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

[DuesToTheDirt]

OK, so the answer is obvious - the biology of our bodies. It is what differentiates women and men.

But I've been thinking about this some more - there is NOTHING that I, as a woman, have in common with all other women, except biology. We may, as a group, be lower paid than men, or more likely to wear lipstick, or to empathise, or to do the school run, or be sexually assaulted. There are also things that some women do that no man does, like give birth. But not all women do or feel these things (and some typical traits or experiences are shared by some men), so they cannot be defining characteristics.

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.

Maybe I am asking in the wrong place, as I expect most people on here agree with me. Can anyone explain?

Sam Smith has fat thighs because he has fat thighs, not because he is a woman.

It's biology plus the social expectations placed on people with that biology.

Biology.

@ChristinaXYZ I completely agree those aren't universal and I'm delighted to hear it if you've not encountered those things in your life. In the same cheery vein I will share that my MiL is an absolute angel and was a delight from the first day I met her. (so I've had my share of luck too)

Easy question, OP.

All women go in pairs to the loo.

That's it, surely.

I think as women, we have many shared lived experiences. Some of these relate to our biology and others to our shared socialisation. The latter varies according to culture and age.

I'm sure you're right, but like my other examples, it's only true on a group level, and is not always true of individuals.

The one thing women share is belonging to the sex (or being on the developmental path towards that sex) which typically, but not always, produces large gametes.

The female sex is the sex with a reproductive system organised around the ability to give birth. It doesn't matter, in terms of how women are treated by their cultures, that not all women will ever menstruate, say, or give birth. To others being female means that these possibilities will be taken into account in how societies treat women and girls.

Sex-based discrimination and sex-based oppression are also something which all women share, at least in the sense of shared history of what it has meant to be a woman (usually exclusion from full rights of inheritance, fewer rights in marriage, exclusion from many professions and higher education).

This sexism is relevant not only because this is women's shared history, but also because even in the most egalitarian societies and even for those women whose social ranking otherwise is high (in that they belong to the dominant, race, ethnicity, class, religion etc.) what I call 'the ratchet effect' works:

Pick a man and a woman otherwise completely identical, and ask yourself which of the two would be most likely to be heard in a debate, which of the two would be most likely to be hired or promoted into important positions, which of the two would be most likely to do the unpaid work in their families, which of the two would face higher risks of being sexually assaulted and harassed, and your answer might tell you what all women probably share.

But there is much that women do not share, and many women suffer from multiple forms of oppression and from exploitation not only on the basis of sex but also on the basis of race and/or class. Women also share allegiances with men of their own cultures and within their race, class and ethnicity, and these allegiances may contradict their allegiances to other women. Some women are far more privileged than other women, just as some men are far more privileged than other men, and all this complicates seeing the answer to the question in this thread clearly:

Women have shared interests in politics, even though we also have many interests which are not shared. For the first group, we need to organise as women (while taking into account intersecting types of oppression and their impact on the forms sexism and misogyny take), and for that we need to keep our name for our group. It's women and girls.

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

You identify as the magical, spiritual essence woman.

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

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).

<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.

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.

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

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.

I really like this analogy.

Interesting. Do you have any further information on this? What kind of things are thought to be affected?

But when you say, "We have no way of knowing, for example, whether female biology means females experience the world in uniquely different ways to males," I'm struggling to think of things that could be uniquely different. For example, it is known that women can typically name more colours than men, whether due to nature or nurture. Suppose this is due to nature. Now unless the difference is actually, say, "women, 10-20 colours; men 5-9 colours" rather than "women, 10-20 colours; men 5-15 colours", there is an overlap and the female vs male experiences are differently distributed but are not distinct.

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.

(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.)

@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.

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).

A fanjo

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.