I am S p a r t a c u s

[PermissionToSpeakSir]

I am a woman.

I was a girl.

I am an adult human female.

Something a man can never be.

I am a woman.

People refer to me has her and she.

Sometimes said with deep contempt and misogyny.

I am a woman.

Something a male will never be.

I have a vagina and uterus.

I menstruate and have given birth.

I am a mother.

Something a male will never be.

I have been insulted, assaulted, belittled, dismissed, held back, intimidated, stereotyped, terrorised, mocked, shamed, humiliated because I am a woman.

Something a male can never be.

I feel insulted, appropriated, offended, anxious, tense, depressed, hurt and under siege, when a male claims to be a woman or anyone says a male can be female.

It is not civil or respectful to treat me this way.

I am a woman.

I am Spartacus.

GhostTess
Waht do you think about Grayson Perry's view on the "default male"?
He says;
When I am out and about in an eye-catching frock, men often remark to me, “Oh, I wish I could dress like you and did not have to wear a boring suit.” Have to! The male role is heavily policed from birth, by parents, peers and bosses. Politicians in particular are harshly kept in line by a media that seems to uphold more bizarrely rigid standards of conformity than those held by any citizen. Each component of the Default Male role – his gender, his class, his age and his sexuality – confines him to an ever narrower set of behaviours, until riding a bicycle or growing a beard, having messy hair or enjoying a pint are seen as ker-azy eccentricity. The fashionable members’ club Shoreditch House, the kind of place where “creatives” with two iPhones and three bicycles hang out, has a “No Suits” rule. How much of this is a pseudo-rebellious pose and how much is in recognition of the pernicious effect of the overgrown schoolboy’s uniform, I do not know.

I dwell on the suit because I feel it exemplifies how the upholders of Default Male values hide in plain sight. Imagine if, by democratic decree, the business suit was banned, like certain items of Islamic dress have been banned in some countries. Default Men would flounder and complain that they were not being treated with “respect”.

GhosTess - please stop the @ thing. I'm turning in now and don't want a bunch of notifications in the morning. (Most of us are in the U.K. so you may be talking to yourself for a while soon...)

Marriage is a social structureThe definition of female (and therefore woman, which is defined in terms of it) is scientific. Poor analogy. I haven't seen anything suggesting the definition is likely to need to change for scientific reasons. If anyone wants to change a scientific term for non-scientific reasons they're probably taking postmodernism a bit far.

So what would be your word for an adult human of the sex that produces motile gametes. I'm guessing you've got one ready now that the old word includes people of the sex who don't produce motile gametes.

George Foreman has 12 children, five sons and seven daughters. His five sons are George Jr., George III ("Monk"), George IV ("Big Wheel"), George V ("Red"), and George VI ("Little Joey"). On his website, Foreman explains, "I named all my sons George Edward Foreman so they would always have something in common.

GhostTess is not Spartacus in the way we mean it, it's impossible. Let them post their wall to wall text telling us how we have it wrong and they have it right. Ignoring is the only way.

Leave them to be their own version, they will not appropriate ours!

Interesting that they're trying ....

@Pratty

Sorry, I don't. Was simply thinking of adding a second definition. Like many words on the dictionary already have. Is that wrong? I don't really think so.

Pratchet Everything adult female's have they want.

Tough life innit?

Interesting indeed Pratchet.

Words need a meaning, otherwise they are just sounds.

Under your new language, 'man' is meaningless. I have no idea what you mean when you say man. Literally none.

That's not really evolution is it? That's destruction.

GhostTees
Maybe you're new to Mumsnet? If you @ and then add 'Pratty', a person with that username will get notifications from you. They likely won't want to receive them.

They want everything but equally important, we must have nothing.

Male means male and female.
Female means male and female.
Man means man and woman.
Woman means man and woman.

Rowan, I didn't know that. Also I am pratchet, ghost

Oh dear Rowan, you're in bother now. Tess has come to educate us not the other way around.

The very notion of a definition is to make things clearer and more exact. When you start including things in a definition which previously were the very opposite of that definition, it ceases to have any meaning.

If we start to include adults in the definition of children, or black in the definition of white, what does any of it mean? Words have meanings attached to them because they perform a function. Without the meaning they perform no function, so if you can expand the definition of the word woman until it means nothing - what have you achieved? That everyone, man or woman, is a woman? - we have a word for that, it’s ‘human’.

@pratty I'm not taking the movement. Just adding to it.

I don't see how 'man would be irrelevant' though I guess under whatever definition you've thought of it is? I'm just glad one of us is a linguist. It certainly isn't me and I don't claim to know how adding a definition removes another word? Isn't that how synonyms exist?

Its GhostTess so actually ectoplasm. I think we are safe.

spontaneousgiventime, is that re-education?

Yes, indeed.

The new synonym for large is small.

And I’m going to campaign for the Oxford English Dictionary to include “someone with lots of money and a lavish lifestyle” under the word poor.

And the word ‘rich’ can include anyone who feels like they would prefer to have a lot of money rather than none. That way, all those poor people having to use foodbanks can just identify as rich and not have to worry any more.

By jingo I’ve solved poverty in one fell swoop!

GhostTess

You have indeed added to the thread.

@MyRelationshipIsWeird

Well, definitions do change, consider with child and adult, what happens when we get close to ftl travel? Time dilates and someone who is a child physically may be an adult legally. The definition might need to be changed to become more precise. Just as the laws are already changing, perhaps the definition of female should too?

R0wantrees Good question. I'm not sure our ectoplasm (thanks Picasso, I like that) knows either. Just a XY wo man telling us how to do things - as usual.

No, it isn't. Transactivists wish to remove meaning from the two words that describe the basic biological human units, and they wish to leave those biological human units with no names.

This is not to do with synonyms. To have a word that means the same or similar to another word, the other word has to have meaning in the first place.

If I were to call someone a twonk, presumably I can also re-define this?