32 A Preliminary Diction Study culturally rooted, than our biologically given suppositions would tell us (Wood 18). Such a complexity of the unaccounted for nuances of gender are not accommodated by this law, the only basis of its spirit being what is in black and white. A case in point that might put this law to the test would be a possible case of a transgendered person. Transgender is an umbrella term that refers to people the biological and gender identity or expression of whom may not be the same. This can but does not necessarily include preoperative, postoperative or non-operative transsexuals, female and male cross-dressers, drag queens or kings, female or male impersonators, and intersex individuals (Weiss). This nuanced situation will render the law problematic for transgendered individuals who claim and identify themselves as women. Without a stipulated definition of the word gender, the scope of who will be covered by the privileges and affirmative action proffered by the law will be open to uncertainty. With such a fluid and debated core concept, it would have been imperative for that law carefully and categorically define the term so as not to throw it upon the mercy of subjective interpretations and understandings, which are in turn at the mercy of individual ideologies and belief-systems. The inadvertent absence or intentional omission of the operating definition of “gender” exposes the law to a possible tendency of indefinite expansion or restriction of its substantive scope. So that if a transgendered woman seeks protection under the safeguarding of this Magna Carta, an opposing counsel may well and perhaps easily argue that a close reading of the law reveals that gender, if taken in its ordinary cultural meaning, may not include the transgendered woman. In a legal system the statutory construction of which grounds itself in the elementary principle that the expressed puts an end to what is implied (and so to understand and interpret the law, one must primarily look into the very words written in the four corners of the paper, and to refrain from reading between and beyond the lines of the words unless well-merited (i.e., when there is patent ambiguity resulting to an obvious failure of the law from reflecting the legislators’ true intent). It is true and might be argued that to do so, narrowly define the word gender, would be at times too limiting, as are all other exercises of definition. But, for purposes of unambiguously producing a law that affords for women their rights, a clear operational understanding of what the term “women” includes is necessary. To not define any more clearly the term gender would go into a linguistic manifestation of the dominant power of the collective members of the Filipino society who automatically presume that the only ones who are women are those who are anatomically predisposed to be so. The fact that the law did not even concern itself