Wordslut
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These examples all involve a speaker passing derogatory judgment on the subject. And though their statements would still be insulting if you swapped in the word woman, they would be, as Cameron says, “less unequivocally contemptuous.” The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context. You wouldn’t hear someone say, “My best friend is the kindest, most generous female I have ever met.”
Why, when aiming to make a disparaging comment about a woman, do speakers often choose to use the word female? Cameron postulates that it might have something to do with the desire to point out that women are flawed by biological design. The implication is that female, a scientific term used to describe bodies throughout the animal kingdom, refers to one’s sex (one’s genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, and other reproductive body parts). Meanwhile, woman, a term only used to describe humans, refers to gender, a culturally invented and much more complex concept (which we’ll attempt to define in a bit). By choosing to label someone a “stupid, crazy female,” it suggests that the subject’s intellectual flaws are connected to her vulva, XX chromosomes, uterus, etc., as if the very sex classification of her body is responsible for these negative traits.
The gender versus sex question is one of the most critical sides of the woman vs. female semantic debate: Is the word woman what we should use to describe gender, which refers to something cultural and conceptual, while female is what we should use to describe sex, which refers to something of the body? Why is sex versus gender an important concept to articulate in the first place? And furthermore, why are the words we currently have to describe it so unclear?
To find out a word’s “true” meaning, our first step is usually to look up the official definition. But even the dictionary doesn’t offer a clear solution to the sex-gender puzzle. As of the time I’m writing this, the world’s four most referenced dictionaries (the Collins Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, and the Oxford English Dictionary) all define the word woman as an adult human female. This definition implies that to be a woman and to be a female are necessarily connected. So what is a female, then? These dictionaries all define female as “of the sex that produces ova and bears offspring” (or some slight variation of this). From there, one can make the connection that, according to the dictionary, in order to be a woman one must be an adult who produces ova and offspring. The definition is a bodily one. (Similarly, these dictionaries all define man as an adult male person, though Merriam-Webster’s top man entry simply reads “an individual human”—a glaring reflection of that pervasive default maleness concept.)
Keep paging through definitions for woman and you’ll find secondary entries reading “a female servant or domestic help” and “a wife, mistress, or girlfriend.” These labels have nothing at all to do with body parts—they describe culturally invented roles and relationships, and they certainly don’t apply to every woman.
Ultimately, this mishmash of definitions scrambles the cultural and bodily aspects of gender and sex, making the definition of woman incredibly muddy.
The confusion isn’t dictionary makers’ fault. The job of a dictionary writer is not to conclusively solve our most confounding language conundrums; instead, it’s to reflect “general usage,” or how most English speakers use and understand a word at the time of the dictionary’s writing, even if it’s murky or politically incorrect. Where gender is concerned, however, dictionary definitions become inherently political. And they can have real legislative consequences. Consider one case from 2002, where the Kansas Supreme Court nullified the marriage of a transgender woman and her recently deceased husband, maintaining that, according to the dictionary, “The words sex, male, and female in everyday understanding do not encompass transsexuals.” Using the dictionary as dogma, the court classified the bereaved wife as a man involved in a then-illegal same-sex marriage, and she was forbidden from inheriting her husband’s estate.
Events like this are partially why a group of boycotters on Twitter petitioned the Collins Dictionary in 2017 to change the definition of woman to be more inclusive and not so dependent on body parts. While protesting a staff of nerdy, underpaid lexicographers is not the most effective way to enact social change, it is true that as a society, treating dictionary definitions as fixed, unbiased facts is a mistake. Word meanings and cultural beliefs go hand in hand, and they are both changing all the time.
The problem those Collins Dictionary boycotters were attempting to address was a real one: If a woman is a female and a female is someone with ova and offspring, then what is a woman who, say, was born without ova, or had to get them removed due to some medical condition? What is an intersex* woman, who maybe has a vagina and XY chromosomes but also testes? And is it really right that in 2002 the court got to decide whether or not a transgender widow earned the label of woman, when their evidence for doing so was a dictionary entry that is no arbiter of truth but rather a mirror of what everyday people all personally believed at the time?
Again, I ask, what does the word woman mean, really?
The sex versus gender concept is befuddling in part because of the etymology of the word gender itself. Believe it or not, gender didn’t enter the mainstream English lexicon until the late twentieth century. According to the Corpus of Historical American English, which contains a massive four hundred million words from the 1810s to the 2000s, most people didn’t start using the word gender to describe human beings until the 1980s. That’s when its conversational frequency raised from just one occurrence per million words to five occurrences per million. Until the late fifteenth century, gender was only ever used to describe grammatical categories, like masculine and feminine nouns. Never people. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded usage of gender to describe humans doesn’t appear until 1474. But at that time, the word was just a synonym for sex—the state of being “male or female”—which is how it would be understood for the next five hundred years. It’s possible that people still confuse the bodily sense of masculinity and femininity (now understood as sex) and the cultural or identity part of it (gender) because these words have been used interchangeably for half a millennium. No one ever posed a semantic distinction between sex and gender until the 1960s, when folks began to realize that our bodies and social behaviors might not be intrinsically linked.
The first people to put the difference between sex and gender on our mainstream cultural radar were second-wave feminist activists in the mid-twentieth century. These second-wavers (whose goals included things like equal pay and reproductive rights) found it politically helpful to distinguish what they saw as self-evident biological sex from all of the cultural expectations that get imposed on people based on their sex. Activists wanted to make the statement that women weren’t inherently suited to the sorts of lives most of them were cornered into leading at the time. Their goal was to invalidate the prevailing thought that women were “naturally” inclined toward cooking, sewing, and curtsying, as opposed to more stereotypically masculine proclivities, like wearing suits and running the world.
Second-wave feminists were highly vocal about the sex-gender distinction, but they technically weren’t the first to name it. A few decades before their movement took hold, gender as a societal construct was an obscure academic concept.* In 1945 the Oxford English Dictionary defined gender as “the state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones.” The definition’s example sentence came from an academic psychology article published around that time and reads, “In the grade school years, too, gender (which is the socialised obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarcation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’”
It was also social scientists who first connected the word gender to internal identity (the gut feeling of who you think you are), as opposed to the culturally learned behavior part (the makeup, the cooking, the deferential tone of voice). The identity-based definition of gender first came up in the
1950s among psychiatrists in writings pertaining to the clinical treatment of what they labeled “transexuals” and “hermaphrodites,” whom we would now call transgender and intersex folks.
One such psychiatrist was Robert Stoller, who conducted his research in the 1950s at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic. Stoller believed there was a biological basis for what he termed “core gender identity,” defined as “an innate sense of being male or female which is normally fixed by the second year of life.” He also believed nurture was heavily involved. A student of Freud, Stoller bought into the (now discredited) idea that a person’s sexual desires, especially what were known as “perversions” (homosexuality, transvestism, sadomasochism), developed in direct response to traumatic early life events that “threatened” one’s core gender identity.
Since Stoller’s time, curiosity and examination of human gender have vastly increased, but the definition of the word has not simplified. Instead, it has only gotten even more complex, even for psychologists and linguists. This isn’t a unique phenomenon—word meanings inevitably evolve and expand over time.* Just as we can’t expect any given culture to stay the same forever, we can’t expect its words to go unchanged either.
Frustrating as it may be, there is ultimately not one simple definition of the word gender or man or woman. Some use gender to refer to a set of culturally learned behaviors, or a social status imposed upon them as a result of their sex. Others use it to mean an inherent sense of identity linked to their instinct or brain. Some use it to mean both. Deborah Cameron defines gender as “an extraordinarily intricate and multilayered phenomenon—unstable, contested, intimately bound up with other social divisions.” Her colleague Sally McConnell-Ginet, a linguist at Cornell, calls it “[a] complex system of cognitive, symbolic, behavioral, political, and social phenomena mediated by sorting of people according to their sex.” According to McConnell-Ginet, the significance and content of being any given gender can vary among cultures, individuals, life stages, even momentary situations. Translation: it is damn complicated.
And all the while, some people still use the word gender when what they really want to talk about is sex—like when pregnant parents reveal the “gender” of their unborn babies. (My theory is that some English speakers continue to do this simply because prudish Westerners are too afraid to say the word sex out loud.) Two people could be using the same word, gender, in a single conversation but could be talking about any number of completely different things.
If gender isn’t something that comes fully formed at birth, where exactly do each of our genders come from then? This might not seem like a language question, but some philosophers theorize that gender is actually constructed through language itself. Their idea is that people don’t talk the way they do as a result of the gender they already have; they don’t simply reflect that gender through words (say, by calling yourself a woman because you know you’re a woman or using “feminine” curse words like gosh darnit instead of goddamnit because you’ve been socialized to be polite). Instead, it’s just the opposite: people have the genders that they do because of the way they talk and the feedback they receive from that talk. Language brings gender to life.
The idea here is that we are all in a constant ongoing process of using language to construct our genders. This notion was first articulated in the 1990s by a gender theorist at UC Berkeley named Judith Butler. She came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. As far as Butler is concerned, humans don’t exist until we do things that bring us into being; that is, who a person is and what a person does come to exist “simultaneously,” as if, at the very same time that you learn about and engage in social practices, you—and your gender identity—emerge.
So the words we use don’t only reflect who we are, they actively create who we are. How? One big way this happens is by people self-identifying their genders through certain labels, pronouns, and terms of address. It is beyond the scope of this book to present a glossary of terms for every gender and sexual identity that exists, from cisgender to transgender to graygender to pansexual to asexual, and beyond. This vocabulary is ever-evolving. For some speakers it may feel hard to keep up, but it’s important to understand that these labels aren’t surfacing just because it’s suddenly trendy to have an identity that will perplex and/or piss off all our great-aunts and -uncles at Thanksgiving.* Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.
This need to typologize different genders and sexualities in order to understand them better is hardly new. In nineteenth-century Germany, there was a pretty robust research institute called the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (now recognized as the first-ever LGBTQ+ rights organization) dedicated to this exact kind of classification. The group was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish physician and researcher of human sexuality living in Berlin. Known as the “Einstein of Sex,” Hirschfeld was one of the first Western scientists to recognize a sex and gender spectrum—as opposed to the binary divisions of male and female, man and woman—and he developed a system of categories to describe different points along this continuum. Hirschfeld’s groupings accounted for sixty-four possible types of sexualities and genders, ranging from masculine heterosexual males to feminine homosexual males to transvestit, a term he coined in 1910 to describe people who we would now call transgender. In Hirschfeld’s mind, there existed a singular, accurate, biology-supported definition for every one of these sex and gender labels, just as there exists a singular, accurate, biology-supported definition for each type of invertebrate, from annelids to cnidarians.
In the following decades, scientists would come to realize that human gender and sexuality can’t be typologized or explained on a purely biological basis: most human phenomena—from intelligence to addiction—are, to some extent, a combination of both nature and nurture. Still, Hirschfeld’s contributions were substantial, and his compulsion to find names and natural bases for these seemingly inexplicable personal identities was logical. He thought that if he could come up with a scientific explanation for nonnormative genders and sexualities, put a label on them, and prove they weren’t moral failings, then that would change the political situation for so many people. In Hirshfield’s time (and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), nonnormative gender and sexual identities were punishable by law. This was true not only in Germany but in most other Western countries as well, including the United States. Hirschfeld and his colleagues figured if they could scientifically validate what were seen as “deviant” identities, then maybe the laws would change.
Fortunately, today, you can no longer be arrested—in most English-speaking places, at least—for who you want to sleep with or what gender you are (though hate crimes are certainly still prevalent). But there’s still an intense drive to come up with language to describe these different identities. We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it’s christened with a title. “It’s clearly empowering for people to discover that they’re not the only ones having an experience and that the experience can be named,” explains UCSB gender and language scholar Lal Zimman. Not everyone is empowered by categorization, and it is possible that one day nonnormative genders and sexualities will become so accepted that this spectrum of labels won’t seem necessary. But in the meantime, labels offer validation to many folks who previously felt isolated and unheard.
As of the mid-2010s, the term nonbinary has started making its way into everyday vocabularies. In 2018 California became the first state to offer nonbinary as a third category on official birth certificates, so that folks who are intersex and/or
gender-nonconforming can have the option of legally changing their identification later in life. A year earlier, Oregon became the first state to allow a nonbinary “X” gender symbol on driver’s licenses. As attitudes about gender slowly continue to change, so will our language.
English speakers can’t consider themselves particularly creative or progressive in the nonnormative gender department, though. That’s because we are not the first to describe the gender spectrum—not by a long shot. On every continent, since the beginning of civilization, dozens of thriving cultures have recognized and offered words to describe three or four, sometimes five genders. Just as linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet mentioned in her definition, gender differs not only from person to person but also between entire cultures, depending on how certain bodies and behaviors are interpreted.
In India, hijras are folks who are considered neither men nor women. Someone from the United States might describe hijras as transgender women who were assigned male at birth (AMAB).* But in Indian culture, they are a totally separate third gender. Accordingly, hijras have special gender roles in society, serving as mythical figures who don’t participate in reproduction, giving them power to bless or curse others’ fertility.
The Buginese people of Indonesia recognize five genders: women, men, calalai, calabai, and bissu. Calalai are assigned female at birth (AFAB) and embody a masculine gender identity; calabai are AMAB and embody a feminine gender identity. Bissu are “transcendent gender,” meaning they encompass all of these identities, serving key roles in Buginese traditions, and are sometimes equated with priests.
In the Native American Zuni tribe, a third gender called lhamana—also described as mixed-gender or Two-Spirit—encompasses people who live as both men and women simultaneously. Two-Spirits are AMAB but wear a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and mostly perform traditional women’s work, like pottery and cooking. One of the most famous Two-Spirits was a figure named We’wha, who served as the Zuni ambassador to the United States in the late 1800s. We’wha spent six months in Washington, DC, where she was reportedly beloved by the establishment. Those white government bros had no idea We’wha wasn’t a “woman” by their standards; as far as they could tell, that word fit her. But back among the Zunis, We’wha went by a totally different label.