Dictionaries Try to Redefine 'Man' & 'Woman'
A man is…
an adult male human
…according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for example, or an…
adult male human being
…as the Cambridge Dictionary worded it until recently.
A woman is…
an adult female person
…according to Merriam-Webster, for example, and according to the Cambridge Dictionary a woman is…
an adult female human being
…at least until recently when the Cambridge Dictionary tried to dictate that a woman can be…
an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth
…and tried to dictate that a man can be…
an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth
They give the example…
•Mark is a trans man (= a man who was said to be female when they were born).
For woman, they give the example…
•She was the first trans woman elected to a national office.
As you may have noticed, they don’t say that a man is one who identifies as a man even if born a woman and don’t say that a woman is one who identifies as a woman even if born a man. They say that a man is one who identifies as a man and a woman is one who identifies as a woman regardless of which sex they were assigned at birth. They go so far as to give the example…
•mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth
This wording is intentional and serves an agenda. It is not just their way of saying “mary is a woman who was born male”. They are intentionally not saying that a baby is born male or female. They are intentionally saying that babies are considered to be male or female based on what sex they are assigned by the hospital. This seems like a jump to an unfounded and crazy conclusion.
There is a growing body of academic literature that argues that the view that babies are born male or female and that their sex is observed and recorded by the hospital is wrong. This wrong view is called biological essentialism. It is not just wrong. It’s transphobic and propagates hatred against the LBGTQIAO+ community, differently abled persons and women. Some of this literature was assigned reading for me as a student at a state university in 2016, a few months before a “historian of medicine” said that…
Basically it is not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex
…as part of an argument against freedom of speech in a now (in)famous discussion on Canadian TV.
In 2014 and 2015 I attended a community college in a red state. The only clear bias I encountered came in the form of a couple of test questions - ironically in a course on evolutionary biology - that had a Creationist bias. For example, in the final test, one question was true/false and asked something like…
If it turned out that all the complexity of life could not be accounted for by the Theory of Evolution, would that give weight to the Creationist view?
I answered false, because that is false, but the professor marked my answer as incorrect. At the very least, this presumes a false dichotomy, a logical fallacy, but this also argued in favor of a religious view regarding life on Earth in a science course. I argued the matter with the professor and she would not budge. She even argued that she had a Ph.D. Her Ph.D. was not in biology. I went to the department head who rectified the matter swiftly.
Other than that, I encountered no religious or political bias in my adult education until I went to a university in a blue state where I encountered more than mere bias. I arrived in the state in the early summer and signed up for what was supposed to be psychology elective to earn some credits before the Fall semester. It turned out to be an indoctrination program. This is where I first learned about Critical Race Theory and was taught that it's tenants were (politically) correct. This is where I first learned of racist, sexist and ablest microaggressions which is an umbrella term for racist, sexist and ablest microassaults, microinvalidations and microinsults.
This is also where I first heard of biological essentialism. I was told that babies are not actually male or female, but that rather they are considered to be male or female and treated as if they are male or female by their family, teachers, doctors, peers and so on based on what is written on their birth certificate, based on what sex they were “assigned”.
As I explain (with a sense of irony) in my Culture War Encyclopedia, biological essentialism is
a derogatory term used to describe the view that males and females have certain essential biological traits. For example, to say that females have vaginas is an act of biological essentialism and that’s bad because, as some have presumed to decide for them, it marginalizes transgender people and hermaphrodites.
But I digress!
My point is that the Cambridge dictionary presumed to dictate a change in the definitions of the word man and the word woman in alignment with the views of the progressive left, also known as the regressive left, the woke left and so on. It is safe to assume that it is only a matter of time when Merriam-Webster will change their definition of woman to conform to the view of that tiny group of ‘woke’ people, a radical elite. After all, They Changed the Definition of 'Vaccine' to conform to the wishes of another radical elite. One had reputation-smearing and riots as leverage and the other had power.
Despite what Cambridge or Merriam-Webster may bluff or bloviate, dictionaries carry no authority to determine how words are defined. They carry the responsibility of describing how words are defined by the majority of the people who use those words.
Let’s have the snake swallow it’s own tail for a moment here. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a dictionary as containing information about the meanings of words, not as something that decides what words mean. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a dictionary as something that contains words…
and explains their meanings
…rather than something that dictates their meanings. At any rate, it is we, the people who determine what the word dictionary means by the way we use the word.
Dictionaries do not decide what words mean. They do not prescribe. They describe. Otherwise, they are not dictionaries.
You may recall when in 2020 J.K. Rowling tweeted…
On December 2nd, 2022 Adam Brooks from Dan Wootton Tonight tweeted,
On December 13th, 2022, the notorious Steven Crowder tweeted…
There was an unspoken agreement, a trust that institutions that call themselves dictionaries are to provide definitions of words as they are used by society. This agreement has been violated. Our trust has been betrayed.
In 1984 the main character was made to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 by ideologues. Orwell included this in the story to signify the way that ideologues force people to believe that nonsensical claims are true. Such a nonsensical claim might be that men can be female or that males can be women.
It’s more than harmless nonsense. It’s agenda-serving redefinition. Also in 1984, a comrade tells the main character about the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary that he and other staff members are working on…
We’re destroying words…It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
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Further reading…
“‘That’s the tell’: Cambridge Dictionary changes definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ using curious wording” by BPR Business & Politics, December 13, 2022
“Cambridge Dictionary changes definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’” by The New York Post, December 13, 2022, 9:53am
“Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of ‘woman’” by The Telegraph, December 13, 2022, 3:11pm
“Cambridge Dictionary changes definition of woman” by The Times (UK), December 13, 2022, 6:45pm GMT
“Cambridge Dictionary Bows To ‘Woke Activists,’ Changes Definition Of ‘Woman’” by USSA News, December 13, 2022
“Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of ‘woman’ to include trans women” by The Washington Post, December 13, 2022, 12:05pm EST