TEDx asks “Why we’re using “womxn.”
The answer is that someone at TEDx is obsessed with virtue-signaling. Many good answers appear in the comments, including this one from aidanjt:
Question and Answer Regarding Womxn
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:March 2, 2021
- Post category:Woke Issues
- Post comments:2 Comments
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
Claire Lehman asks a good question and relevant comments gush forth:
We need additional categories, not just woman or women or cisgender women or trans women but also womxn and eventually many more. It creates new grievance groups to exploit.
The defining difference isn’t how one feels, it is how one’s genes came to be. Humans have two major groups based on chromosome 23: XX and XY. A very few men are XYY. Otherwise, we use the term female to describe someone with XX, and male to describe someone with XY. How one feels about one’s self does not change basic biology.
People who believe they are misgendered should be free to dress, act and name themselves as they wish. It does not change maleness nor femaleness. I do not understand transgenderism, but I accept that it is real. I find it boorish at best to be discourteous to people because they believe they have souls or personalities that don’t match their biology.
Transgendered people are owed the same respect as all other people. They are not owed the right to compete as XY males against XX females in sports, they are not owed the right to invent their own terminology and impose it on others. They are not owed the right to choose a bathroom, locker room or shower room with complete disregard of others’ rights to personal privacy and dignity. A few years ago I supervised a transgendered female who was unable to work with others in a group. That had nothing to do with her transgendered status and everything to do with her being a jerk. I fired her. My HR department went bat-shit, called me to say I had to rehire her immediately or we could face legal action. My response was to refuse. In order to respect all employees we need a single set of standards of conduct, and no special treatment. Accommodation is necessary in some cases, but not a separate standard of conduct. That way lay unequal treatment, when marginalized groups historically demanded equal treatment.
You can have your soapbox back, Eric.