Women - what do we have in common with each other?

It absolutely nails it, and yet we get called names/lose our jobs/suffer violence for not accepting it.
WTF?

The more I think about it, the less I understand trans people. How can you identify as a member of another group, when that group is large and amorphous, and when that group's ONLY defining characteristic is something you can never share.
Nailed it!
Thank you for an interesting thread @DuesToTheDirt

If you start from the basis that everything you comprehend about the world is informed by what you have received via your sensory interface i.e. your body (your eyes, nose, ears, mouth, skin, muscles, tendons, bones and nerves etc) then differences in that interface between people must mean that comprehension of the world will differ purely on the basis of different sensory inputs.

A very simple one is height. If you are a 6 foot tall adult, your comprehension of the world and how it works will be different to that of someone who is only 5 foot 1 -- because everything you see and experience through your eyes, nose and ears when you stand up is a foot higher. That can make a huge difference when it comes to things like the stress of driving, as Criado Perez mentions in Invisible Women.

But the thing is . . . this has to be a far wider phenomenon than we think.

I got very interested in this idea when I was doing some work on women's fitness years ago, and a lot of women in the group reported a distinct change in their day-to-day experiences caused by regular exercise increasing their muscle mass. Life was "easier" because they now had more muscle: going up and down stairs was no longer so much of an effort, for example, or getting up in a morning. This then changed how they not only lived on a day-to-day basis, but how they saw and experienced their environment. The world was less stressful for them.

So I started thinking about what your general experience of life must be like if you are a top athlete. Is the world just far easier for you to exist within, because you have above average muscular power?

But if we go down to sex differences, then we aren't just talking about muscle mass and bone length, but fundamental differences in the building blocks of the bodily interface, and all the attendant hormonal differences.

What do we know? Well, we know estrogen has some sort of effect on smell sensitivity. We know, as mentioned above, female retinas are different to male retinas. We know female skin has less collagen and is thinner than male skin. Women have less bodily hair. Skull size sex differences mean some part of the outer ear are slightly shorter.

What if all this adds up to a fairly significant sensory difference between adult males and females? What if we, as females, actually feel more with our finger tips because the skin is thinner? And what might that mean for our perceptions of the world?

Transmen have reported that the world looks sharper and harder when they take testosterone. What might that mean for an male understanding of the world when you couple that with thicker skin, more body hair, and different retinas?

And then for females, is our world just way more sensory? Do we smell more, feel more through our skin, see things that men just don't -- or maybe can't?

See, it starts to get very awkward. I feel uncomfortable just typing that out.

So Judith Butler on womanhood is like someone with severe untreated mental health issues writing a book aimed at the general population on what good mental health looks like.

Biological womanhood is supposed to exclude trans women. It is supposed to exclude all biological males. Why are we only allowed to define ourselves in a way that includes them? It is oppressive.

Yes it’s a very good point that Judith butler identifies out of womanhood and finds any association with women distasteful. I think she struggles with her own identity and body. Also note that when she says biological womanhood excludes transwomen she’s already begging the question that transwomen are women to begin with, which is the very question shes trying to answer! It’s like me saying chairs can’t have the function for sitting on because the sky is a chair and you can’t sit on the sky!

Judith butler

Because a woman who pretends not to be a woman or even know what a woman is, and whose professional career would literally cease to exist if we all agreed that gender is a load of bollocks, can definitely be trusted to be a sensible authority on this subject.

Femaleness can’t be the unifying feature of women because a) it’s biologically essentialist.

I prefer to call it biological realism.

It reduces women to reproductive capacity and their bodies

So what?

If you use the verb "reduces" to refer to women's collective capacity to literally grow and give birth to every human being who has ever lived, that tells me you have no respect for female biology.

Defining women as people who perform feminine stereotypes (and claiming that you are therefore not a woman because you don't personally identify with those stereotypes) most certainly is reductive though.

b) transwomen and some intersex people identify as women but don’t have female bodies.

I don't fucking care. We can't have everything we want in life.

If identifying as something was all you need to do to make you actually be that thing, I would identify as a billionaire.

Female bodies are therefore not necessary to be a woman

N/A (see above)

c) the concept of the female sex itself is a social construct that is extremely hard to pin down and define.

Is it fuck.

Is biological sex a social construct in other animals too, or just humans?

Stella Creasy believes there is such a thing as a female penis, but funnily enough, when she was moaning about female MPs not getting maternity leave or being allowed to breastfeed their babies she didn't think to outsource these jobs to her bepenised partner. I wonder why.

It’s not a “fact” that all women are female, but a social choice we have made.

Yes, that's right, all those FGM survivors and women forced to wear the burkha and denied an education in Afghanistan and sold into marriage at 10 years old have chosen this.

For fuck's actual fucking sake.

Luxury belief system espoused by fucking morons with their heads in the clouds who wouldn't know oppression if it slapped them in the face with a wet fish.

Here’s the post modernist/ Judith butler answer. Femaleness can’t be the unifying feature of women because a) it’s biologically essentialist. It reduces women to reproductive capacity and their bodies b) transwomen and some intersex people identify as women but don’t have female bodies. Female bodies are therefore not necessary to be a woman c) the concept of the female sex itself is a social construct that is extremely hard to pin down and define. It’s not a “fact” that all women are female, but a social choice we have made.

therefore, the best answer is NOTHING defines women as a class and no women share any common features. Every woman is completely unique. Once you realise that womanhood has no conditions attached to it, it becomes a space of radical freedom where anyone may identify as a woman if they wish, and anyone may identify out of womanhood if they wish. The only common feature is affirmation - someone is a woman if they say they are a woman or think they are a woman. That truly is the only feature that women share.

I had to wade through all this in grad school, so I think I can give a pretty good summary. Enjoy finding all the logical flaws and parts that just don’t make any sense!

Oh yeah, the trans movement is 100% sexism

what’s ‘women are all like this, men are all like that’ if not sexism?

All women share how they are viewed by the trans movement.

Same with sexism (although I'm starting to see the trans movement as sexism tbh). We may not all experience it explicitly but if a man says housework is woman's work he's referred to all of us not just to women in his life

If hormones made you the opposite sex, transmen would be winning marathons. I'd love to be able to bench 270lbs like DH but I wouldn't be able to even if I took testosterone.

A fanjo

Women have structural differences in our retinas, compared with men - so we're quite likely to literally see the world differently. A man on oestrogen wouldn't grow a female retina any more than he would grow a cervix, or a female immune system (which responds to oestrogen in ways a male immune system doesn't).

@ColdMeg btw sorry if my reply was unnecessarily snitty. I really don't like it when people start using men's words as a reference point to define and describe women's experiences, but in fairness, that's a common pitfall in a sexist culture.

(And that's not to mention that most biological differences between women and men aren't as simplistic or crude as "oestrogen levels" but of course they all make a difference to our experience of the world too, because experience is fundamentally embodied.)

We have no way of knowing, for example, whether female biology means females experience the world in uniquely different ways to males. There's some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this may be true, which has interestingly come out of the related experiences of trans-people who've reported noticeable perception and sense differences when on cross sex hormones.

Yes, women obviously have different experiences of the world than men - women have more complex hormonal cycles as well as clearly delineated different life stages, as well as, you know, pregnancy, which mean that we have more variation in our experiences at the level of basic biology than men do. Women are entirely aware that the way our biology is configured makes a difference in how we experience the world - it isn't some kind of abstract thought experiment, we live it. So of course men with male biology have completely different experiences than women do, at some fundamental level that goes deeper than socialisation, whether they take cross sex hormones or not.

And if you wanted to know whether oestrogen levels make a difference to how a person experiences the world, the obvious group of people to ask are menopausal women, we don't need to ask men. Or you could ask women who are on (some types of) the Pill. I find it odd that men's musings on the experience of artificially fucking with their hormone levels are being granted such philosophical significance when most women could tell you all about the effects of altered hormone levels - and our brains aren't addled by the wild misogynistic stereotypes many TW appear to subscribe to, which makes them rather unreliable narrators about the impact of the hormone they take.

The difficulty with this is that your biology is far more than just reproductive capacity. Your body is your interface with the world and female bodies differ from males on a cellular level.

We have no way of knowing, for example, whether female biology means females experience the world in uniquely different ways to males. There's some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this may be true, which has interestingly come out of the related experiences of trans-people who've reported noticeable perception and sense differences when on cross sex hormones.

It's fascinating to consider what that may mean for females and males who've experienced natural puberty and natural adult sex hormone levels throughout their adult life. Do we actually experience the same sensory inputs in the same way?

If entire cultures can differ from others on perceptions of colour and texture, and that's just geographical difference between peoples, then what might cellular and hormonal differences do?

It's a tricky one because the conversation is bound up with legacies of oppression and suppression, and the desire for all to be equal.

Just here to admire that diagram. I'd give you an A for that, MrsTerry.

Good diagram. I do like an animal-based example.

It's related to my horses argument.

Imagine you ask 'I want to buy a horse, what do I need to know?'

If people understand 'horse' to refer to a category 'things that are horses' you will get answers like 'It will need access to fresh water', 'they eat a lot of hay', 'check its teeth to find out how old is', 'the shoes are expensive'. These are all useful answers - some details may vary depending on whether you're planning to get a racehorse, shire horse or Shetland pony, but they are all broadly applicable. It is a useful category.

However, if the people you ask understand 'horse' to refer to a category 'thing that are called horses' then you will get answers like 'They live in salt water', 'make sure the stick is the right length for your legs', and 'the gatefold type takes up more space than the ones that concertina upwards, but hold a lot less washing'. None of these are helpful to your plan to buy a carthorse, and some would be actively dangerous if you tried to apply them. It is not a useful category.

Similarly, 'people who are women' is a useful, meaningful category; 'people who are called women' is not.

<dusts off philosophy book>

It's all necessary and sufficient conditions.

So the necessary condition to be a woman might be XX chromosomes or having ever possessed an ovary.

The sufficient might be pregnancy or spinny skirts (joke) or BFing or periods.

You NEED the necessary condition and not the sufficient but if you have the sufficient, you will possess the necessary.

If you think a condition is sufficient it HAS to fit in the necessary conditions, otherwise it's not sufficient.

I should have got a higher mark in Logic. FFS.

I think there are 2 defining factors.

1. Our sex (biological)
2. Our sex class (sociological)

Number 2 means that we are currently universally oppressed by the other sex class (men).

Oh yes,the 'patter of tiny feet' conversation.

You identify as the magical, spiritual essence woman.

wonderful, female logic, said/read in a rush, laughed out loud, thanks Margot