human being” — is still there and “remains unchanged,” White said. But an additional definition of the word appears below.
“An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth,” it reads.
Similar changes were made for the entry on "man".
Selected readings
- "Merriam-Webster gives "vaccine" a new definition" (4/30/21)
- "How ‘gaslighting’ became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year", by Brittany Shammas, Washington Post (November 28, 2022)
- "‘Vax’ is Oxford’s word of the year, as pandemic’s ‘Fauci ouchie’ and ‘inoculati’ enter the lexicon", by Andrew Jeong (November 2, 2021)
- "Amen" (10/18/22)
- "Awoman: gender-free language in Congress" (1/4/21) — with extensive notes and comments on false etymologies, mispronunciations, morphological and grammatical misinterpretations, etc.
Jenny Chu said,
December 13, 2022 @ 9:03 pm
I'm sure everyone will agree that this is a mildly interesting but mainly sensible decision based on ordinary observation of how people use language in the wild.
(Checking headlines)
Ah – perhaps I was too hasty.
Uly said,
December 14, 2022 @ 2:39 am
Ah, Jenny, I see you must be an optimist.
Seth said,
December 14, 2022 @ 3:03 am
Prescriptiveness vs descriptiveness on steroids (maybe that's not the best metaphor).
Taylor, Philip said,
December 14, 2022 @ 10:14 am
I don't know if I am alone in this respect, but whenever I read the phrase "trans[-gender] woman", the image that immediately comes to mind is that of a biological woman who has elected to transition to a man. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what the phrase is intended to convey, so I would be interested to learn whether any other {readers of / contributors to} Language Log experience this same phenomenon.
Jerry Packard said,
December 14, 2022 @ 10:57 am
I see this as a sensible move that accurately describes current use of language. As to Philip Taylor’s point, I process trans-woman as a type of woman rather than the a type of man.
GeorgeW said,
December 14, 2022 @ 10:58 am
@Taylor, Philip. The term leaves me unclear. I just haven't gotten suficiently accustomed to the terms. (Which is my failure)
Taylor, Philip said,
December 14, 2022 @ 11:07 am
Jerry — "I process trans-woman as a type of woman rather than the a type of man". I regret that I am unclear how to interpret that. Do you process "trans-woman" as a biological woman who has transitioned to a man, or as a self-declared woman who was (and perhaps still is) biologically a man ?
Guy said,
December 14, 2022 @ 11:47 am
To elaborate on Taylor, Philip’s comment about Jerry Packard’s comment, one can imagine a person with a general lack of familiarity with adoption finding it difficult to interpret “adoptive parent” as referring to parents who have adopted children, rather naturally interpreting it as a biological parent who has given their child up for adoption.
I think there is a certain analogousness here: people with close personal relationships with trans people, and families that have adopted, find it natural and perfect literal to use these words according to their social definitions because we are primarily social creatures and these words are mostly used for social reasons.
However people who do not have social relationships like this often lack the perspective to understand that: some people think it is like “playing pretend” to say that an adoptive parent is literally a parent, or suggest that it shows a type of confusion about whether they are biological parents. Likewise people with a lack of personal relationships with trans people sometimes view trans people as being “confused” or “playing pretend”, when to most people (even people who previously had this attitude) who maintain close relationships with trans people realize that is not the case at all.
I’ve always been occasionally surprised by people who have the attitude that adoptive parents are not literally parents, to me the social definition of parent is primary because it is the one that is relevant in most social contexts, the biological sense is only relevant in certain special cases.
II’m less surprised that people have a similar attitude with trans people since it is the nature of our society that discussion of trans people was historically considered inappropriate with children more recently than adoption. However, I think the situation is essentially the same: people with familiarity with the relevant people and families tend to view the social definitions as primary, whereas people lacking familiarity tend to view the non-social definitions as primary, if only because they lack a natural understanding of the reality of the social situations being discussed.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 14, 2022 @ 12:12 pm
An interesting analogy, Guy. For myself, "adoptive parent" has always been clear, in that I see "Adoptive parent" "Adopted child" as a well-defined relationship in which the former has adopted the latter. As far as I am aware, I have no word in my idiolect for a birth-parent (presumably mother) who has given her child up for adoption; she is simply the child's birth-parent, and this remains true whether or not the child is subsequently adopted.
As to why I have trouble properly interpreting the phrase "trans[-gender] woman", I am uncertain, but it seems to me that as, for most of my life, the term woman has been applied only to biological women, the fact that it is now also applied to biological men who have elected to identify as women is a sufficiently recent phenomenon that I can process it only at the intellectual level — at the gut level, my instincts tell me that the term "woman" must refer to a biological women, even when prefixed by "trans[-gender]". The OED supports this analysis.
DJL said,
December 14, 2022 @ 12:20 pm
I must say that I really haven't seen or heard many instances of people using the word 'woman' to refer to trans women – in the vast majority of cases people seem to use the phrase 'trans woman' in full rather than just the word 'woman'. Any data to the contrary will be welcome (assuming we don't have access to the research conducted by Cambridge Dictionary).
The analogy between trans people and adoptive parents has been noted before, more notably by Sophie Grace Chappell (here: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2018/07/11/transwomen-and-adoptive-parents-an-analogy/), but I must say that my own intuitions regarding the social and biological definitions of parenthood are slightly different to what Guy says here, and so are the social and biological aspects of womanhood (or manhood) for me. I don't see the social definition as primary and the biological as secondary in either case, but rather, I see a situation when one, the social, derives, to a large extent, from the other (the biological). I mean, of all the parents you meet you simply assume that they are the biological parents too, and you'll be right most of the time.
Jerry Packard said,
December 14, 2022 @ 1:08 pm
Philip, as is probably clear from the preceding discussion, I process "trans-woman" as a self-declared woman. That seems to be what is being termed the social definition.
Daniel Barkalow said,
December 14, 2022 @ 3:11 pm
I think it isn't obvious without checking a dictionary whether "trans" is like "former" or like "new" in its usage: a "former employee" isn't an employee, while a "new employee" is an employee. It's been pretty clear for a decade what situations "trans" would apply to, but it wasn't obvious which usage would become standard before it was commonly an adjective applied to gendered nouns. However, people don't like to have their core identity given as an inaccurate description, negated: "former employees" is fine in reference to the staff of a particular company, but you don't use it to refer to all retired people, and you don't refer to adults as "ex-children".
James said,
December 14, 2022 @ 3:40 pm
Daniel Barkalow, are you familiar with the B. Kliban cartoon, "'It was hell,' recalls former child"?
Terry K. said,
December 14, 2022 @ 7:14 pm
@Taylor, Philip
Transgender women don't "elected to identify as women". They simply do identify as female as an innate part of who they are. The choice is not choosing to identify as a girl or woman. The choice is to recognize and accept that identity and to present themselves as the gender they identify as.
D.O. said,
December 14, 2022 @ 7:16 pm
A logical decision, though probably a bit politically motivated and trying to get ahead of the curve, as it were. My question is this, setting politics aside, is regarding "trans-woman" as a subset of "woman" requires a possibility of someone being called woman if they in fact a trans? That is, it reasonable to give your interlocutor an idea of who the person is under woman/man dichotomy without telling that they are in fact trans? Does it happen in the wild?
Ellen Kozisek said,
December 14, 2022 @ 7:18 pm
@DJL
Or maybe you have seen and heard instances of the word woman being used for a transwoman, or women used for a group including transwomen, but haven't noticed that. Sometimes that someone (or some people within a group) is transgender isn't salient.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 15, 2022 @ 4:27 am
Terry Y — « Transgender women don't "elected to identify as women". They simply do identify as female as an innate part of who they are ». Sorry, I meant "elect to identify to others", rather than referring to how they identify internally — just as someone can be homosexual without "coming out" to others, so a man who internally feels himself to be a woman does not necessarily choose to make that fact known to others.
R. Fenwick said,
December 15, 2022 @ 5:15 am
@DJL:
I don't see the social definition as primary and the biological as secondary in either case, but rather, I see a situation when one, the social, derives, to a large extent, from the other (the biological).
Even if so, as is the case with so many other English words the two definitions are not perfectly overlapping. That doesn't make either one any less valid. (Except insofar as we're coming to understand that the classical "biological" definitions of "man" and "woman" are themselves inadequate even within their own bailiwick, essentially forming two peaks of a bimodal distribution rather than an exceptionless binary. The South African runner Caster Semenya is a well-publicised example of a woman with a phenotype not fitting well within the antiquated binary perspective.)
I mean, of all the parents you meet you simply assume that they are the biological parents too, and you'll be right most of the time.
Which is fine if all you care about is your batting average. In any individual case, however, you'll run a small but significantly non-zero risk of being wrong, which is presumably the more important factor if you care about your relationships with the individuals involved. Being 90% right across all your friends and family isn't going to appease the remaining 10% to each of whom you are 100% wrong.
This is particularly important for trans people, who suffer plenty of active erasure on a targeted individual basis without also having to put up with being passively erased through faulty generalisation as well.
DJL said,
December 15, 2022 @ 7:00 am
@Ellen Kozisek: maybe, but therein lies the issue: what is the evidence for including the new definition in the dictionary? As mentioned, can we have a look at some data?
@R. Fenwick: don't think the 'classical' definition of sex (whatever is meant by classical) is inadequate, at least not in terms of the differences in size of the gametes, which I take is the standard definition in biology, in fact. And no, I don't only care about my batting average, and not because I think cricket and baseball are ridiculous sports, but this is by the by, given that I didn't suggest otherwise in my comment, obviously. But thank you for the unsolicited lecture.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 15, 2022 @ 7:56 am
« The South African runner Caster Semenya is a well-publicised example of a woman with a phenotype not fitting well within the antiquated binary perspective. » I think that that is rather begging the question — I would instead express it as « The South African runner Caster Semenya is a well-publicised example of someone with a phenotype not fitting well within the traditional binary perspective. »
Jonathan Smith said,
December 15, 2022 @ 9:30 am
But the new definition WOMAN (2) should simply be broader than WOMAN (1) by *including* trans women (e.g., "an adult female or female-identifying person irrespective of birth assignment…"), not point to trans women in particular as is now done.
Re: "trans women are women," it has been 2000+ years since the philosophers pointed out that plain language formulations like this one are indeterminate with respect to say subset-superset relationships ("a white horse is / is not a horse), but the lesson doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 15, 2022 @ 10:13 am
Whether or not I agree with your re-formulation is irrelevant, Jonathan, but if I may suggest "person identifying as female" might be preferable to "female-identifying person" — the latter might (for example) be someone participating in an identity parade who is tasked with identifying the female involved in a crime.
wanda said,
December 17, 2022 @ 4:37 am
Philip, the current view is that gender and sex are different, which means that "woman" and "female" are different. By all accounts, Caster Semenya identifies as a woman and always has. So her gender is clear. But her sex isn't because she has an intersex condition. While is it OK to say that « The South African runner Caster Semenya is a well-publicised example of someone with a phenotype not fitting well within the traditional binary perspective. » (because women are people) it would also be OK to say that, « The South African runner Caster Semenya is a well-publicised example of a woman with a sex phenotype not fitting well within the antiquated binary perspective. »
Taylor, Philip said,
December 17, 2022 @ 4:54 am
OK, I think I understand your perspective, Wanda, but let me ask just to be certain — are you saying that anyone who identifies as a woman automatically gains the gender-attribute "woman" as a result of that self-identification — i.e., all that is necessary to be treated as, and refererred to as, a woman is to state publicly "I am a woman" ?
Taylor, Philip said,
December 17, 2022 @ 9:18 am
From today's The Times — all I could grab before the "take out a subscription" popup appeared …
DJL said,
December 17, 2022 @ 9:45 am
Intersex individuals don’t make the binary distinction between biological sexes inadequate or antiquated. Biologists certainly still believe that sex is binary; indeed, intersexuality is usually described as a disorder of sex development in biology, it’s not literally an intermediate case between male and female sexes (despite the name, a misnomer surely!). In fact, as I understand it, intersexuality is usually a discrepancy between internal and external genitals. The issue of gender is a different matter, of course.
Xtifr said,
December 17, 2022 @ 3:48 pm
@Taylor, Philip: the main alternative to taking someone's word about whether they're a man or woman is to demand that they strip down and prove it, which seems remarkably rude! There is, basically, no civilized alternative to accepting someone's word on this topic. And in any case, why should I care what equipment some random person is actually packing under their clothes? It's honestly none of my business. So, is there any reason at all why I shouldn't just take someone's word?
In any case, the topic is whether the term "woman" is used for trans women often enough to justify documenting the usage. Not how some random person on the Internet might feel about such usage. And I trust that lexicographers know how to do their job.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 17, 2022 @ 4:15 pm
I would respectfully suggest, Xtifr, that there is a very good reason why one should not simply take someone's word about whether they are a man or a woman. Imagine that I turn up at my local swimming pool, pay my entry fee, and enter the women's changing room. I appear superficially to be male, and there is nothing about my appearance to suggest otherwise. One of the women present, horrified by the fact that her "safe space" has been invaded by a man, challenges me — "What the hell do you think you're doing in here ? This is a women's changing room, you filthy pervert. Get the hell out of here". I calmly respond, "Madam, I am a woman — I may not look like one, but I can assure you that I am".
How many women would accept my word in those circumstances ? And more to the point, why the hell should they ?
Ellen Kozisek said,
December 17, 2022 @ 4:57 pm
To Philip Taylor and others.
It's not simply about what gender someone says they are. It's about gender presentation. And how you actually live your life.
Note the dictionary definition quoted in the article that's quoted in the original post:
“An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth,” it reads.
"Lives as" and "identifies as". Just saying to someone that you are a woman doesn't make one a woman, not according to that definition, and not in real life.
And note, "identifies as" is what we say when we are talking about how someone thinks of themselves. When talking about someone telling others who they are, we say "identifies themselves as". So, how someone sees themself. But also with that, living as a female.
wanda said,
December 18, 2022 @ 1:04 am
"Biologists certainly still believe that sex is binary; indeed, intersexuality is usually described as a disorder of sex development in biology, it’s not literally an intermediate case between male and female sexes (despite the name, a misnomer surely!)."
It depends on what you mean by "binary." Are most vertebrates able to be classified as "pretty much female" and "pretty much male", in the sense of "these individuals make eggs" and "these individuals make sperm"? Yes. There's been a lot of evolutionary pressure on the systems for creating sex characteristics to mostly produce males and females who can produce enough offspring to replace themselves. But what do "female" and "male" mean? That must be defined relative to a particular species. After all, in the Spanish mole, fertile females are all hermaphrodites with both ovarian and testicular tissues; they make eggs but also tons of testosterone.
So, let's think about humans. We know that in biology in general, pretty much everything is more complicated than it appears at first glance. This is because of the stochastic nature of events at the molecular level and because evolution is kludgy- it mostly cobbles together small modifications of existing mechanisms to come up with solutions that mostly work, most of the time in the conditions under which they evolved. Sex determination is, naturally, complicated: an embryo has chromosomal sex, which leads to the formation of certain organs (anatomical sex), which make certain hormones (hormonal sex) that go all over the body. Body in this case includes brain, and in a process we don't quite understand these hormones interact with chromosomal sex to influence brain development and lead to the formation of sexual orientation and gender identity. (In people, this is yet more complicated because gender identity and anatomical sex interacts with culturally-specific societal cues to produce gender presentation, but let's ignore that for this argument.)
Why would anyone expect such a complicated biological process to always unfold exactly the same way? Well, the short answer is that it doesn't. There's quite a bit of variation between individuals of the same sex in their particular anatomy, physiology, hormone levels, etc. (This complexity also means that there are a lot of ways for things not to work in the typical way to create people with intersex conditions.)
Therefore, I take issue with describing sexes as "binary." In math, the binary number system uses 0 and 1. In biology, the reality is statistical distributions that overlap. I believe that talking about the "gender binary" or "binary sexes" implies a greater and cleaner separation than actually exists. I also take issue with using the word "disorder" to describe all variations of sex development. (It's not just me- many intersex people feel the same way.) As a society, we have been moving towards only using "disorder" to describe conditions that cause major problems for the people who have them. Many intersex conditions are not really "disorders" in this sense.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 18, 2022 @ 4:27 am
Ellen, yes, the was the reason underlying my question to Wanda, although with the benefit of hindsight I see that my question could have been better expressed. So, we agree that it is not sufficient to simply say "I am a woman" in order to have the right to be treated as a woman" — one has to "live as, and identify as, a woman". Note that whereas Cambridge says "… as female", I have substituted "… as a woman" so as to avoid the conflation of sex with gender.
Of course, none of this really address the issue of female-only safe spaces (women's changing rooms, for example) — a human male who lives as and identifies as a woman, but who externally is clearly male (penis, testicles, no breasts) even though he dresses as a woman, is still likely to cause uproar in a women's changing room when he strips off …
Seth said,
December 18, 2022 @ 4:36 am
@wanda These are dangerous waters. But, to be on-topic, there are some deep linguistic issues present here. I believe the key sentence is: "Therefore, I take issue with describing sexes as "binary."" Is the claim that since the small mobile/large immobile gametes classification is not 100.0%, i.e. not a "binary" in a pure mathematical sense, it's linguistically incorrect to use that word to describe it? When you say "implies a greater and cleaner separation than actually exists", how much less than perfect separation would you accept for "binary"? It's definitely more than 99%.
Isn't this a bit like disputing saying "the Earth is round" by pointing out the very true aspect that it is not, in fact, a mathematically perfect sphere (rotation causes a distinct deviation where the diameter at the equator is larger than at the poles)? Plus it has mountains and trenches too. Someone working in a specialty like satellite guidance would be very wrong to assume a perfectly spherical Earth.
I think I understand where this impulse comes from, in that we want to validate people with an "internal" gender identity which is opposite their biological sex. But, not to deny that validation, the vast majority of such people are unambiguous in terms of the small/large gametes distinction.
DJL said,
December 18, 2022 @ 8:06 am
I can only repeat myself, and add some links here for context, but it really is unquestionable that the consensus in biology is that sex is binary, despite the variability all biologists are obviously aware of.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/11/16/stephen-knight/
https://nautil.us/why-sex-is-binary-but-gender-is-a-spectrum-236301/