What is a Woman?
Whether it's a simple or complex question largely depends on whether you think Western civilization and the Enlightenment are a good thing.
I began this by watching Matt Walsh’s ‘What is a Woman?’ and then collected counter-arguments from a gender critical feminist, a trans-activist AI bot, and trans-activist human being.
The short version is that the Right wants ‘woman’ to be a simple, stable category. But stable categories are part of what upholds enlightenment thinking and Western civilization, for better or worse, and so from a critical or Marxist point of view the definition should be taken out of the realm of objectivity, and resettled into the space of socially constructed linguistic realities. There might be a middle ground here that operates between these positions.
By understanding ‘woman’ as a non-defined gender role or identity, this unsettles the power imbalances which create and reinforce hierarchical social roles, putting women, and especially transwomen, below men, thus creating a duty to not give a simple, categorical answer like, ‘a woman is an adult human female.’
We’ll start with the Right on this one -
The Matt Walsh (above) argument is that a woman is an “adult human female.” According to this worldview, biological sex is objective and binary (with a small exception for intersex persons). Women have XX chromosomes, female secondary sex characteristics like wide hips and breasts, and produce ova, which if fertilized leads to pregnancy and childbirth. Gender is the social roles and typical personality traits found in biological women.
Simple and to the point. From here Walsh confronted proponents of contemporary critical theory (Gert Comfrey and Dr. Patrick Grzanka stood out), and gets lots of answers like, “A woman is a person who identifies as a woman” (circular reasoning) “Anyone who says they are” (begging the question). Walsh does a pretty solid job playing the clueless everyman, so a lot of the movie comes off the same as Borat or Ali G.
The movie switches tone about halfway through and gets into MTF athletes in sports and prisons, children transitioning and whether or not they can understand the implications of that decision, the limits of self-identity (cats, wolves, and transracialism) and detransitioners who feel like they were coerced into believing they were trans. He also goes over the story of the idea of gender being separate from sex coming from the work of John Money, who did a horrific sexual experiment on twin boys that led to both of them committing suicide.
That whole messed up story can be found here. It’s nightmarish.
Note - An interesting auxiliary argument to Walsh’s basic definition is Jordan Peterson’s idea that the concept of gender might be a misnomer. He gets a segment towards the back of the film, and he says that because 10% of women are as masculine as the average man, and 10% of men are as feminine as the average woman, the whole idea of gender from a bell-curve point of view might actually be misleading. According to this view the word ‘gender’ is actually referring to temperament and personality, which aren’t necessarily sexed attributes. I.e., large-N studies show that, on average, certain traits show up more often in males or females, but that doesn’t mean any particular male or female is going to have those traits.
Counterpoint One -
I’ll put the gender critical feminist critique between the conservatives and the trans-activist human and robot. I was told to start with Simone de Beauvoir's Introduction in 'The Second Sex,' so I shall.
Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.
Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to believe that woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological, psychological, or economic forces. Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other – and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from woman’s point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.
So woman, as a gender, is understood as a secondary ‘Other’ to men, and the critique of the Walshian position is that by reducing womanhood to ‘adult female human’ there is an essentializing going on that has historically served this purpose. It’s not up front, but rather in the background of what the words ‘female’ and ‘human’ presupposed ontologically and epistemologically.
So for gender critical feminists there is a link between gender and biological sex, but the concept of gender should be challenged to bring about more existential, liberating, and self-actualizing possibilities for women.
Counterpoint Two, as promoted by a trans-advocate bot.
Gender identity is a deeply felt innate sense of whether you are a boy, girl, both, or neither. Trans people do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. This is different than gender roles or norms (expectations because of gender).
The bot was following the conversation on twitter and interjecting that into all the conversations.
Counterpoint Three - as promoted by a trans-advocate human.
Here is a summary of the points of the argument.
Acknowledges that saying “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman” is a really easy target for conservative owns. It’s circular. However, every straightforward definition has failed in some way because gender is not static - it varies across times and cultures. “Adult” “Human” and “Female” are not strict categories, so it’s not a clear definition.
Historically, from a Marxist perspective, in egalitarian pre-agricultural communities gender was not so rigidly defined and didn’t so clearly elevate men over women. Engels argued that women came to be seen as property because men, being the creator and head of the family, became the gendered owner class, and thus women were put into servitude (Similar to the argument in ‘The Second Sex’). This historical artifice, according to Marxism, created gender based roles - men’s work and women’s work. One example is that in pre-colonization Cherokee civilization, women had more power.
Continuing in the Marxist critique, modern gender requires an underclass. Creating an underclass is why it exists. It gives power to men and dominant culture.
The goal of trans-activism and Queer Theory is not to reform gender, but to destroy gender. Without colonial gender, the social order would crumble, but this is a good thing according to this worldview.
One example that’s covered is that in ‘The Straight Mind,’ Monique Wittig makes the bold claim that lesbians aren’t women. Women are defined in relation to men, and so lesbians don’t qualify as women. Out there definitions of female are meant to disrupt control and encourage disengagement. This means that non-definition should be seen as a strategy of disruption.
TERFs and conservatives are trying to create a class structure that supports some people over others.
Contentious Points For Debate -
Should we continue in the Enlightenment, Liberal tradition where freedom has spread from wealth, White landowning males (who themselves rebelled against the monarchy in order to become sovereign citizens), to women and racial and sexual minorities, or should we abandon the project and instead aim for Marxist liberation? This is important because stable categories, such as ‘a woman is an adult human female’ is part of what supports the Liberal-Enlightenment structure, which is why they’re being challenged.
One argument I’ve seen frequently by trans-advocates is that by not supporting transwomen as women, and transmen as men, they are creating the space for murder and violence against transpeople. At the same time, while I suspect that most people are ok with adults doing whatever they want with their own bodies, there are reservations about spaces where biological sex matters (spas, bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, rape crisis centers, etc.) and where children are involved. How do we create a space where these concerns can be addressed and policy options debated? Because these debates are often taboo and forbidden on campus, that has created a market where challenging these shibboleths is a profitable path to popularity for conservative and heterodox thinkers, as seen in the response to ‘What Is A Woman?’
Finally, on a less serious note, even if it’s contentious to say what a woman is, I feel Tom Jones firmly settled the matter on what exactly a lady is:
As always, thank you for reading and if you have any suggestions for how I could improve this article, I always respond to constructive criticism.
First off, I'd like to point out that The Second Sex was written in 1949, before the Women's Liberation Movement of the early 60's. I'm sure it inspired some women, like my mother, to go back to college to finish her degree (she married at 19) so she could become a teacher and have her own income. So my generation (boomer) learned that we could become anything we want and all choices were open to us. It basically comes down to having financial freedom to make choices as we see fit (i.e. leaving a bad marriage, start a business, stay home to raise your child, etc.). This, to me anyway, has nothing to do with notion that you can actually change your biological sex. Because you can't function as the opposite sex and this is the reality. So it appears that there are psychological issues going on whereby a person cannot accept the reality of their healthy, functioning body. Those issues are what needs to be addressed, IMHO.
The older anthropological literature is good. One is generally looking at smaller scale societies. I think scholarship was more rigorous. There was more than one way to skin a cat or organize task production sequences or kinship, but women cross-culturally know/knew who and what they are and were. Arguing the tails seems preemptively to appropriate the obviously truthful and cross-culturally descriptive category, to me. Woman. Women. Something i am. Whether post-menopausal women in some cultures could join men’s since they were no longer constricted regarding child bearing years did not make them any different in the basic sense of biological and woman within their society. Whether Agta females with infants cold hunt efficiently (though not with toddlers) did not make their self-perception change, I imagine. Sex roles do vary cross-culturally and are not ingrained by sex. But men and women are real in language and category cross-languagely. Through Life history stages. Forget the thin volume (Whyte [who authored articles with Brudner]), multiple authors, cross-cultural data, maybe old HRAF files, found most women in small scale societies would have been considered to have a similar status to men, but not the same. So co-equal or egalitarian in anthropological usage (intellectual not sub). It has been too long since I was competent and familiar with the literature. Geez. So much rereading to do. Thanks for your post. Just musings of a 60 something.