Am I a self-defined woman?

I should clarify I meant there are already cultures where mothers are considered a separate sex.

The chimera thing is not culturally specific!

Yes. In some species, bird song is culturally transmitted and developed.

A bird of the same species, that was young in a different place, will learn a different bird song. If it moves into a different environment, it will stuggle to find a mate, because it cannot sing the local cultural birdsong.

But that is not a genetic difference. The bird song is not innate. If the bird had been 'adopted' as an egg, it would have learned the 'correct' local birdsong.

There are other examples of learned behaviours. Birds of the same species know to peck open milk bottles in some locations but not others, because they have been taught how. It is culturally transmitted knowledge.

Indeed Buffy. There may be all manner of ways of understanding biology in the future that may fundamentally alter how we see biological sex.

For example, it now seems that very many mothers have chimerism. They have absorbed foetal material into their bodies (including their brains). In the future we might want to categorise mothers as a different sex to non mothers.

And there are already cultures where there is a long history of that being the case, iirc.

But that is not the case at the moment.

I'm not sure why this is complicated. There is no 'matching' cultural experience to being female, anymore than there is a 'matching' cultural experience to being human. Any culture that humans experience 'matches' human biology. Any culture that humans do not experience does not 'match' human biology.

Birds have a culture.

Only birds can experience bird culture. Humans cannot experience it.

The biology of birds sets a limit on what kind of culture they can experience, but it does not determine the specific culture. The same species of bird can create different cultures in different contexts.

The specific culture can change biological outcomes.

So there is a match between bird biology and bird culture, in the sense that only birds have bird culture, but that doesn't determine which specific one of many cultural possibilities a particular population of birds end up having.

I feel like this thread would be precisely 387% better for more of this.

I'm struggling to see how this is a cultural/constructionist viewpoint? It seems like biological essentialism to me - where someone IS essentially male or female and therefore has the 'matching' cultural experience?

That is very, very different from a view that says gender is all cultural and therefore quite arbitrary, which bertie articulated on the previous page, no?

No. I think that some of them are having experiences that men have when they are confronted with the sexism that women face in ways that men are not used to encountering personally. Your shop example is similar to me quite often experiencing homophobia even though I am straight.

Semenya is intersex. Her experiences are those of an intersex person. She will share many experiences with women that many intersex people do and men do not, but her overall life experiences are those of an intersex person.

I assume not, since you said "being a woman is a cultural experience that only humans with female biology have" and then "They [i.e. the examples I mentioned] just don't have the conventional biology of a female."

I never mentioned second wave feminism. Lots of feminist writers, from all sorts of perspectives and waves, have written about the importance of women's biology.

Sorry, 'conventional' was a very bad choice of word! In your view, are those examples of 'female' experience?

Yes, I think it is that simple.

All of those people have conventional biology. They just don't have the conventional biology of a female.

iisme - I share that view, and therefore that dilemma. I can't think of a shorthand way of doing it either. "Women who are identified as women" seems to give too much power away because it doesn't emphasize enough that the identification lies in broad power structures not individual groups (I can imagine the radfem brigade swinging in with "We don't identify you as a woman so eff off"), yet "women who identify as" appears to claim far too much. Maybe "identification" as a concept is just too loaded and focused on intentionality.

Oh, and I'm aware of second wave feminism, so please don't feel you have to summarise all of that stuff... gosh, that would be a lifetime's work!!

Is it that simple, though? Ever had short hair and been mistaken for a guy from the back? Or had a male friend or partner with long hair who gets mistaken for a woman? (This happened to one of my friends who is a very, very macho metalhead with long hair - a bloke came up and fondled his bum in a shop, thinking he was a girl . It did rather change his attitude on harassment). What about a really good cross-dresser, who 'passes' on a near-permanent basis, esp those from history - the highwaywomen, the female pirates and soldiers? What about people like Caster Semenya who are hermaphroditic? All those could be said to be experiences of life as the other gender without having the conventional biology, and though some are transient I'm not sure that necessarily means they are less of an insight??

Because being a woman is a cultural experience that only humans with female biology have, Holly.

There have been huge numbers of feminists texts written explaining why women's biology matters. I don't see much point in summarising it here.

I think I'm missing your drift (my bad, not yours). I agree with you that there shouldn't be a marginalisation of topics like maternity in womens' groups (is there any evidence this is happening?) - but I do think that 'female experience' is fabulously diverse, and that such topics as Western motherhood shouldn't be used as the exclusive definition of womanhood, or be the sole things that such groups discuss. (Nor, indeed, do I think that there should be any kind of assumption that mothers are 'more' womanly than childless women). I know that you didn't argue either of those things, btw, I'm just making my own position clear!!

I keep coming back to the question: if embodied experience is cultural and there is no 'inner' or essential biologically-determined womanhood, why can't a person born with a penis identify powerfully with a woman's gender identity? Why should their lack of physical/biological embodied experience 'matter'? (Yes, I realise there is a separate issue with cultural experience, but I'm just interested in this for now). I worry a bit that these exclusions around embodiment are quite narrow, to the point that they actually start to exclude some non-trans women!! (Caster Semenya might be a case of this?)

I guess at the base of this is another idea: "feeling" like you're a woman needn't be a reference to a deep, inner core of being- it can be cultural, and still tremendously powerful. (In fact, I would argue, to see gender as constructed surely necessitates the dismantling of this second set of ideas about selfhood?) To be completely clear: I am by no means saying that all transsexuals take this view! Some clearly do not! I am merely saying that it is possible to construct a coherent position that sees gendered identity at an emotional level and embodied experience as acculturated, without writing either down as in any way 'fake'.

I can't help feeling that there is a trace of this idea that the biological is somehow more basic, determinative and powerful in these arguments than the cultural, which is more superstructural and provisionary... which, again, is a very common idea that lots of clever people have, but one I disagree with.

I am not coming from that angle at all Holly.

I never said the experience of the body isn't biocultural.

I said that gender identity is supposed to not be about being male or female bodied, according to its proponents.

I

"What I don't see is what this has to do with gender identity. Gender identity is a different thing to you being aware that you have a female sexed body."

I can see where you're coming from with this - the old biological sex versus cultural gender thing - but (just speaking personally) I'm not sure there is a way of understanding female embodiment that is acultural. How - and, perhaps more to the point, where - exactly could that happen? This is the problem I have with a lot of work in the area of embodiment - it seems to assume a kind of residual selfhood that is prior to everything else. Which is a valid point of view, and certainly remains influential. But if you tend to think (as I do) that we are born into a society, a culture that precedes the self and that influences it at a wall-to-wall level of pervasiveness, then that idea of an asocial, acultural self becomes a problem.

I actually think the issue of talking about the female body is one of the major themes that women's groups used to cover. Women having consciousness raising groups and talking about their own experiences of changes after pregnancy (like a thickened waist!), of feeling uncomfortable during pregnancy, of the menopause, those things were discussed.

Now that woman is defined as a gender identity women are told not to talk about their experiences of pregnancy, of changes to the female body with age, because it is now transphobic to talk about such things as being about femaleness and trans exclusionary to bring them up at a women's meeting!

You don't self identify as a nationality though. You can self identify as French all you want but if the French Government disagree, then you are not actually French.

Whenshewas, I think what you are describing in your post is a mixture of wanting to express femininity and living in a female body.

I don't want to get to the stage where people feel they have to declare, 'well I breastfed but it meant nothing to me!' or 'the norm for my sex is to have a small waist compared to my hips but that is nothing to do with me' Of course people should experience the world within the body they have. We have sexed bodies.

Femininity is about personality traits, clothing etc and anyone can have those. But men don't have the shared experience of living as female bodied because they are in no way female bodied.

So I think lots of women go through pregnancy and experience ambivalence about it. But they are the only people who do. And it is only women who are supposed to have those particular relative waist and hip sizes. The healthy waist range for men is higher than that for women.

I don't think what you have written is a stereotype. It isn't a stereotype to compare yourself to the height, physical size and strength and pregnancy experience of other women. That is part of the feminist act of not seeing the male body and male experience as the human default experience.

What I don't see is what this has to do with gender identity. Gender identity is a different thing to you being aware that you have a female sexed body. If anything, it is the opposite. If you really believed in gender identity, then your explanation would be transphobic, wouldn't it? Because there is no physical difference between men and women, according to the theory of gender identity.

Shortcut, I think the image of the spectrum is useful (the Xyz one, not the one with numbers, which represents something different) because it potentially shows masculinity, femininity and non gendered experiences as being on different axes. So being more masculine does not make you less feminine. I think that is an improvement on putting masculinity and femininity on the same axis.

Whether any of these charts illustrates gender identity I don't know, because what is gender identity?

I agree, OP. Would 'people who identify as women' work better?

Both 'self' and 'definition' are full of so many problems, aren't they?!