O'Neill: "The Woke War on Truth:" The Cambridge Dictionary Redefines 'Woman'

They could say that they're just descriptivists, and that the new usage is now common enough that it belongs in the dictionary. This could be true, but I'd bet money that they pulled the trigger more quickly on this one than they would have if conservatives had made an ideological push to redefine some term or other.

   Sidebar: they must have changed the definition of 'marriage'--probably some time ago. I wonder when...but not enough to look it up. In my view, though, there was enough indeterminacy in the meaning of 'marriage' to warrant or at least permit a change. (And: I'd bet that there was a change, and that the old definition included that it was a relation between a man and a woman...) There is no such indeterminacy in 'man' and 'woman.'

   Quickly: the new definition is utterly, ridiculously stupid. Here's the online version, with examples:

Woman:

An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth:

She was the first trans woman elected to a national office.

Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Aside from the other absurdities here: at no time in someone's life--so far as we know--does he or she have a different sex than he or she had at birth. Born male, die male; born female, die female. Of course they hedge with "said to have had." Was this person a different sex at birth? (Answer: no.) Or did someone falsely say that? (Answer: apparently.) 

   Finally:  someone who identifies as female?? No, not really...not, say, as a female dragon... So: as a human female. And: "as" an adult female--not a girl. So we're back to: a woman is someone who "lives and identifies as" an adult human female...i.e. a woman. So a woman is someone who "lives and identifies as" a woman... So a circular definition--and not merely in the sense that all definitions are interlinked with other definitions. The circle here is far too small. 

   Besides, I thought that "living as" a woman wasn't necessary? If Smith is male and "identifies as" a woman, but he doesn't "live as" one, the left's orthodoxy here is that he's a woman. In fact, for awhile--dunno whether this is still the loony orthodoxy--the line was that he'd always been a woman... Bruce Jenner, for example, was said to be a woman...always (except, I suppose, when he was a girl)--even when he was winning gold medals in the men's division of the Olympics, and even when he was fathering children. So the "living as" part is mere distraction. 

   Really finally: of course this doesn't make the left right about the issue. You can't make yourself right by getting all your buddies to use words differently--even if enough of you do it for long enough to make dictionaries change their entries. Get everybody to start using 'dog' to refer to cats, it won't turn cats into dogs; nor will it mean that cats have always been dogs.