Alternative spellings of woman

Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man" or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm.

"[4] The OED added womxn in 2021, and defines it as "adopted by some as a more inclusive alternative to womyn, which is perceived as marginalizing certain groups, especially ethnic minority and transgender women.".

[5] Dictionary.com added womxn to its dictionary in 2019 with the definition "used, especially in intersectional feminism, as an alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequences m-a-n and m-e-n, and to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary people.

[3] The term wimmin was considered by George P. Krapp (1872–1934), an American scholar of English, to be eye dialect, the literary technique of using nonstandard spelling that implies a pronunciation of the given word that is actually standard.

[1] Keridwen Luis, a sociologist at Brandeis University, states that feminists have experimented for decades to devise a suitable alternative for the term identifying the female gender.

[37] This is just after the founding of the Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn and Children, a lesbian feminist social event centred around women's music.

[38][39] Z. Budapest promoted the use of the word wimmin (singular womon) in the 1970s as part of her Dianic Wicca movement, which claims that present-day patriarchy represents a fall from a matriarchal golden age.

[35] Nita Harker, a sociologist and organizer of the march praised the term womxn for its ambiguity in pronunciation, saying that it forces users to "stop and think".

[21] In a 2019 Styles article published in The New York Times, journalist Breena Kerr stated that while womxn was difficult to pronounce, it was "perhaps the most inclusive word yet".

Twitch removed the tweet and apologised, stating that they wanted to use the word to acknowledge the shortcomings of gender-binary language and that they would use the term "women" moving forward.