Matt Walsh made an entire documentary out of asking one question:
What is a woman?
And whether you like Matt Walsh or hate Matt Walsh, the reason the question became so effective was pretty simple.
Everybody was using the word.
But suddenly people seemed unable to agree on what the word meant.
That has always bothered me.
Not only because of this particular word.
Because I’m starting to think we have a much bigger problem.
We keep acting like words are somehow ours to renegotiate after everybody already learned them.
And I don’t understand why.
Take the WNBA argument from yesterday.
Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have announced that they identify as women and intend to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft. League sources have said they are not eligible. At the same time, the WNBA has not publicly laid out a detailed eligibility definition explaining precisely how that determination is made beyond the collective bargaining agreement’s women-only language.
Fine.
Maybe they shouldn’t be eligible.
Maybe the answer is incredibly obvious.
But I keep coming back to the same thing:
Which definition are we using?
Because the WNBA rule says women play in the WNBA.
That sentence only works if the word women does some work.
Otherwise the rule might as well say:
“People who qualify to play in the WNBA may play in the WNBA.”
Wonderful.
Very helpful.
The entire reason we use a word is because it saves us from having to give the complete definition every time we speak.
If I say “chair,” you have a pretty good idea what I mean.
We can argue about whether some weird modern-art object technically counts as a chair.
There will always be difficult cases.
But I don’t need to begin every conversation by saying:
“When I use the word chair, I mean an object generally designed for one person to sit on, typically with a seat and some kind of support…”
We already did that work.
That is what language is.
It is an agreement.
I make a sound.
You hear the sound.
Approximately the same idea appears in both of our heads.
Pretty incredible system, actually.
And the entire thing depends on us not changing the code while we’re using it.
Now, obviously, words can have more than one meaning.
A bank can hold your money.
A bank can sit beside a river.
Nobody is particularly confused by that.
Context does the work.
If I tell you:
“I deposited my paycheck at the bank,”
you probably don’t picture me standing next to the Mississippi River throwing money into the water.
Unless you know something about my financial situation that I don’t.
But that is not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about taking a word that people already use in the same context to describe one thing and deliberately changing what that word describes.
Because that doesn’t instantly change the language.
It creates two languages using the same vocabulary.
One group hears the word and thinks A.
Another group hears the exact same word and thinks B.
Then they start arguing.
And both sides think the other side is being dishonest.
That seems like a fairly predictable outcome.
Imagine if tomorrow somebody officially announced that “dog” now included cats.
Not because the word had naturally developed some obscure second meaning over hundreds of years.
We just decided dogs now include cats.
Okay.
You can put it in every dictionary tomorrow.
You can have every university announce it.
You can put it in government documents.
You can tell elementary-school teachers to begin using the new definition.
But something important has not happened.
The millions of people who learned what dog meant yesterday did not wake up with their brains automatically updated.
They still hear dog and picture a dog.
Now someone says:
“My dog is scratching the furniture and refuses to use anything except a litter box.”
And I’m thinking:
You have a very strange dog.
No.
You have a cat.
Or, under the new system, apparently we have entered negotiations.
That sounds ridiculous because nobody has a political reason to redefine dog.
That’s useful.
It lets us look at the mechanism without immediately joining a team.
Because if we need another category, we have an incredibly sophisticated solution available to us.
Make another word.
We do this constantly.
English is not running out.
We aren’t down to the final seventeen words.
If human beings encounter a genuinely new concept that our existing vocabulary cannot describe, terrific.
Name it.
That’s how languages grow.
But changing an established word creates a completely different problem.
It doesn’t merely add information.
It potentially destroys information the old word was carrying.
And then we wonder why everybody is talking past each other.
Which brings me back to Matt Walsh.
Walsh has repeatedly answered his own question by defining a woman as an “adult human female.” His documentary and earlier public appearances became famous largely because he pressed people who used the word woman while giving very different or sometimes circular explanations of what it meant.
You can disagree with Walsh’s definition.
Fine.
But then give me the other definition.
That is where I think the conversation has to begin.
Not:
“Why are you asking?”
Not:
“Which side are you on?”
Not:
“What are your intentions?”
Just:
Which definition are we using?
Because the WNBA now has to use one.
It has no choice.
The word is sitting inside an eligibility rule.
And eligibility rules eventually require yes-or-no answers.
Someone either gets drafted or does not.
Someone either qualifies or does not.
The philosophical discussion can be a spectrum.
The roster eventually cannot be.
And this is where Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have created a useful stress test, whether anybody likes their motives or not.
Suppose the definition is:
“A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.”
Okay.
They say they identify as women.
Now what?
If the answer is:
“No, because they aren’t sincere,”
then sincerity is part of the definition.
Fine.
Define sincerity.
If it requires transition, say that.
If it requires gender dysphoria, say that.
If it requires a certain duration, say that.
If it requires a legal designation, say that.
If biological sex matters, say that.
Maybe there is a perfectly coherent rule.
I’m not saying there isn’t.
I’m saying tell me what it is.
Because if the real rule becomes:
“You are a woman when you identify as a woman for reasons that I recognize as legitimate,”
that is not the same definition as:
“A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.”
We added something.
And once we acknowledge that, we can actually have the argument.
That is what bothers me about so much of this.
We spend enormous amounts of energy fighting over conclusions while refusing to agree on the words inside the premises.
Then everybody gets furious that the other side’s logic doesn’t work.
Of course it doesn’t.
They’re beginning with different dictionaries.
And this goes far beyond gender.
We increasingly argue about words like:
Racism.
Violence.
Harm.
Safety.
Equity.
Misinformation.
Woman.
Man.
Speech.
And sometimes two people are using the exact same word while talking about meaningfully different things.
At that point, we’re not debating the issue anymore.
We’re debating through a translation error.
There is another reason I think changing established definitions should bother us.
A definition is supposed to constrain us.
That’s part of its usefulness.
If I get to change the meaning of the word whenever the existing definition produces an outcome I dislike, then the definition isn’t really controlling anything.
The outcome is controlling the definition.
And that is where this becomes much more interesting to me than the WNBA.
Because tomorrow I want to try this somewhere nobody has a political stake.
I want to steal something.
Or maybe I don’t.
Maybe I’m just going to borrow it for an extremely long time.
Because if changing the definition changes the rule, I have several laws I would like to renegotiate.
And I suspect we’re going to discover something.
Changing what we call a thing does not necessarily change what the thing is.
But that’s tomorrow.
For today, I just want one question answered.
We all keep using the same words.
Which definitions are we using?
Because if the answer is different depending on who you ask, maybe our disagreement problem starts before anybody even disagrees.
Maybe we aren’t speaking the same language anymore.
