It's no easy life being a gender warrior these days, where one of your principle tasks is thinking up endless ways to spell "woman" without some permutation of "man" in it. At the University of California, Irvine, for instance, the campus womxn's center has encountered an embarrassing stumbling block to its attempt at linguistic justice:
"Womxn" is one of a few lexical and social phenomena, including the adoption of ‘x' in naming gender non-conforming individuals, genderqueer folxs, two spirit people, femmes, transgender folxs, and non-binary people.
Womxn acknowledges that gender identity exists in a sphere and one word has room for multiple gender expressions without weighing one more important than another. ...
Most pronounce it like they are saying woman or women, but spell the singular and plural with the ‘x'. However, this raises the question if that actually is truly inclusive; members of the blind community may be left out if there is no audible way for them to hear this distinction.
This is so very true. How will a blind person know if he's hearing "womxn" if both are in fact pronounced "women?" I mean, sure, that raises the question of why, exactly, it was renamed "womxn" in the first place. But let's not think too hard about that.
Thankfully they are already figuring out some workarounds to this vexing problem:
Others prefer to say it as wom-inx or woma/en-x, or wom-ux. These ways can bring attention to womxn when talking verbally to someone about and opens up more dialogue about linguistics.
Ahh, yes, "wominx." Because nothing advances a woman's equal standing in society by referring to her as a "minx."
Though honestly, I think I like "womux" even more. It sounds like a Native American term for some dreadful animal bodily function or something.
Let the feminists go with this and watch as even more people run from feminism like they're running from a natural disaster!
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