Over 80% of English vocabulary comes from old French. However, when you look at the most commonly used words in English, you have to look well outside the top 100 before you find the first word that doesn't come from Old (pre Norman conquest) English.
This is because the most basic words, the ones we use most often and which describe the most fundamental concepts, tend to remain very stable over the long term.
You can see the evolution in the meanings of words such as "terrible", "awesome" and even "gay" in relatively recent history.
Generally, when the meaning of a word evolves, it is because we no longer have much use for the old meaning, or because the same word can have different meanings depending on the context, without causing confusion. (Take the word "sole", for example, which can mean a type of fish, the bottom of a shoe, or "only". Nobody is ordering sole in a restaurant and expecting to be served a shoe on a plate.)
None of this applies to the word "woman", which is about as basic as it gets. Both "woman" and "man" come from Old English and have been used consistently for over a millennium to mean, respectively, "adult female human" and "adult male human". These words haven't evolved because the original meanings are no longer relevant. We still need to be able to identify and distinguish between female people and male people as much as we ever did. Nor are they the type of words which can comfortably support different meanings.
If the word "woman" can mean either "female person" or "male person who identifies as the opposite sex", how are we supposed to understand which group of people we are discussing? And more to the point, "women" is a category word. In order for a category to exist, all the things or people in it need to have something in common. If what women have in common is being female, changing the definition to include male people makes it a meaningless word for a non-existent category of people with nothing in common.
So yes, "language evolves". But certain words do not, because our need for these words remains the same over time.
Until about 10 years ago everyone agreed that women are female people. Most people still do. And we definitely still need a word for female people that doesn't include male people.
If you redefine "women" to include male people then you no longer have a word that just means female people.
This isn’t the natural evolution of language. This is a rather Orwellian weaponisation of language, designed to prevent people whose beliefs are grounded in reality from being able to express those beliefs coherently, and to stop women as a whole from engaging in activism as a sex class. And that's why it must be resisted.
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