On Monday, the streaming platform Twitch was widely criticized after it referred to Women’s History Month as “Womxn’s History Month,” in an apparent bid to be more “gender inclusive.”
“March is Womxn’s History Month,” Twitch wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “Join us in celebrating and supporting all the Womxn creating their own worlds, building their communities, and leading the way on Twitch.”
Twitch also published the following in a blog post:
Twitch is a place where creators can build their world and have their voice heard. And women are doing that live, every day.
Building channels. Building communities. Building the future of gaming. And inspiring all of us while doing it. Including the next generation of women streamers.
So this month, join us in celebrating women creating their own worlds, building their communities, and leading Twitch to the next level.
Support Women Creators Every Day This Month
Every day in March we’re raising up women and their communities on Twitch. From the newest up and coming voices to the trailblazers, check out the front page to see a different featured streamer, starting right now. You can find the full schedule below. Just double check the start time (they’re all in PT), jump into chat, and join their world.
Twitch faced widespread condemnation from both sides of the political aisle, with conservatives pointing out the obvious fact that “Womxn is not a real word,” while the BBC reported that “LGBT communities online called the change transphobic because it suggested trans women were not women.”
Twitch isn’t the first major organization to make the same open attempt to appear “inclusive.” In September 2020, TEDxLondon used “womxn” to “explicitly include non-cisgender women,” and in December 2018, two London student groups vowed to start using “womxn” instead of “women” in communications.
There are two fundamental facts which demonstrate the absurdity of this latest foray into radical Leftist fantasy. Linguistically, “womxn” is not a word. Biologically, transgender women — by definition — are not women.
However, there is another argument which should not only put an end to the absurd use of “womxn” — let alone its use to include men as women during Women’s History Month — but also other “modern” words like “Latinx,” another supposedly “inclusive” term used by just 3% of Hispanics.
This argument rests on the fact that you cannot make a gendered term “gender neutral.” The word “woman” relates entirely to biological sex, with its sole use being to assign or describe sex and/or gender. The attempt to make such a word “gender neutral” is nothing other than an attempt to erase or dilute its core and only meaning. It would be like someone working to replace words for colors or numbers, instead using meaningless creations which serve no linguistic purpose except to erase the original word and its meaning. “The sky is bleep.” “Bloop plus bloop is bloop.”
Ultimately, the purpose of words like “womxn” is not to include men who think they’re women, but to exclude those who believe that sex exists by removing our vocabulary to argue otherwise.
It’s hard to commemorate the centuries of feminist progress on Women’s History Month as we watch men take even the word “woman” for themselves.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.