Take back the definition of "woman"

Now that 2022 is officially in the books, we can formally enshrine it as “the year when Americans decided they didn’t know what a woman was.” Dictionary.com has made this official by selecting “woman” as their Word of the Year. The announcement was accompanied by some hilarious commentary, which made clear that the dictionary people were calling attention to the word partly to emphasize that they don’t know what it means. “The word belongs to each and every woman—however they define themselves,” said the Dictionary.com statement.

It was an appropriately nutty way to cap off a year jam-packed with gendered insanity: a man winning all the women’s swimming prizes, fractious fights about whether men had the right to be naked in female locker rooms, and a (now) Supreme Court Justice declaring publicly that she doesn’t know what a woman is. There were forerunners to all of this: the attempted cancellation of J.K. Rowling, the rise of “birthing people,” and the AMA’s formal recommendation in 2021 that a newborn child’s sex should no longer be recorded on a birth certificate. There is something particularly Orwellian, though, about the dictionary’s formal capitulation. Have we reached peak insanity yet, or is there still more?