Am I a self-defined woman?

[iisme]

A woman's group I am a member of is now stating that it is for 'self-defined women'. I appreciate that this is about inclusivity and I don't have a problem with trans-women joining the group. But I feel uncomfortable about the idea of being a self-defined woman. Firstly, I don't feel like I define myself as a woman. I am a woman and I'm fine with being a women (though pissed off with all the crap that comes with it) but it doesn't define who I am. I also don't feel, even if I am defined as a woman, that I am self-defined. I recognise my female biology and this is part of what makes me feel like a woman, and I experience life as a woman in a male-dominated world, and this is the other part of what makes me feel like a woman. But most of what I feel it is to be a woman is defined for me by society - something that is put on me because I am female bodied, and not something that I am choosing or defining myself.

Another woman's group I was looking at is for 'self-identified women'. This feels less problematic for me but I'm still not sure about it. I do identify as a woman in the ways I described above, but I again, I feel like most of the issues around being a woman are about external identification - because I am identified as a woman by others. My own internal identification - the core of who I feel who I am - is non-gendered.

Anyway, I'm trying to work through my thoughts and think about whether these phrases really are an issue and whether this is something I should address in the group. I'd be really glad to hear other opinions on this.

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!

"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 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.

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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 think 'people who identify as women' is probably better than 'self-defined women', but still problematic for me. I don't really identify as a woman. I recognise that I am a woman and actually that's really important to me in some ways because of the experiences I share with other female-bodied people and my determination to try work towards the liberation of female-bodied people from oppression by male-bodied people. But I don't feel that this identification has come about through anything internal or inherently to do with me. It's not me identifying as a woman, it's me being identified as a woman.

Frankly, I don't think there is any way to come up with a single term that include both female-bodied women and transwomen in a way that I didn't feel excludes me. I can't imagine what that would be. As I say, if they said 'woman and transwomen', or 'female-bodied- and trans-women' that I would be okay with that, but that would be totally unacceptable to a lot of transwomen. Maybe 'people recognised by others as a women' would cover it? But I think a lot of transwomen would find that exclusionary.

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.

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??

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!!

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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'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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The chimera thing is not culturally specific!

I will try and find it because someone just sent me the link about it last week! But I have to be in a meeting in ten mins!

I think the trouble with the landscape metaphor (rather beautiful though it is) is that is sort of assumes that gender is a background or a context to an individual life, rather than being fully and actively constitutive of it, something we are constantly in dialogue with, and constantly make and remake, IYSWIM?? (I agree about the sedimented historical nature of understandings, though, and that remaking should very much be seen in the context of a highly inertial and discriminatory system!!).

Not sure I understand the bit about the map. I think that there must be a lot of cultural work to do when transitioning, and that it must be a steep learning curve of practice, and clearly (given the number of attacks on trans individuals) one that is not without its very real dangers. But in identity terms, I don't see a conceptual or ethical problem with that idea of gender as a kind of performance (bad word, but it's the best I can do right now) or citation of cultural norms, nor do I see it as light years different from the practice of being a cis woman at the most basic level. (This is what I mean about there not being an 'authentic' identity and a 'performed' identity - though culturally, of course, there are differences).

I think there are a great range of gender positions available in many cultures (or, to go back to your metaphor, a great many routes you can take) and that this is fundamentally both a good thing and something that requires constant attention and acknowledgement (as a privileged white woman, I'm always in danger of assuming my experience 'stands' for that of others, and I'm grateful for the emphasis by many black feminists both outside of the Western tradition and within it - on privilege and the need for plurality of ideas of the feminine and of feminism, and also a diversification of ideas about the threats to gender equality beyond the rather monolithic 'patriarchy'). I find a lot of hope in that diversity, because there are all kinds of spaces for resistance in a complex field. I see one of those as being actions that draw attention to the arbitrariness and provisionality of gender as a non-universal, non-transcendental thing that we're all constantly making and remaking. In which light, trans people do not seem any kind of threat.