Words

 

Words aren’t as important as you’d think.

I recently took a course on historical novel writing and all the other participants were already published writers with an idea that wasn’t their usual genre. One, had been writing very good, lay-person gynaecology books. She had written a birth book and her period book for teenagers was just being published.  However, her life was falling apart. On Twitter, to promote her books, she had taken the most horrific abuse. It started because she had used the word woman. This, apparently, marked her out as a transphobe and the more she tried to defend her use of the word the more transphobic she sounded. It all got quite horrible and I don’t blame her for wanting to run away into the past. That’s exactly what I would do but writing these books is the way she makes her living. It’s how she feeds her children and so she had little choice but to continue to defend herself. The group of women who want transgender women banned from female spaces claimed her as their own and she embraced the support. 

The Lancet published an article about how gynaecological issues had been under researched, with the quote, 

For many women, who were born women and have been identified as women for their whole lives, this felt de-humanising and as though it would actually add to that neglect. If you are talking about women then everyone knows it’s just over half the population. Bodies with vaginas makes it sound like it’s less people and when you start talking about cervixes then a serious number of people with them have no clue that they do. 

Now that the Labour Party Conference is on, it seems to have become their role to define the word woman. It’s a very clever way of making lots of people angry. Emily Thornberry was asked why the party was against saying, “Only women have cervixes,” and she said that it was because it wasn’t true. She explained that trans men also have them. Helen Lewis then pointed out that whilst that is true there also needs to be a distinction between the word woman used socially and the word used as a biological sex marker. Twitter was furious with both women. 

Knowing that the word woman is an abbreviation of the phrase womb owning human  and that ‘trans women are women’ are not mutally exclusive things would be a grow up thing to do. Let’s stop getting hung up on a word as an excuse to have a fight. We don’t all need to be in the same group. It’s our differences that make us human. 

We have lots of words in English that have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. We don’t have to eradicate the word women to give trans people rights or respect. 

Here is a list of words that can mean different things depending on context, I’m sure there are hundreds of others.

• Fair
• Saw
• Fell
• Novel
• Bow
• Crane 
• Date
• Second
• Type 
• Nail
• Minute
• Bark 
•  Bat
• Mine 
• Water
• Row 
• Season

Please can we stop arguing about this? It’s not healthy.