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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

What Makes A Woman?

521 replies

MxJackMonroe · 27/07/2016 09:28

Hi MNers,

A couple of days ago I did an informal webchat ...

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/in_the_news/2693127-Im-Jack-Monroe-Ask-me-anything

...and it seemed to go quite well. One of the questions that came up was 'What Is A Woman'?

I'm throwing this one open to the floor - as I am interested to hear your opinions on it.

Please try to not railroad the thread with trans-bashing; it is a wider question than that, so keep responses respectful please.

Jx

OP posts:
todayitstarts · 27/07/2016 11:07

I am utterly aghast at people wanting to drop the 'female' from FGM. Fucking hell, self absorbed selfish fucking arseholes

KittyLaRoux · 27/07/2016 11:07

Kitty, Stephonknee has advised the Canadian government on trans issues...

That's a joke isn't it Grin
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Please tell me it is Shock

KateAdiesEarrings · 27/07/2016 11:07

WOMAN is not an 'identity'. It is a biological reality. Anyone with female anatomy (whether normal & functioning or not) and an XX chromosome is a woman. Simple.
This
And also the political class that is subordinated in a patriarchy.

FreshwaterSelkie · 27/07/2016 11:11

Not a joke, Kitty. Here's the Canadian Hansard with the speeches thanking Stefonknee

SwissWank · 27/07/2016 11:11

Stephonknee was actually name checked and thanked when the Canadian government changed their policies on trans issues.

DaisyDaisy01 · 27/07/2016 11:12

todayitstarts, many trans activists are intent on erasing all the language women have to describe themselves and their reality. And this even includes FGM.

What Makes A Woman?
BeyondBeyondBeyondBeyondBeyond · 27/07/2016 11:20

Oh gosh yes,of course. I missed out in my explanation that some of the women experiencing FGM might not 'identify' as female. Thus 'men' also experience FGM so it can't be called It anymore.

OfCrayonBorn · 27/07/2016 11:21

Jack I for one would really like to know your answer to the question.

WilLiAmHerschel · 27/07/2016 11:24

A woman is a adult human female. Female means "of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."

A small percentage of intersex people does not change this, just like the bipedal example given earlier in the thread.

As far as I understand it, (please correct me if I'm wrong) intersex people are male or female with features of the opposite sex or with atypical features. They still have a sex. Besides, and more pertinent to this discussion, trans does not equal intersex.

I'm constantly asked by a small persistent group of people why I accepted a 'womans award' when I identify as non-binary and have been told I am unwelcome in womens spaces. The same people also tell me I can't change my biology and I am a woman. It's all very confusing.

Well, yes you are a woman and that is a biological fact. However, according to you, you are not a woman, so accepting an award for women is all a bit having your cake and eating it too. (I am not one of those people who constantly ask you about this but I suspect they feel the same way.)

Felascloak · 27/07/2016 11:26

Thinking about it more, I see woman as a descriptor - shorthand for identifying a class that all have things in common.
For people here who classify transwomenas women - what's the descriptor for women? If you picked a random human, how would you classify them?
I feel that its impossible and basically what is happening is we are extending the class women (and the class men) to just mean human.
Sounds good, but there is still a group of humans who are capable of giving birth and a group who aren't. As soon As you add a descriptor to those groups the whole thing starts again. This is exactly what's happened to the word female.
There's nothing inherently harmful in a descriptor. No one gets offended if someone calls them tall.

DaisyDaisy01 · 27/07/2016 11:27

MrsToddsShortcut You are absolutely right. I know and am close friends with some wonderful trans women. I would fight to the death for their rights and safety etc. But they are male (and they know that and are far healthier and happier for not living a delusion!). They support and care about women without trying to insist that they are one. There are, however, very many nasty & vocal trans activists who hate women, want to erase and usurp us. The aggression, violent threats and misogyny they demonstrate is horrific.
terfisaslur.com/

Xenophile · 27/07/2016 11:27

A woman is an adult human female. She will be of the sex class that is perceived to be able to bear young and due to that perception, she will be treated as lesser than men from before she she is born.

Being a woman isn't a feeling or an emotional response to things, it's is a set of societally defined boxes in which we place half the population of the world in order to maintain men's supremacy over females.

Suggesting that a genetic mutation that only happens in male humans can help to define what female humans are is simplistic and distasteful. Co-opting people with intersex conditions in order to suggest that humans are not sexually dimorphic is in a similar vein, and something that groups of those with intersex conditions are getting increasingly pissed off with. Human females who are unable to bear children are not "lesser" females, they have a medical or structural anomaly which prevents them from being able to do so.

BeyondBeyondBeyondBeyondBeyond · 27/07/2016 11:28

I suspect the women's award things are kind of (?) the equivelent to a transwomen retaining a high paying job that was achieved while known as male. Keeping the perks from before does look like "having your cake and eating it"

SeraOfeliaFalfurrias · 27/07/2016 11:28

If religious fundamentalists suddenly took over a la A Handmaiden's Tale, under the new regime would you be the one being oppressed (congratulations, you are a woman) or doing the oppressing (congratulations, you are a man)? Because religious fundamentalists don't tend to give a flying fuck about 'identity' and are generally very clear that it's all about the biology. Women are there for sex and babies. That kind of oppression, being experienced right now by women all over the world, isn't something you can identify out of.

Neither can the girls being cut for FGM identify out of being mutilated nor the rural Chinese baby girl identify out of being drowned in a bucket at birth.

There are those who say that it's offensive to women to reduce us to our biology, that's what patriarchy has been doing for millennia and is the very basis of our oppression. We need to able to speak that truth if were are ever going to change it.

HemlockSolanum · 27/07/2016 11:29

I've got to wonder why Jack has started this thread. It's not exactly a surprise that a website used predominantly by mothers, and mothers with feminist viewpoints, would refuse to buy into the idea that womanhood and the subsequent class oppression isn't intimately tied to our reproductive capabilities.

Most of us know that our sex has been used to deny us our rights throughout history, and it's still used to deny us equality now. Trying to disengage the words we use to name that oppression are just more of the same.

Women = female = vagina/uterus/ovaries/eggs/XX (even if any of those do not work or appear as usually expected)

VashtaNerada · 27/07/2016 11:30

Well there are clearly two schools of thought:

  1. a woman can be defined by biology
  2. anyone who defines as a woman is a woman I've always been happy for people to self-define so I probably lean towards 2) but I think what is far, far more important than the definition is that we tackle issues such as FGM, access to abortion, domestic abuse etc (plus of course hate crimes committed against trans people). I think our focus on definitions risks us dividing when actually most people agree that the above issues are of concern. I take the point that blurring the lines of definition risks us losing focus on 'women's issues' but I also think that obsession with definitions is distracting us from the problems.
BeyondBeyondBeyondBeyondBeyond · 27/07/2016 11:30

And if transgender biological women and also transwomen are classed in the same block (as it now is for the ioc and is implied in you recieving women's awards after coming out as trans) makes it look like "Men" and "Not Men"

I am not a Not Man.

Felascloak · 27/07/2016 11:30

Wish we could edit posts!
I mean, if picked a random human, how would you decide whether to give them the descriptor man or the descriptor women?

MrsToddsShortcut · 27/07/2016 11:32

The class 'Men' hasn't been extended. It's the class 'Women' that have had to make room to accommodate males who no longer want to be male. I've found it increasingly notable that transmens voices are so marginalised in these discussions, but I'm not actually surprised. They just get lumped in with the increasingly large group charmingly referred to as 'non-males'.

SeraOfeliaFalfurrias · 27/07/2016 11:32

Sorry - There are those who say that it's offensive to women to reduce us to our biology, but that's what patriarchy has been doing for millennia and is the very basis of our oppression.

RobinsAreTerritorialFuckers · 27/07/2016 11:32

Deliberately not reading the thread so I can just post what I think!

I would say that confusions in this area come from confusions about the premise and purpose of the original question. So, caveat first.

If you say, 'what makes a woman,' you're implying something makes women women - that there is some process, which you could undergo, to construct a woman. I slightly worry about that implication, because it suggests that we have far more agency in the world than any of us do - whether you're looking at this from a hardline radfem perspective or a transactivist perspective. Realistically, however you define 'woman,' you still hit the hard wall of socially normalised, institutionalised misogyny, which will insist that, whatever a 'woman' is, she is to be controlled and undermined.

'Woman' as a noun is hugely culturally constructed: it is not simply a biological term denoting the presence of, say, vagina and ovaries or the absence of a penis. It is steeped in centuries of binary thinking and patriarchy, whereby it gathers layers of connotations to do with wombs and weakness and partnership with men. This is overlaid by libfem/wishy-washy attempts to reclaim 'woman' as a term of strength, by constructing largely bogus histories of women's special, spiritual and nurturing qualities.

However, 'woman' is also the term that has been used by feminists in order to allow people suffering biologically-based and gender-based oppression, to come together as a group, whose unification has real power. We live in a world where women are oppressed because they have the capacity to be raped, and to reproduce. The fact that some women are infertile, does not make a difference: we are all treated as the group that can be raped, and that can reproduce. This extends also to transmen and to lesbians, both groups who receive threats about corrective rape, which are intended to keep us within that group who can be raped, and reproduce. The same extends to some degree (and I know less about this) to transwomen, who are policed for failing to look enough like rapeable objects, and for looking too much like rapeable objects.

It is basic misogyny, and in this context 'woman' is the group of people who are aware that misogynists are targeting women on the basis of biology.

That's one issue. The other is gendered. We live in a society where, when you are born, the crucial categorising point is whether you have a recognisable vagina, or a recognisable penis. From this point, children and adults are presumed to have largely spurious differences, and this fiction of differences is used to oppress women. However, this gender issue comes back to biology in contexts such as pregnancy and labour: here, because gender (the social construction) has reinforced the spurious belief that women are weak, less able to cope with pain, and less sexually motivated, doctors are still encouraged to act as if birth trauma that impairs women's sexual function or causes them pain, is simply not very important.

The socially constructed aspect ('gender') and the biology it roots itself into, constantly interact. But it's worth noting that patriarchy isn't actually interested in accuracy about biology. If someone is infertile, lesbian, nonbinary, intersex ... patriarchy wants to put them in a box. And it says: this box is marked 'woman'. It means 'people who can be raped, and can reproduce'.

Because that generalisation is so damaging, we must be able to interrogate it, and show how false it is, and how completely it fails to justify the patriarchal idea of 'gender'. At times, that means you acknowledge that (for example) transmen were socialised as girls, and so have had some of the patriarchal assumptions about biology pushed at them. At times, you acknowledge that transwomen were socialised as boys, and so experienced the corresponding situation. You acknowledge that infertile women are generally treated as baby-making machines, despite the personal hurt this causes. You acknowledge that lesbians are seen, by the patriarchy, as potential sexual partners for men, even though this is an upsetting idea. You do this, because as we do this - recognising, for the moment, the category the patriarchy has put us into - we also find ways of showing how fraudulent and oppressive that category of 'woman' is.

SwissWank · 27/07/2016 11:33

If transactivists actually gave a fuck about 'rights' and not about women affirming their identity we'd all be campaigning for a third 'sex'.

At the moment I can say 2 women a week are killed by their partners. It's much more difficult to get accurate statistics for trans people.

Rapes, health stats, criminality all this would be better tracked if we had another option besides man and woman.

But transactivists who seems to be overwhelmingly male born don't want that. They want to change the definition of the word woman. So we move over and make space for males but 'non binary' people and transmen don't actually gain any rights.

Do we REALLY want to send transmen in to male prisons? Do we need to start messing up health stats by recording women with prostate cancer? Does the NHS need to start sending out reminds to everyone about getting a smear?

NO we need prisons and domestic violence shelters for trans and non binary people. We need accurate statistics about their health and especially how it is hindered or helped by hormones. Transitions detransitions.

We need unisex changing rooms and toilets with proper safe floor to ceiling doors.

SwissWank · 27/07/2016 11:34

IN fact they are totally invested in keeping things binary. Just changing the rules about which bit of the binary you belong on.

NeedACleverNN · 27/07/2016 11:36

I will agree it's a difficult question to answer but what is feeling like a woman supposed to feel like?

This phrase keeps coming up on trans threads. They transitioned because they felt like a woman.

To me a woman is someone who has XX genes. Being able to have children is neither here or there. You have XX genes you are a woman. No amount of surgery will change that.

Same to a man. If you have XY genes you are a man. Removing your penis does not make you a woman. If just makes you a man without a penis.

If you identify as a woman and you still have a penis, you need to use the men's bathroom and changing rooms

Felascloak · 27/07/2016 11:37

I think our focus on definitions risks us dividing when actually most people agree that the above issues are of concern.
Yes I agree the constant chat about definitions is infuriating. But its important too. If we can't name the class that suffers these issues, we can't tackle them.

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