Lies, damned lies and linguistics

How males became women, and women became 'biological'

By a guest contributor

We are hosting this piece because the significance of small changes in language is a bias that’s often missed, when it should be highlighted at every turn.

Politicians, gender identity activists and journalists have one thing in common; an interest in the power of words.

On Friday 28th June a formidable woman called Jane rang the BBC to ask Labour leader Keir Starmer ‘Can you say, now, that you will not allow men, under any guise, into women’s safe spaces?’

Starmer ducked and dived before turning to his now familiar plea for those who ‘don’t identify as the gender they are born into and who are often traumatised by that’ - suggesting that men who are distressed can be women if they want to be.

Certainly the exchange put some flesh on the bones of his shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s previous comment that ‘biological women have felt excluded’ at times in debates on transgender rights.

Because if the commonly understood (including by children) word ‘woman’ now needs the qualifying adjective ‘biological’, that suggests other types of womanhood are available. Non-biological, yet equally valid. Traumatised men are women if they say they are.

The query ‘what is a woman?’ has been repeatedly asked in the media in recent years. But the question itself isn’t new. Since the ancient Greeks (who locked women in the upper rooms of dwellings overnight so they couldn’t escape whilst their male guardians slept), important men have scratched their heads and pondered this particular mystery, telling each other and the rest of society what a woman is.

Plato believed women were incapable of rational thought, and men’s destinies were controlled by how they managed their emotions; if men failed to control themselves, after death they would be reincarnated as a woman. Women are failed men.

Aristotle similarly viewed women as ‘lower’ than men; women’s intellects were damaged by their emotions, so their role was purely to nurture the soul implanted by male semen. Woman as ‘biological’ vessel. Starting to sound familiar…

The book of Genesis had women constructed from a spare rib of a male; a mere offshoot of the spare part of a man.

Freud’s ‘oedipal stage’ for females meant they couldn’t rise above their passions and had to suppress the latter in order to become moral. Again, women viewed as irrational beings, mysteriously somehow never quite as good as men.

And now, in an echo of Plato’s women being ‘failed men’, Labour’s current patriarch suggests some traumatised men are women. Damaged men are a kind of woman.

Misogyny is both blind to itself and eternal. Throughout history, male thought leaders have been redefining and telling society what a woman is, always to the detriment of women themselves. Men are viewed as the default human, with woman defined in relation to them.

Given this long history, it’s clear the definition ‘trans woman’ would never hold, because the adjective ‘trans’ defines men in relation to women. And that’s obviously intuitively unacceptable in any self respecting patriarchal society.

So UK Labour have put that right.

The adjective in front of the word ‘woman’ has been changed from ‘trans’ to ‘biological’.

Trans women - males - don’t need to be described under this new definition. They’re part of a large group called simply ‘women’. But actual women are no longer ‘women’, and need to be described as ‘biological’ women. Like a kind of washing powder.

The single word ‘woman’ now includes biological women and any man who says he’s a woman.

In a neat move worthy of the most language-obsessed gender identity activist organisation, the adjectival descriptor before the word ‘woman’ has been adjusted, so that women are once again in their proper place; defined in relation to men.

This must be what the Labour Party means by ‘inclusion’. ‘Biological’ women, despite overwhelmingly the majority, are now merely one type of woman. Other versions of womanhood are available. In this Newspeak by senior Labour figures, the common understanding of the single word ‘woman’ no longer means ‘adult human female’.

It’s been re-defined, without any kind of UK referendum, or asking 51 % of the population if they mind the word unique to them for centuries - ‘woman’ - being given an entirely new meaning.

Many men, ‘traumatised’ or not, cannot resist demanding that they are the first sex, the default sex of humans: if they wish to be women, they can be. If men wish to change the meaning of the term woman, they can. Anyone who objects is smeared and judged unkind. Including by handmaidens in the Labour Party who are happily repeating the words ‘biological women’ to describe 51% of the population. A population previously known simply as ‘women’.

What may look like a victory - ‘we finally have our own category!’ - is not.

Transactivists, not journalists or politicians, are currently winning the language game. Their cognitive capture of the Labour leadership has achieved more in the redefinition of a word describing the 51% than Plato could ever have dreamed of.