"Empowering students who define as women" - Manchester uni

[LaptopLoverrr]

Why not just "empowering women"?

Mustn't offend the penis owners.

The word woman has been emptied of all meaning, it just means anything men want it to mean.

Do universities have any all female groups left?

I'm sorry but I did laugh at 'define as mature'. 'I'm 17 but I have always felt like a 38 year old who missed out on uni the first time round...'

It's interesting that we still define as BME in the UK, and that's okay language to use here. I doubt that wording would be okay in the USA, with the different treatment of Rachel Dolezal and Bruce Jenner.

It is nonsense. The Student Union should be a fun and accesible place for all students regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, age, religious beliefs or the lack of them, sexual affiliation or lack of and even gender.

What about the Post Grad Pizza Friday - who's allowed to go to that?? What about if you're a post-grad student with a penis who defines as a queer disabled lesbian? Would you be able to go to both? Or just the Friday Pizza bit?

What if you're gluten intolerant, then what????

What about if you don't have a penis but you are BME but you don't like pizza but you do think you're mature but it's raining on Friday.......

If they wanted to be supportive of trans people as a minority, they'd include trans men.

Oh god I really want to start identifying as a Nepalese (I like mountains) man. And bang on about transgender and transracial rights to these sorts of people. With a hidden camera.

I do t think the Government approves of self definition as disabled.
They're not even happy with independent assessment

It's not even "identify as" in that, it's "define as". Isn't that getting even worse?

"Identify as" is crap enough, and I object on every level to its creeping usage into everything that one might believe, affiliate with or be, but the meaning of "define" is state or describe exactly the nature, scope, or meaning of.

"I identify as a woman" - I believe I am a woman, and align myself with all the identifiers of a woman
"I define as a woman" - I am a woman because I posses all of the attributes of being a woman.

Or am I getting into linguistic pedantry here? Oh well, if that's where we are, I define as a pedant, so ner. I filled in a form the other day and it asked "Do you identify as male/female/other/prefer not to say". I wrote underneath "I don't identify as anything, but I am a woman".

Good on you Sophocles! I will use that myself.

It's not even "identify as" in that, it's "define as". Isn't that getting even worse

It sounds clunky. Either they meant 'identify as' or 'self-define'. I'm sure a grammar geek will tell us if it is actually grammatical.

Hey, I define as a grammar geek!

But you're right - as well as being meaningless, it's also clunky, ugly and incorrect. Poor old English, what a beating it's taking of late.

I'm not at Manchester, but I filled out the online enrolment form for my university recently.

There was a question asking about my gender identity - not sex, not even gender, but whether I identified as male, female or other. Then there was another question asking if my gender identity matched my 'assigned sex at birth'. The only options were yes/no/prefer not to say, so I didn't get to write in 'gender is a harmful social construct and I do not subscribe to the ideological framework underpinning this question so cannot answer' or something similar.

Instead, I preferred not to say. Meh.

The 'define as mature' thing might be because the official definition of 'mature student' is anyone starting at 21+, but in my experience some of the students in their early twenties don't like the term. Maybe that's giving them too much credit, though, and the 18 year olds can identify as mature students if they want to.