I’m a writer because I bloody love words. I love the meanings of words. I love the roots of words. I love tracing their etymology - so easy now with google - and thinking about the stories behind their formation. I love poetry and I love seeing what any good writer can do with words, just as an artist perhaps loves colour. I love humour and word play and I love my dad who, born in 1926, always had a song lyric or a wise crack or a double entendre for every occasion. For me, words make everything make sense.
Or at least, they did once. It was words that first made me curious about gender. “Birthing people”, and “assigned male / female at birth”, these were new phrases and they caught my eye. Where had they come from? What did they mean? Whose mouth was the first to use them? Where were their roots? Nobody seemed to know, and what’s more, the conversation was off-limits. These words were to be used, but we were not allowed to ask about them. This was violence. Violence. That’s another word I’d not heard used in this context before. Curious.
And then I was violent. I was violent because I stuck to the meaning of a word as I understood it. That word was ‘woman’.
I said, ‘Obstetric violence is violence against women’.
By women, I meant, female people. The ones giving birth out of their vaginas. Women.
This was violence because other people were using a new version of the word ‘woman’. Their version was based on identity, not biology. A woman is anyone who feels they are a woman. A man is anyone who feels they are a man. And some people may feel they are neither, and these people are non binary.
So obstetric violence therefore also happens to trans men and non binary people too.
My point was not to dispute this, but to express that if a person in labour experiences violence, it’s sex based. It’s not happening to them because of their identity (if it is, it’s a hate crime not obstetric violence). It’s happening because of their sex, because they are female.
So that makes it all clearer, doesn’t it? Female, unlike woman, is not a word that is shifting in meaning, right? We all understand that people, like many other life forms, come in two sexes, male or female, the male has the small motile gametes (sperm) and the female the large gametes (eggs). Nothing to do with identity, just clear, biological facts? OK! Phew, that was getting complicated! Thank goodness we have the words female and male because, ya know, sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act so - we’d be a bit fucked if we started to change the meaning of that word, right?!
Well, I have bad news.
Female doesn’t mean the one with the large gametes any more, either.
“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” ― Desmond Tutu
A headline from today’s Sydney Morning Herald, proclaims, “Morrison backs bill excluding female trans athletes from women’s sport”.
Now I’m not going to get into the discussion around gender identity and sport here because I want to stay focused on the words issue. And on that front this headline is extremely interesting, because it talks about ‘female trans athletes’. If we are sticking to female meaning ‘the one with the large gametes’, then the headline would mean that trans MEN (born female) were being ‘excluded’. But that’s not what the headline is referring to. When the SMH says ‘female’, it means athletes who were born male and have transitioned. Female here means people with small motile gametes. Sperm havers, ejaculators = females.
Words wise, the headline would be slightly more grounded in reality if it said, ‘Morrison backs bill excluding trans women from FEMALE sport’. But it doesn’t. Because the meaning of the word female has been entirely changed.
It’s not the only example. Here’s two from my own life. The first, an A4 form to fill in for a club one of my children attends. The form is to monitor ‘diversity and inclusion’. The form asks for my child’s ‘gender’. It then gives three options to choose from. Male, Female, or Non Binary.
But Male and Female are not genders. They are sexes. So if they want to monitor diversity and inclusion, they should really be asking the questions separately. Sex: Male or Female. Gender Identity: a variety of choices, including ‘none’, for those who don’t subscribe. Otherwise they will not know if their club is failing to be inclusive to females or males. Which is presumably the point of the form.
Second example I’ve written about on this substack. When I pointed out on a social media post that it was ‘good to see birth rooms being built with female physiology in mind’, someone corrected me. ‘Birth rooms being built with BIRTHING PEOPLE’S physiology in mind’, they finger-wagged. Erm, it’s female physiology that gets ignored in birth space design, that’s the crux of the entire problem. ‘People’ don’t make (or fail to make) oxytocin, females do. Eyeroll. Read more on that here.
Widening out the lens, there have been notable recent examples of the word ‘female’ being applied to people who make small motile gametes.
Back in October 2021, the New York Times and others reported that Dr Rachel Levine had been sworn in as ‘the first female four-star admiral’. Levine became a trans woman at the age of 54.
And in February 2022, we were told that Eddie Izzard was to play the lead role in a ‘female reimagining’ of Dr Jekkyl.
There is much to be written here about the colonising nature of these claims. It is not about taking anything away from Eddie or from Rachel, who have achieved great things with their lives. But these events are framed as ‘female’ achievements in a world in which both people in uniform and stand up comedians who produce large gametes - rather than, like Eddie and Rachel, small motile ones - tend to have a much greater struggle to get to the top of their respective fields. If I get a writing prize one day (you live in hope), will I discover I am not the ‘first female’ to win it? Even though we still live in a world where women call themselves JK rather than Joanne because being female might affect their book sales? Will my daughters ‘first female’ dreams be unachievable when they find that somebody with small motile gametes already got there first and planted a flag? This is what I mean by colonising - land is being grabbed, and territory taken, by those to whom it does not belong.
But back to words. Women who are keen to protect our sex based rights have used the slogan, “Woman: adult human female”. They’ve done this to try and make it crystal clear what they mean when they say ‘woman’. They’re holding the boundaries - often a harder task for those with large gametes. They’re saying, “This is what the word means according to the dictionary, and I’m sticking to it.” But - and presumably this is not a coincidence - their slogan is rendered meaningless if ‘female’ can and is now being used to describe a ‘small motile gamete person’.
The google dictionary, provided by Oxford Languages, is clear:
and so is the Cambridge English Dictionary.
But the American dictionary publisher Merriam Webster, have added an extra meaning: “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. As far as I understand it, dictionaries reflect current word use rather than dictate meanings, so, if the word female continues to be used to describe small motile gamete havers, then other dictionaries will follow the Merriam Webster example. The word will officially change meaning.
This would be ok if we didn’t have rights built around the protected characteristic of sex. Women-only spaces, sports, panels, shortlists and awards become harder to protect unless woman means an adult human female. But both words, woman and female, are now being regularly applied to ejaculators, sperm havers, motile gamete owners, men. And when you do this, adult human female, quite literally, means Jack.
Quick links: check out the new advisory group at Sex Matters, read Hadley Freeman’s brilliant piece on gender, read Helena’s insightful story of transition and detransition, donate to Fair Play for Women’s crowdfunder to reclaim the definition of the word ‘sex’ in Scotland, listen to me on The Period Party podcast, I talk about sex and gender from about 21 mins in.
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My Period is for girls age 9 to 13 and is filled with information and positivity about periods and puberty.
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The Positive Birth Book is a comprehensive guide to getting ready for birth with lots of humour and a dash of feminism thrown in. Oh and it’s 99p on kindle this month!
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