Woman is not an identity statement

[Whatiswrongwithmyknee]

The problem for me with pretending men can be women, is it means that there is no collective word to describe the experience of biological women.

This is a problem in a world which pays women less, looks after their health less, in some countries requires them to kneel when talking to their husband, in others requires them to cover their face and not have an education etc. etc. None of these things are done to women because of their identity. Many women this is done to would not say they match the definition of 'woman' created by those who think the word woman is a statement of identity. Not identifying as a woman does not protect them from the consequences of having a female body.

When I say TW are not women, I am therefore not restricting their identity. I am asking them to respectfully find another word to describe it.

This is why I consider that any man who says 'call me she' is not recognising his male privilege.

Can you help me develop this thinking?

Why develop it?

Theres a danger the message is lost in paragraphs of explanation, descriptions, drawing parallels and so on.

woman is not an identity it’s a biological fact.

Good point!

Im reading material girls at the moment, and stock uses her philosophy expertise to go through this exact argument!

I think you've nailed it quite succinctly.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee i agree completely, and I think your arguments are already quite well developed.

The heart of it for me is that I’ve never met a woman who is able to define what it is to be a woman except with reference to biology, or by using a set of stereotypes which are very specifically rooted in a culture. From this, it follows to me that no male can describe what it means to ‘feel like a woman’.

Despite being asked many times, transwomen never seem to offer any explanation except, once again, with reference to stereotypes and ‘feminine’ things. I really would love to hear a better description (rather than just being called a transphobe for asking). As a specific example, I’ve seen transwomen describing their attraction to lacy, silky fabrics. But in Georgian times, this would very much be seen as upper class, masculine dress….

Being male gender non-conforming (in a given culture) does not make you a woman, it makes the cultural expectation of males too narrow (ignoring other reasons why a male person might try to force access to women’s spaces)

The word is: woman

However I think there should be a new word for sex. Gender used to be comparable enough to sex, and was good on forms. Sex is problematical obviously because it has different meanings: having sex or male/female. Maybe gender could be promoted to male/female and we could have a new word for how people feel? Feeltype? Identitype? I don’t feel like a woman (sorry Shania Twain), I just am one so I would write: none. Feeltype could have hundreds of different variations.

When I taught biology, a mention of the sex word would send the whole class into disarray. Sex is the word we need to sort.

Womaning is simply anything at all that done by a biologically female person. Whatever they do is womaning: however diverse, it just extends the 'bandwidth' of womaning. It cannot be done without being biologically female.

Being biologically male and TQ+ means extending the bandwidth of 'maleing' (interesting there's no reciprocal idea here really). Which is a good thing, surely.

Absolutely agree, those who wish to define themselves in addition to their biological sex need to use and celebrate their own new terms and not appropriate other people's words and colonialise their identity and resources.

Homosexual people would quite like this too please. Lesbians for example. Which is part of the very rich, diverse pattern of womaning.

Agree with keeping it simple. The truth is simple. Ideology is labyrinthine.

This is exactly how I feel. It's not about whether what trans women (and indeed trans men) feel about themselves is valid. I am happy to take them at their word.

It's because not only are TRAs appropriating for trans people words that already meant something and insisting they mean something different, they are insisting the words always meant this new group, and therefore that any new term coined for the people that used to use the name they have taken is invalid because the existence of that original group itself is invalid.

They never consider that even if sex really was , as they assert, some great delusion with no material basis, if a group of people have been defined by and disempowered due to that delusion to the degree that women (sex meaning) have been, and that if that inequality was built into our society as deeply as sex is, that in itself is a reason to recognise them as a group with shared needs and concerns, worthy of a voice and a name.

Woman. You don't need to say biological woman. We don't need a new word. Woman means adult human female. Everytime we qualify the word woman with biological, natal, real we are using the language of our oppressors. I think if you need to be clear you are talking about women and not men who say they are women just say woman (adult human female) or women (adult human females) or girls young human females). We have fought to keep the word woman and now the word female is being taken too. It doesn't matter what we women call themselves men will try and take it.
Men can say they are women or identify as women, but they are not women and never will be.

Men can say they are women or identify as women, but they are not women and never will be

Which is why they try to distort and change the meaning of our words because they cannot change reality, so it's the only way to try to make themselves fit in a category they cannot belong in.

This is a very good point. I had not thought of it like that but you're right.

OP, what you've mentioned is a legitimate objection in its own right, but you can develop it to flesh out the implications like:

• If it becomes unacceptable for women to define themselves as a group, then they are no longer able to organise as a group to discuss their needs and experiences
• They are no longer able to organise to defend their rights and political interests
• They are no longer able to be protected as a group in law
• It is no longer possible to express an opinion like "Women are oppressed by men on the basis of their reproductive biology". Or as Jane Clare Jones puts it "If you cannot name sex, and you decide that naming sex is a hate crime, you effectively make the feminist analysis of women's oppression unsayable."

If "woman" does not matter then women do not matter.

Over my dead, female body.

Yes very true. Thanks. It is interesting how TRAs are not jumping up and down in a tizz when we see reports of what the taliban are doing to women in Afghanistan. Clearly we have no idea whether those people identify as women but TRAs don't seem to want us to say that the taliban are actually doing this to men and women. Why not? Because that would expose the nonsense in their ideology. I think if they said that, the public reaction would be horror. But to properly discuss what is happening is a analysis of women's oppression. On some level I think TRAs know their arguments are a pack or cards. They know that we have to sometimes still be able to call a woman a woman. They just try and minimise how often that happens because they don't care about women's oppression.

It's also worth knowing, that the entire idea that woman is an 'identity' comes from postmodern/queer theory. As Kathleen Stock points out, if we believe in science and reality then there is no need for us to follow the dictates of postmodernism!

The argument appears to be this. Every woman is different and no woman has the same experiences. There are rich women, black women, disabled women etc each with their own struggles. So we can't find a single thing that women have in common that unites them as women.

What about the female body? Well, postmodern feminists fret that defining women by their bodies (a woman is an adult human female) is reductive and reduces them to their biological functions, which is what the patriarchy does. since the early 90s, postmodern feminism has been terrified of 'reducing' womanhood to some property or other, but hasn't really been able to articulate why this is even reduction and why reduction is so terrible in the first place.

So being a woman must be an 'identity', something that a person opts into and chooses because there is nothing externally that fixes what a woman is. It must be something internal and personal. And then along came Judith Butler with 'gender trouble' and her views that gender is a performance, and suddenly being a woman is an identity that can be adopted by anyone.

It's all nonsense, and it's quite shocking to see that it's leaked into the mainstream. Really, the foundations for this belief are very wobbly indeed.

Yeah it's great that man can become womN until bad old biology gets in the way.

I'd Have happily changed sex with my husband for 9 months as I had a pre existing nndical condition that was sight threatening if I has a baby. He doesn't.

Biggest risk of my life and went blind in one eye luckily in 3rd tri so they whipped her out. All ok now.

Yeah so don't tell me men can become women stonewall until that can happen as , er biology

Fucking insult to my experience

I do find it hilarious that I'm technically agender so on the stonewall genderthing
I am
I don't announce it cos I don't need to just like I don't need to announce mh politics religion etc

Would I mortally offended and feel I no longer exist if someone thinks I'm a lefty and I'm not.

Course not

So.why.is gender the fanfare announcement and massive wrongdoing if someone uses the wrong pronouns once, unintentionally.

Yeah it's great that man can become womN until bad old biology gets in the way.

Ain't that the truth. I'm another one with a lifetime condition triggered by pregnancy. By biology.

And because biology is the unmoveable stone of reality in all this?

Women get whined at not to talk about their bodies or mention the biology because it's so meeeeeean.

We'll not get into how mean it is, or sexist, to require half the human race to pretend they don't exist or talk about their lives, bodies, unique experiences, in case less than 1% of males find it hurtful .

Bonkers. No. The 1300s ain't coming back. Neither are the Romans. Women exist and the only thing they have in common as a unique experience is being born in a female body. Anything at all done in a female body is womaning. That's it. That's all. If you weren't born to it it's unclaimable.