Cambridge dictionary includes new definition of ‘woman’

The Cambridge Dictionary has updated its definition of ‘woman’ to include anyone who “identifies as female” regardless of their sex at birth (Independent,?Mail,?Times). As well as “an adult female person”, the online dictionary now includes a supplementary definition: “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Examples of usage given include: “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth” and “she was the first trans woman elected to a national office”.

Explaining the incorporation of this definition, a spokesman for the Cambridge Dictionary said: “Our dictionaries are compiled by analysing a large corpus of English texts (over two billion words in total) taken from all areas of writing and publishing… [and]… we regularly update our dictionary to reflect changes in how English is used, based on analysis of data from this corpus” (Telegraph).

Speaking to the?Mail, FSU General Secretary Toby Young was disappointed to see identity politics creeping into the work of dictionary compilers, and suspected that this new definition “has been introduced as a result of lobbying by political activists, a slippery slope that no dictionary should go down”. (Toby reiterated that argument on?GB News.)

Naomi Firsht makes a similar point in?UnHerd. “Of course,” she concedes, “language evolves and so dictionaries must update words and meanings once a new term has entered popular usage.” But even so, “are we really expected to believe that lexicographers at Cambridge Dictionary think the majority of English-speakers would agree to and use their new definition?”

Criticisms of this kind are only half right, says Charles Moore (Telegraph). The key factor for lexicographers is not always popular usage, but current usage — which, in this case, is born of legal reality. The fact is that ever since the Gender Recognition Act passed onto the statute books in 2004, trans people can be, by law, the gender they say they have become by providing a relevant medical diagnosis, regardless of what it says on their birth certificate.

That’s why the dictionary’s supplementary definition has that coy, almost Dickensian expression “though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”, says Moore. Some people might think – and Lord Moore readily acknowledges that he might well agree with them – “that what has happened is an affront to biological fact and linguistic truth”. But the Cambridge Dictionary “is only doing its duty if it records a meaning which the law imposes”.

Maybe so, but Brendan O’Neill was quick to spot the political ramifications of this ostensibly technical, lexicographic intervention (Spiked). The fact is that ‘woman’ has become one of the most problematic, socially contested words of our times. So when the Cambridge Dictionary decides to give the word a supplementary, transgender friendly definition, it is not simply “reflecting meaning imposed by the law”, as Charles Moore puts it, but also, and at the same time, taking sides in an ongoing and deeply divisive debate regarding the social, political and cultural importance of the biological reality of sex.

It’s in this context that Naomi Firsht suggests the dictionary’s supplementary definition constitutes “the latest in a long series of examples that chip away at what it means to be a woman and often erasing women’s sex class in the process”. Back in July, for instance, Merriam-Webster also added a supplementary?definition?of “female” as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. And in many public sector settings today, dehumanising terms like “menstruators”, “pregnant people”, “chest feeders” and “cervix-havers” are being used to re-classify biological women as just one type of incumbent of that now much wider category ‘woman’.

The problem with these progressive attempts to broaden the concept of ‘woman’ to include trans woman, Naomi says, is that they are effectively denying women the language they need to campaign for their own sex-based rights. More specifically, if organisations and institutions are moving towards describing women in this way, then it will become even harder to maintain a legal definition of the word that allows for necessary female single-sex spaces, such as women’s refuges, changing rooms and prisons. She has a point – one only has to look at the backlash JK Rowling has faced for daring to launch a women-only support centre for victims of sexual abuse in Edinburgh to see how contentious this issue is becoming (Pink News,?Independent,?UnHerd).

And what about the political campaigning necessary to maintain the current legal definition of ‘woman’? It has, for instance, become an act of feminist defiance to utter the old dictionary definition of a woman – witness, for example, the right-on fury that always greets Kellie-Jay Keen whenever she uses the standard definition of ‘woman’ – ‘adult human female’ – as a campaigning slogan (Mail). But now, thanks to lexicographers at the Cambridge Dictionary, campaigners like her will no longer be able to point to the dictionary and say: “See, a woman is an adult human female.”

Are trans activists really attempting to remove the idea of a woman from our minds altogether – and are dictionary compilers complicit in that endeavour? FSU Advisory Council member Andrew Doyle certainly doesn’t seem in the mood to pass the episode off as an unfortunate case of bookish, other-worldly lexicographers inadvertently stumbling into a political minefield?(GB News). “Just like publishing houses, libraries, museums, theatres, and other creative and educational industries,” he says, “online dictionaries have been ideologically captured.” The staff will “continue to tweak definitions, not to reflect common usage, but as a form of engineering – in the hope that by redefining words they can modify the way we see the world”.

Laura Dodsworth thinks they may well succeed. In an unsettling piece, the author of?A State of Fear?reminds us that George Orwell’s?1984?is built around the idea that totalitarianism and corruption of language are intrinsically linked. “Language structures thoughts,” she says, “and if you control language you can control thought.”

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