[Ads-l] More on "womxn" from BBC news

[Laurence Horn]

Leaving aside the mockery, there’s the observation that “womxn” is (sometimes? often?) pronounced to rhyme not with “Nixon” and “vixen” but with “kinks” and “hi-jinx”: 

“...I've heard some pronounce it 'wo-minx’”, Dr Bradbury-Rance says.

If so, neat metathesis, right up there with Favre /farv/ and pisketti.

LH

> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45810709 <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45810709>
> 
> Should women be spelt womxn?
> Womxn - to the untrained eye it may look like a typo.
> 
> But when the Wellcome Collection - a museum and library in London - sent a tweet promoting an event using the word it led to a Twitter backlash from hundreds of women, and an apology from the organisation.
> 
> 
> Like women, womxn refers to females, but it is an attempt to get away from patriarchal language.
> 
> Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance, fellow at King's College London, said the spelling "stems from a longstanding objection to the word woman as it comes from man, and the linguistic routes of the word mean that it really does come from the word man".
> 
> The word is also supposed to be inclusive of trans women, and some non-binary people.
> 
> But how is it pronounced? "I've heard womxn pronounced in lots of different ways. I've heard some pronounce it 'wo-minx'," Dr Bradbury-Rance says.
> 
> Why did the Wellcome Collection use womxn?
> 
> The museum was promoting a four-day event called Daylighting, which featured women's writing, art and ideas. In a tweet, the museum said it was using the spelling womxn because "we feel that it is important to create a space/venue that includes diverse perspectives".
> 
> 
> But the term led hundreds of people, many women, to mock and criticise the Wellcome Collection.
> 
> Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman said the museum's "new gender categories are 'men' and 'other'".
> 
> Suzie Leighton said she would not be referred to as a womxn until men became mxn.
> 
> 
> One Twitter user said it was "demeaning and insulting to women".
> 
> Vanessa Bailey called it "nxnsense" and Gillian Craigie referred to it as "a load of bxllxcks".
> 
> Many mocked the spelling, one wrote: "Wxll you xnd your collxborxtors clxxrly hxvx too much timx on your hxnds. Gxt x grip!"
> 
> Was the term inclusive?
> 
> 
> The Wellcome Collection said it used the word womxn "with the intention of being inclusive".
> 
> One of the groups that the term was supposed to include was trans women. But campaign group Trans Media Watch said it would never use that term.
> 
> Chair Jennie Kermode said: "We would generally just write women in the usual way because we feel it's important for people to recognise that trans women are women.
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> "Trans women aren't a special, separate category."
> 
> One Twitter user said: "I'm not a womxn though, I'm a woman, so I guess that excludes me."
> 
> 
> Dr Bradbury-Rance said: "As far as I can tell I think that the problem has been seen as being too simplistic in their suggestion that they're being all-inclusive.
> 
> "To say just using this word makes them completely inclusive in all lots of different ways - trans women, non-binary people.
> 
> "They seem to have used womxn as a fix-all."
> 
> A Wellcome Collection spokeswoman said: "We should have put more thought into whether this was the right term to use when communicating about the event.
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> "We made a mistake, and we should not have used it.
> 
> "We're sorry that we made the wrong call."
> 
> Ms Kermode added the Wellcome Collection had always done its best to be inclusive "across the spectrum", but added the museum should have anticipated this response.
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad


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