Defining a woman by her sex is not reducing her to her biology

I think it may have started with the argument that black women were excluded from white women's spaces in the USA prior to the civil rights movement.

TIMs are now excluded from women's spaces - but transwomen are women ( ) ergo - transwomen are like black women in pre-1960s America and we're all nasty. Or something.

It's not an argument that holds water at all (particularly not in the UK) - it is not a comparison to draw parallels with racial segregation in the US and women refusing to say that a man can be a woman.

It's highly offensive to call black women "a subset of women" - I can't believe anyone has dared to say this. I've even heard someone say that black women are not biologically the same as white women as a way of furthering the trans argument.

But I think it's indicative that this TRA movement has large white male supremacist component. It's just another stick to beat us with.

They all started doing it at once, too, the "well if you don't think trans women are women then you must not think black women are women" thing.

Mate, everyone knows that black women are women (except TRAs, apparently). The specific ways in which black women have been oppressed are a result of experiencing both sexism and racism, and the way the two overlap and intertwine is what intersectionality was meant to focus on. Not on how everything intersects with penis.

Its new to me though, this addition of blatant racism.

New to me also until a few weeks ago.

People on social media asserting that a black woman's relationship to womanhood is the same as a transwoman's relationship to womanhood. I've never seen anything so blatantly offensive and racist in my life.

I mentioned this on another thread, but I personally saw three black women called "white feminists" for sticking up for Rose McGowan on Twitter in one single day this week.

Thank you.

So many (usually male) 'intersectional feminists' seem to think that its literally just about saying male people are female. I have only ever seen it used in this context..if your feminism does not include transwomen, it is not intersectional, therefor it is bollocks kind of thing.

Its new to me though, this addition of blatant racism. I saw someone do it on twitter yesterday (maybe the day before) and now this guy..I wonder if theres been a new TRA memo or something. Seems odd that they woiuld all sltart basically saying that black women are the same as male women and if you accept black women you must accept males

If being female isn't a bad thing (and it's not) then it's not something to be "reduced" to.

And

Periods can be reframed as the circle of life, breasts as what gives sustenance.

The female body is amazing. It brings forth life. It can, all by itself, sustain a child.

Women have borne every single person on the planet, and every single person who has ever lived.

And I know, not everyone can, which is often source of pain. Which I genuinely do not mean to cause.

But that aside, it's a nerve that anyone can imagine women can be reduced by thier biology.

Women, and the whole human race, are elevated by it.

Here she is saying that intersectionality is NOT about identity politics:

More recently Kimberle Crenshaw has had to explain that her work on intersectionality never intersected with males.

Is this online? I am in the middle of an argument with a male 'intersectional feminist' on another site who is telling me to go read/listen to Crenshaw and I will understand how me excluding males from the category woman is anti-feminist and the exact same thing as saying black women are not women The racist bit I can do on my own (and have, already put a rant to that, instictively without thinking through the reply) but it would be great to turn his ;educate yourself' nonsense right back on him

Perhaps we need to get girls to celebrate their biology, so that they see that they are not reduced as women. Periods can be reframed as the circle of life, breasts as what gives sustenance.

Women who participated in what is called the second wave of Feminism such as myself were perfectly aware that trans identified males are a subset of males. More recently Kimberle Crenshaw has had to explain that her work on intersectionality never intersected with males.
Trans advocates have been selling snake oil.

Failed men are not women and women most certainly are not failed men. Aristotle was a misogynist.
I had that same sort of dissociated feeling about my body for about a year after having spent a few month in hospital on dialysis. I am sorry you went through that trauma.
While your experience is not unique it is also not universal.

Framing acknowledgement of my sex as being "reduced" to it seems like misogynistic nonsense, particularly given that the same framing doesn't seem to get applied to men. If being female isn't a bad thing (and it's not) then it's not something to be "reduced" to.

What she said.

We don't say that defining a man by his biology - penis, testicles, testosterone, semen production, muscle mass is 'reductive' do we? No of course not because men are proud of all these things. They are not seen as shameful by anyone.

Exactly! Being a woman isn't, like, the deep metaphysical essence of my being, partly because as an atheist I don't think I have one. It means that I'm a member of the sex that can in theory get pregnant and bear children. From that initial fact flows a lot of societal stuff, some of which has had an impact on how I see myself and the personality and characteristics that I've ended up with as an adult. I'm aware of which group (can get pregnant, can get other people pregnant) other humans fall into, and can empathize with a lot of experiences that other women have because they're common and shared by most of us (the social part as well as the could get pregnant part and all the other biological stuff that goes along with it). I'm wary of people in the can get other people pregnant group (aka men), because they're physically larger and stronger than me/us and a lifetime of experience has taught me that they can be a threat. The size/strength differential is innate, but the way they're socialized makes them even more of a potential danger than they would innately be, and at a certain point I became aware of that too and started taking note of how strong that socialization seemed to be in individual men and what that meant for me if I had to deal with them.

None of this makes me feel "reduced" to my sex any more than the fact that I can't fly makes me feel reduced to being a human and not a bird. It's just reality, and forms the backdrop against which my life is lived. Pretending it doesn't wouldn't make that backdrop go away. Framing acknowledgement of my sex as being "reduced" to it seems like misogynistic nonsense, particularly given that the same framing doesn't seem to get applied to men. If being female isn't a bad thing (and it's not) then it's not something to be "reduced" to.

It is just a biological signifier. It means this person has the potenial to reproduce with a man (adult human male) and anything else is personality, characteristics, personal preferences.

Exactly. Otherwise we would categorise male and female on something other than the body.

Which, obviously, some people are attempting to do. But since there is no shared, universal characteristic under which you can divide those people, good luck with that!

Blimey. So much introspection!

Outy woman is an adult female human. It's a biological signifier that is all. It describes the body.

How a person feels within that body is down to all sorts of things. Some people embrace gender stereotypes and expectations; some intentionally reject it; it just doesn't speak to others; some assume it is intrinsic.

It is just a biological signifier. It means this person has the potenial to reproduce with a man (adult human male) and anything else is personality, characteristics, personal preferences.

Gender is socially constructed.

Your intellect creates a world through which you experience the physical world. Your body is the bridge between the two providing sensory feedback through your brain to your mind and making your intentions into physical actions. My mind informs my physical experiences, not the other way around.

To my mind you have this exactly backwards. It's actually your physical experience of the world that informs how your spirit/intellect develops. There is no way to experience the world except through the body you have. For that reason, I do agree with the next part of your paragraph:

Obviously my body is female but my intellectual self is also female. I'm not a person inside a woman's body I am a woman inside a woman's body.

I agree and I think that some radical feminists do a disservice to women when they insist that our 'personhood' must be separate from our womanhood (which they see as something imposed on us).

However, we might be coming at this from different perspectives, Outy, because you seem to think (if I've understood correctly) that there is an extra-corporeal essence of femaleness (and presumably maleness) that has nothing to do with the body, and what I'm arguing is that it is through experiencing the world in a sexed body that our sense of ourselves as women (or men) arises.

This is why I disagree with the radical feminists who argue for 'gender abolition'. To me that's an impossible and indeed anti-human project, because the physical differences between the sexes will always be relevant to how we experience the world. We are a sexed species - there is no unsexed experience of 'personhood' separate from our male or female bodies. My embodiment as female is not incidental or irrelevant to who I am.

When I've stated this in a radical feminist circles, I've been accused of believing in 'lady brain'. But my argument has nothing to do with brain structures, and I actually find the modern obsession with locating all sense/feeling in the seat of the brain to be reductive and a faith-based belief, akin to the Ancient Greeks' notion of the four humours. Yes the brain generates consciousness, but our sense of our whole self is experienced through the body: through having limbs, a nervous system, a digestive system, etc.

Men's and women's experience of the world can never be the same, because our bodies are so different in so many crucial respects: not just reproductive organs, but hormones, bones, muscles - medicine is just starting to realise, for instance, that you can't treat men's and women's bodies as interchangeable for the purpose of diagnosing heart disease, or prescribing drugs.

This doesn't mean that I'm not for interrogating the cultural basis of femininity and masculinity - these phenomena arise, I believe, mainly from power relations between the sexes - they are not natural, except in the fact that the power relations themselves arise from biological differences in the first place. It's been stated here before that if women were as strong as men and had the same capacity for inflicting violence, patriarchy wouldn't exist. I believe it, and I also believe that what we understand as 'feminine' behaviours wouldn't exist either. However, given that these differences can't be abolished without getting rid of sexed bodies themselves, does that mean that the power relations will always exist to some degree, no matter what social structures we come up with to mitigate them? Yes, I'd say, as depressing as that is.

This is an excellent article that deals in part with this question:

Gender is socially constructed (upon material reality)

Apparently not.

I think anyone is allowed to have a view on anything, right? So you can say a body is a corpse, but you should probably expect challenge from people who don't agree.

Yes, it was a metaphor. A disturbing one that dovetails nicely with a lot of unpleasant misogynist views of women's bodies.

But fine, apparently saying that is unacceptable in this particular feminist space.

(Not the OP who said it, btw.)

Oh for goodness sake. The OP or whoever was was not being literal in the sense that you took it.

Speaking of getting a raw deal, what about those of us who don't appreciate seeing female bodies described as corpses? We're not allowed to find that horrifying because that's being mean to the person who wrote it?

My body is not a corpse. It's my body, it's me, it's not a chunk of dead meat that I'm just awkwardly dragging around with me.

There's a difference between burning heretics and disagreeing with the idea that women have an innate female essence that's not tied to our bodies, or objecting to female bodies being described as corpses. If you want a discussion then people will disagree. That's how discussions work.

I'm not sure why you think that women who say that they don't feel a sense of womanhood that's separate from and not associated with their bodies are not telling the truth, or are modifying their arguments in a defensive ways. Some people just aren't very spiritual by inclination, some are allergic to all forms of woo, some are just super practical in how they see the world. There are multiple Marxist-adjacent people here, you can't possibly think that they won't apply a materialist analysis to this stuff too?

I'm also steeped in the second wave and its literature. What does that have to do with the person arguing that she had a sense of metaphysical womanhood that predated the consciousness of boys and girls being different physically

Fuck all. Because that's not all this thread is about.

Also, to be honest I think the OP is getting a raw deal when she is doing her utmost to flesh out (boom, boom) a position and it does seem she is struggling for the right language at times.

Jesus Christ - are we now going to burn heretics like the authoritarian left?

Also, a thing that bothers me about how this conversation plays out is that, although I can understand how trauma or disability may lead to a person feeling disconnected from their body and that it's not really "them", the flip side of that is that misogyny relentlessly pushes the idea that female bodies are weird, disgusting, shameful, and in that context referring to female bodies as "corpses" and arguing that they're somehow not-us, and actually-us is a sort of spiritual something not tied into our bodies, play right into the female bodies as weird and disgusting and shameful narrative. Which can be hurtful and upsetting for women. But somehow it's OK for the my body is nothing to do with me I'm actually a metaphysical essence group to say they find the opposing perspective hurtful and offensive and other people should be sensitive to that, but apparently there's no need for the metaphysical essence, female bodies are corpses/not us group to take the other group's feelings into account at all.

That doesn't sit right with me.

I'm also steeped in the second wave and its literature. What does that have to do with the person arguing that she had a sense of metaphysical womanhood that predated the consciousness of boys and girls being different physically?