Scrutinized words: man, woman, boy, girl

On my website, I have made it so that whenever someone uses any form of the words man, woman, boy, or girl in a post or comment, it appears with a mark of scrutiny. Observe: man, woman, boy, girl, men, women, boys, girls. Womyn and wymyn¹ are also included for completeness, because I've seen people use them on the Internet. I wanted to include guy in the list, but guy also means a lot of other things.

Why?

Because they're ambiguous to the point of absurdity, and sometimes they mean things you don't want them to mean, ambiguity or no ambiguity.

Now I'm going to take a step back and explain that. The trouble is, since there are so many ambiguities built into the language, it's not easy to do that. So I'm going to take another five steps back and explain things from scratch.

Part one: Gender

So, there's this thing called gender. I wrote a little about it in my post about why I use the pronoun ze and scrutinize she and he. Gender is really important, but nobody knows what it is, so I'm going to skip to something that's easier to describe.

So, there's this thing called sex.² In the case of humans... well, humans are diverse creatures. Some of them have vaginas, and some don't. Some have penises, and some don't. Some develop lots of facial hair when they reach puberty, some develop breasts, some have their voices deepen... and some don't. By a quirk of biology, most of these attributes are strongly correlated with each other, so we've grouped all the attributes that usually go with each other into two convenient little boxes. There's the box of deep voices, facial hair, and penises (and a bunch of other things), which we call the male sex, and the box of breasts and vaginas (and a bunch of other things), which we call the female sex. So if I have a human, and I ask a biologist what sex that human is, then the biologist will look for the attributes from each of those boxes, and if they all fit in the male box, the biologist will tell me that the human is male, and so forth. If the human's attributes don't fit neatly into a box, the biologist will give up, go back to zir laboratory, and invent a fancy theory about why not all humans are the way ze expected them to be. But the real reason that not all humans are the way ze expected them to be is that we don't know everything about how humans work yet.³

When a biologist writes something like men have greater testosterone levels than women, ze is talking about sex.

There's another thing called subconscious sex. All humans have brains, and brains are really weird. Brains often have strong senses of what is right, or what should happen. It's quite common for a human to have a strong sense of what zir body should be like, and if it's a sense about the attributes that we call sex, then that sense is called subconscious sex. Fortunately for most humans, that sense usually matches what their bodies are actually like. Unfortunately, the ones for whom it doesn't are in quite a pickle. Fortunately, we have enough technology to change most of those physical attributes through surgery and hormone supplements. Unfortunately again, those things are expensive, and our social and legal systems are full of discrimination against people who have to do that.

Since neither our society nor our science understands subconscious sex very well, people don't usually talk about it.⁴

There's another thing called assigned gender. When a person gets born, everybody around them usually goes and looks at their genitals and either says It's a boy! and starts giving them toy trucks, or says It's a girl! and starts giving them dolls and frilly dresses. When they do that, they're assigning the baby a gender; the baby usually doesn't get any choice in the matter. If its genitals don't fit the other people's notions of what male or female genitals look like, then they probably do weird medical tests to decide which they think makes more sense,⁵ because they aren't okay with just saying it's not male or female and leaving it at that. Giving people different toys because of what gender you've assigned them is called sexism. Because our society is so sexist, people of different assigned genders often end up experiencing the world in significantly different ways.

When a trans-exclusionary radical feminist says something like I'm talking about real women – women who were born and raised as women, ze is talking about assigned gender.

There's another thing that I don't know a good name for. (Please tell me if you know a good name for it!) That's the gender that people usually decide you are when they see you. People are usually very stupid, so they look for easy cues to decide gender. Except that usually the cues they look for are physical sex cues, not gender cues; they look for breasts, facial hair, etc., so they're basically trying to decide your sex and they just assume that picking a gender for you based on that is okay. The main exception is that they also look for how long a person's hair is, which doesn't really make any sense because it's really easy to change how long your hair is, regardless of your gender or sex, if you have access to a pair of scissors.

When a person is in a room full of people they don't know and asks something like who's that girl over there, wearing the fuzzy hat?, ze is talking about zir immediate gender identification of that person, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to use the phrases male-perceived and female-perceived to talk about this concept.

There's another thing called gender roles. Remember that list of attributes associated with sex? Well, there are also lists of behaviors associated with gender. People usually expect you to do the behaviors associated with the gender they've picked out for you, and a lot of the time, they'll actively or passively discriminate against people who aren't doing them. The main difference between the gender lists and the sex lists is that the sex lists are biological fact, while the gender lists are arrant nonsense. I'm not even going to dirty this blog post by telling you what they are where I come from, because you probably hear about them all the time, and if you haven't heard about them, thank goodness for that!

When someone describes a female-perceived child who plays with male-perceived children at physical sports and games as one of the boys, ze is talking about gender roles.

There's another thing called gender identity. For one reason or another, some people think they actually are a specific gender, as opposed to just being assigned into it, or doing the activities associated with it, or subconsciously being of the sex associated with it. I haven't got a clue what that means, but it seems to be really important to some people, so I generally acknowledge that it is a thing that exists and is important. There are a lot of things that exist and are important even though I don't know how they work.

When someone refers to a male-identifying person as she, and ze says something like dude, I'm a guy, ze is talking about gender identity.

So, have I made my point yet?

Part one and a half: No I bloody well haven't!

The thing is, that whole essay about gender and sex and stuff isn't even the original reason I decided to scrutinize these words. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful reason to try to use more specific language, and to avoid overused, ambiguous terms like woman and boy. But that's not the real reason that I have for avoiding those words, and I think it's a weaker reason.

After all, a person could say something like this:

Well, okay, hypothetical person. I like what you're saying. But since you're advocating the continued use of the word man, and you say you can use it in an unambigous way, I'd like to know what exactly you mean when you say man.

So if I'm eight years old, and I say I'm male, then I'm a man?

Yes. Yes, you did. But what the heck is an adult, anyway?

Part two: Age

The same way I talked about in my post about she and he, there are two problems here. One has to do with how we categorize people, and the other has to do with the fact that we chose an overbearing binary categorization system in the first place.

Passive exclusion

Suppose I'm addressing an audience, on the topic of feminism, and I say Women in this country face pervasive discrimination. There are two problems with that sentence. The first problem, of course, is that it's true. The second problem is that there are plenty of people who face the exact same kinds of discrimination I'm talking about, but whom I've left out. Discrimination doesn't magically start when you hit adulthood, so by saying women, I passively excluded a lot of people.⁶

On a related note, think about the hypothetical person I was talking to. Ze didn't even notice right away when ze said people and really meant adults. That's an easy mistake to make if you've internalized the notion that non-adults aren't really people. Both this and the example from the last paragraph are instances of ageism. Ageism, as you've probably guessed, is active or passive discrimination against people of a marginalized age group. In general, all people who are not yet adults (whatever an adult is) are a marginalized age group. (Ageism also includes discrimination against people who are much older, because of their high age; that's not the subject of this post, but I'd be wrong to leave it out of the definition.)

Active discrimination

Okay, now go and re-read my post about she and he, except this time, replace she with child, he with adult, and the minority of people who obviously don't fit in the gender binary with everyone who lives past the age of twelve. Go on, I'll wait.

When does a person become an adult? What the heck is an adult, anyway? It's just like the whole gender thing: Like gender, it's really, really important in society, and like gender, nobody has a clue what it really means.

As long as man, woman, boy and girl are our primary words for talking about people with genders (or sexes), we're going to have problems. It's not just a problem because it makes it awkward to decide what to say when you're talking about someone who's fourteen years old. It's also a problem because it creates a politics around the age categories. It makes every healthy conversation about gender into a secret nasty conversation about age, and every healthy conversation about age into a secret nasty conversation about gender. Even if you think it's okay to view specific events as coming-of-age events, we have language like You're a woman now and separates the men from the boys to make it so that you can't just be an adult... you have to be an adult in a gender-binary way! And that's not the only terrible thing it does. Let's look at another specific example:

So, there's this issue of people calling adult female people girls, all the way up through their forties. Some people say it's bad because it reduces competent, independent adults to children.

Sure, that's bad... if you were thinking of children as lesser in the first place.

Think about the schoolyard insult You hit like a girl. It's pretty obvious how sexist that is. It's not sexist because you're telling a male-perceived child that ze's weak; it's sexist because the basic assumption of the statement is that female children suck at hitting because they're female. Of course, it's also an insult, and you shouldn't be insulting people anyway, so it's bascially a really bad idea on both counts. It's a statement that I'd be happy to blast from the language, and never look back.

Now think about the statement that calling an adult a girl is infantilizing. It's true, just like it's true that that You hit like a girl is an insult. People call adult female people girls because they think of female people as lesser and also think of children as lesser. But if you call out the sexism and not the ageism, you're just like the male child who yells back I do NOT hit like a girl! and leaves the basic, sexist assumption intact.

Like I said in the she/he post, that's only a symptom of the underlying disease, and the disease is the fact that our language pushes us to judge people based on their age before we make statements about their gender.

My solution...?

The easy way to communicate clearly is to say exactly what you mean (or as close as you can manage), and figure out which things you're thinking are true, and which are just convenient assumptions. Let's look at an example: Suppose we're debating abortion rights. Quick, tell me! What group is directly affected by access to abortions?

If you said women, go find a buzzer so that you can make an annoying buzzing sound to mark your incorrect answer. The group affected is people with functioning uteruses. A lot of people with functioning uteruses aren't adults, and not all people with functioning uteruses are female-identifying. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from talking about how sexism affects legal abortion rights campaigns because of the strong correlation between functioning uteruses and female gender roles, once you acknowledge that, and by saying people with functioning uteruses, you have neatly avoided all the passively ageist and cissexist language. It's a lot of syllables, I know, but if worst comes to worst and you have to say it over and over again, you could always come up with a shorthand for it or something.

A few syllables is a small price to pay for a healthy society.

– Eli