As all ordinary speakers of English know, the gender whose history is celebrated in March, the gender of Cleopatra and Joan of Arc and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and your mother, had been spelled using the following five letters: “Womxn.” Or that, anyway, is the impression you get if you read the corporate communications pabulum from Bain & Company’s “Womxn at Bain” section, which opened “Womxn’s History Month” by putting out some slides about its commitment to the well-being and furtherance of people who are not men. One asked, “What is one thing men can do to be better allies to the womxn in their lives?”
As it is my solemn duty to keep regular Word of the Week readers up to date about developments in the public use of language, this week I must let you know that it is time to stop saying “womxn,” as I am sure you have all been doing, and resume using “women.” I hope you can adapt without too much trouble to this new reality.
After Bain’s slides went viral on Twitter and some generally fervent yet ill-informed discussion about the point of using “womxn” over “women,” it has been determined by amateur internet lexicographers that “womxn” is not the preferred term any longer. Indeed, not only is “womxn” over now, it is to be avoided and scorned, since it was “invented by TERFS.” (That is, transphobes.) Twitch, the painfully woke streaming company, tweeted: “While we originally wanted to use a word that acknowledges the shortcoming of gender-binary language, after hearing directly from you, including members of the LGBTQIA+ community on Twitch, we will be using the spelling ‘women’ moving forward.”
The recent story of the nonword “womxn” is an absurd one, and I am glad to see its end. “Womxn” was invented by activists who can’t seem to agree about exactly why they did so, but various explanations are proffered. One is that it is inclusive of transgender and nonbinary people in the category named, and this lack of specificity is good. Another one is that it doesn’t put the word “men” inside the word “women” and thereby “define women in terms of men,” thus righting a grave orthographic wrong. According to the New York Times, the co-organizer of the “Womxn’s March Seattle” who proposed that the 2017 rally against Trump replace its E with an X “said her understanding of the word was: ‘women and those affected by misogyny, or women-related issues.’”
I don’t think it is a very explanatory way to define women (or womxn) to say that they are people affected by women-related issues. But let’s not hold anyone’s feet to the fire. Clearly, the point of “womxn” as a means of communication is more social and political than it is really about communicating any information as such. That’s why Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a lot of noise in 2019 about getting the endorsement of a group called Black Womxn For. For what, exactly? Doesn’t matter. It matters who’s for it.
I own an album by the great bluesman John Lee Hooker from the 1960s called Whiskey and Wimmen. Based on its lyrics, I’m quite sure he didn’t do it as an act of feminist activism. Yet, around the same time, feminists were already trying on “wimmin” and “womyn” to take the “man” out of “woman.” But these things come and go like tides, or more precisely like seasons, since it’s a fashion thing. This season, we get to use regular old “women” again. I, for one, won’t be complaining.
