“But aren’t you, indeed, some substance or other, with or without your saying so?” - from 18 Months
Dictionaries “reflect, rather than dictate” definitions, as Oxford University Press says in this statement to CNN. At least, that used to be the process—and for all its flaws, it’s a good one. Dictionaries are assumed to be reference materials, so they’re created by “studying patterns” of language and compiling results. They should not reflect the biases or interests of those employed to do this work.
In the same CNN article, however, the organization admits to revising its entries for “woman” to make them more “positive and active.” Can we then trust Cambridge Dictionary, whose more “inclusive” definitions now include “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”?
The clue is in the verbiage. If it seems clunky and awkward, there’s a reason for that: it is not neutral, but contains at least two critical theory-informed assumptions. First, the idea that sex is not innate, but something that “has been said” about a person, i.e., “assigned at birth.” And second, the implication that there are “a” number of “different” non-female sexes, rather than one. Though definitions reflect current discourse, they shouldn’t employ it; it seems that the illiberalism infecting science and academia has spread to a new realm.
Still, words shift over time. “Alternative music,” which once described the obscure and unpopular tunes collected by well-traveled friends and passed along by mixtape, now refers to mainstream music. “Literally,” to the chagrin of purists, has morphed into “figuratively.”