Twitch responds to “Womxn’s” History Month controversy

Twitch came under fire for an attempted celebration of Women’s History Month while using the controversial “Womxn” label. The Amazon-owned streaming platform has since reversed this decision following a wave of backlash and will continue forward with “Women” in their celebration. 

On March 1, Twitch tweeted a video and shared a blog post stating “March is Womxn’s History Month” and asked its users to join in by celebrating “womxn” content creators and their communities.

It didn’t take long for Twitch to come under fire for their choice of words in this announcement. Mere hours after the “Womxn’s” History Month post caught fire, the decision has now been upturned.

“While we originally wanted to use a word that acknowledges the shortcoming of gender-binary language, we will be using the spelling “women” moving forward,” Twitch followed up.

“We want to assure you that we have, and will continue to, work with the LGBTQIA+ community. We’re still learning.”

The word “womxn” was used in place of “women” in an attempt to be more inclusive to transgender and non-binary individuals, but according to many, it was doing more harm than good. “Womxn” even trended on Twitter briefly, as many users took to the social media platform to air their grievances with the term.

Many took issue with Twitch’s wording, including some with large followings such as GameStop TV host Melonie Mac who wrote, “I’m all on board for appreciating women, but the womxn spelling is so weird to me and I don’t identify with it at all.”

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“I don’t get how womxn is more inclusive than women. Trans women ARE women, so if anything, womxn is bordering on transphobic. Unless I’m misunderstanding something here,” she further added.

Others echoed Mac’s statement, and remarked, “With womxn you’re just separating them more, you’re not being inclusive, you’re excluding them from women.”

“Womxn” is not a real f**king word. It was literally created by T*RFs to invalidate trans people,” another user wrote. “Please, just call us women. Hell, I’d rather be called a literal slur than “womxn”.”

Streamer Cohh Carnage said that while he believes Twitch had good intentions, they took things too far by changing women to womxn.

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“The motive is solid. The direction is good. Take the tweet down, replace womxn with women and pop it back up. Sometimes overly inclusive can lead to exclusive,” he suggested.

At the time of writing, Twitch’s original blog post is still live with the term “Womxn” on full display.