TEDxLondon erases women, pushes 'inclusive' womxn to include men

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Thursday, September 10, 2020

When spelling the word women, it's more "inclusive" to replace the letter "e" with the letter "x," according to TEDxLondon which argues that anyone can identify as a woman. 

In a Friday post on Twitter, TEDxLondon announced that "TEDxLondonWomxn" was returning in a virtual format, and invited followers to participate in a five-minute quiz to share their thoughts and ideas to help steer future programming. 

In response to a Twitter-follower who asked, "What is a womxn?" TEDxLondon replied: "No, that's not a typo: 'womxn' is a spelling of 'women' that's more inclusive and progressive. The term sheds light on the prejudice, discrimination, and institutional barriers womxn have faced, and explicitly includes non-cisgender women."

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As of Thursday, the quiz is no longer accepting responses. 

The term "non-cisgender women" refers to individuals who self-identify as either transgender, nonbinary, or something else, but are biologically male.

The prefix "cis" means "this side of" and is most commonly used in the field of chemistry to indicate that the functional groups of certain particles within molecules are on the same side of a carbon chain. In modern gender parlance, it's used to describe someone whose biological sex, a material reality, aligns with their subjective sense of gender identity, a construct based on internal feelings about biological sex.

Many women from across the political spectrum consider the traducing of language to accommodate contemporary gender politics an affront to women as a sex class and that transgenderism yields an erasure of their hard-won rights on the basis of sex.

Maya Forstater, who was fired from her tax researcher job at a think tank over her online comments that were critical of transgender ideology as it pertains to the much-debated Gender Recognition Act in the U.K. tweeted a response to TEDxLondon: "Women is fine. Womxn sheds no light. It is neither inclusive nor progressive to use unpronounceable buzzwords and suggest that female people don't have a name already."

This is not the first time that the spelling of women with an 'x' has appeared in formal communications under the banner of so-called inclusion.

"Our name as a class of persons is becoming unspeakable, a curse word that has to be bowdlerized or qualified somehow," Natasha Chart, board chair of the left-wing radical feminist group Women's Liberation Front told The Christian Post in an interview back in October 2018 when the Trump administration announced its plans — that have since been implemented — to scrap "gender identity" in Title IX law and return to the previous legal definition of sex as synonymous with biological sex.

"Some in the U.K. now use 'womxn,' which is unpronounceable. As if women and girls, human females, are an eldritch horror that can't even be mentioned. The only people who get to say without qualification that they 'are women' are 'trans women,' who are all, only and ever male," Chart said at the time. 

She added, "Sex is a material reality that has meaning to our lives and society, even if these facts are open to interpretation of meaning, or if that makes some people unhappy. The facts of such things are unresponsive to our feelings about them."

The parody Twitter account Titiana Mcgrath that was created and run by comedian and Spiked columnist Andrew Doyle and is known for clever, sarcastic ripostes, sarcastically applauded TEDxLondon "for taking this brave stance."

"However, I worry that 'womxn' still too obviously resembles the offensive word “women.” From now on, please use “wxxxn,” “menstruators” or “unmale.” THIS is how we’ll defeat misogyny," Doyle (as Mcgrath) quipped.