Twitch slammed for woke effort to promote Women’s History Month with ‘Womxn’

“March is Womxn’s History Month,” tweeted the company’s account on Twitter. “Join us in celebrating and supporting all the Womxn creating their own worlds, building their communities, and leading the way on Twitch.”

The company’s website explained its efforts to promote “Womxn” on the platform, explaining that they’re using the term “Womxn” because “All women are women, but we use Womxn to stand with intersectional feminism.”

“Womxn” is a woke term, and is defined by dictionary.com as “a woman (used, especially in intersectional feminism as an alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequences of m-a-n and m-e-n, and to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary women.”

The term effectively excludes males and biologically female transmen under the misconception that the term “woman” is derived from “man” or “wife of man,” (which has a different meaning from the contemporary definition of “wife”) contrary to what common folklore might suggest. The etymology of the word “woman” comes from wifmann in Old English, which means literally “woman-person.” Whereas “wer” referred to “man.” Mann, per the dictionary, had a gender-neutral meaning of “human,” which corresponds to “person” or “someone.”

Boring explanations aside, what this means is that efforts to neuter the English language by stripping “man” out of “woman” are ignorant at best.

The company faced a massive backlash following tweet, with many popular streamers, both male and female, telling the company to knock it off. They were not alone: transgender gamers spoke up and called the term dehumanizing.

Following the backlash, Twitch deleted the tweet and published a promise to use the term “woman” moving forward.

Despite the backpedaling, Twitch continues to use the term "Womxn" on its website.