Is woman a gender?

[Everythingtastesbetterwithcheese]

Ive been having a "discussion" with someone on social media, who claims that the word "woman" is just a social construct and describes someone's gender which means it can be used to describe anyone who identifies as one as gender is just how someone feels . The scientific word is female. Im quite confused now. I asked him what the word for a group of adult human females that didnt include adult human males was, and his reply was ciswomen. Can someone explain this to me? Is "woman" a gender?

Non-transferrable argument. Age is continuous, sex is not.

Haha, yes I’m not campaigning for a change in slogan etc, Posie’s energy and drive is fantastic and it certainly gets the message across. The word order just makes that muscle in the corner of my eye twitch.

How would you go about treating your trans colleague 'as a woman'??

Get them to make the coffee and take notes?

Talk over them, expect them to take the minutes and pay them less?

Counter question, what is a 'gender'?

On a more serious note the trans gender debate in my opinion risks bringing back 1950s female stereotypes and rolling back the hard won gains of feminism from the 70s.

If a woman is simply an adult of either sex but with feminine gender traits and or who feels feminine then outdated stereotypes come into play on what exactly these feminine traits / characteristics actually are.

Don't employ them if a man also goes for the job because they might get pregnant. Promote men above them even when they have a higher level of competence because you've not reflected on your unconscious bias.

Age is not socially constructed. Sex is not. All that is here is when we decide adulthood starts. That's irrelevant to the toilet issue because we don't have toilets just for adults, we have toilets just for females. Girls and women are both welcome. Males of all identities are not. **

We never categorise people just by biology. If we did then all human females who have gone through puberty are adults and would be women. But we have the social constructed category of women from late teens onwards. Ten year olds can go through puberty but nobody wants to categorise them as women

You’re muddling two things. Whether a female person has gone through puberty or not isn’t the defined of whether they’re a girl or a woman. A 10 year old female who is going through puberty is a pubescent girl; a 10 year old female who hasn’t gone through puberty is a prepubescent girl. They’re both girls because of their age. Age is the definer of girl/woman. Female is the definer of their sex. Every girl/young women/adolescent woman/woman is female because those names are age-related add-ons to their sex category.

What are you on about?

Adult female. Not 'female who has gone through puberty'. For obvious reasons. Medicine is currently successfully fucking up some children's puberty, but has not yet thank God found a way to stop them growing up. A male child will not grow up to be an adult female, a female child will not grow up to be an adult man. This is nursery school level stuff. The amount of wangling and nonsense some adults will go through to pat male people on the head about their belief that they can be women just never ceases to amaze me.

If I worked with a transwoman I would treat her like a woman. I may well have worked with transwomen without realising that they are trans. If I found out I wouldn't stand in the doorway of the toilets saying "You're not allowed in here. You're a MAN!"

If you had had the experience you may be less naive about the not 'realising'. It's not about how successfully men can dupe women, it's about women's right and need to single sex spaces. If you personally don't feel you want or need single sex spaces yourself, how lovely for you, I am happy you have the luck and the privilege to be apparently completely innocent about the women not like you. There's a lot of them about though. You might want to listen to what they're trying to say before handing men those women's rights.

I doubt many women have stood in the doorway of a single sex space shouting 'you can't come in, you're a man'. Mostly out of fear. Many however will have just quietly had to turn around and go away and cede any access to give that special man his choice and self expression. The man won't stand there shouting 'All women who can't use this space unless it's single sex, piss off because I'm here and I don't care about you, and if you can't put me first you don't matter'. It's still what every man walking into a woman's space is communicating though. The women he excludes will mostly be silent and uncounted victims.

Why not champion the mixed sex third spaces that you would be happy to use yourself, and which give men an alternative to sex based spaces and still include provision of access for women who need single sex spaces? Why make it a zero sum game and sneer at those who won't play on your team?

In short, when someone speaks on how sad the potential hurt feelings and rejection of one male might be, but has no knowledge or care for the women who are excluded and rejected?

They're talking about their own sexism. And not much else.

I don't actually know what they mean as I don't really know at all anyore what the concept of a woman actually is. I have often wondered this but there really isnt'a forum to ask transgender people what it means to identify as a woman. When they said they knew their gender identity was a woman - what does that mean? I don't understand that idea at all as women are not a monolith in any way.

I can see if they mean they better align with femininity and sterotypical / gender role / generalized social norms that are connected to women. But to me that doens't make one a woman because there are many women who aren't feminine or into those stereotypes. Women dont all think or act or feel or present or look in any shared fashion. Which I guess is why I have no clue what people mean when they say they identify as a woman beyond they have a preference for sterotypically female and feminine appearance and gender roles and gendered social norms. And to me prefering those things doesn't make you a woman. There is nothing wrong with a man liking feminine or stereotypical female things.

What does one think or feel to know they are a woman if not born female? Or vice versa?

I’m calling bullshit on this :
We never categorise people just by biology. If we did then all human females who have gone through puberty are adults and would be women

Being an adult isn’t “has gone through puberty”. Take someone with Prader-Willi syndrome like Katie Price’s son Harvey. Many people with PWS will never go through a full puberty, that doesn’t mean they aren’t men and women in adulthood. Some people go through puberty early, some late. It’s not “you’ve had a period so now you can vote.”

You're right, it's another of the lies that everyone is supposed to go along with.

They mean adult human female.

They feel like they imagine an adult human female would feel.

They identify as an adult human female. That is what they mean when they say 'identify as a woman'. Since as you say, without meaning to the word 'woman' there's nothing to 'identify as'. There is shared meaning.

The word mess is merely to try and have convincing self beliefs of this being something other than entirely impossible. It is currently thought polite to male people to enable this at the expense of women.

But there isn't really a way that adult human females feel as we are all very different. I have no idea how it feels to be an adult human female or an adult human male. I only know how it feels to be me and I happened to develop as a human female in utero. I don't really think I have a strong gender identity of any kind as I just don't get this feeling that makes them know they are a woman...when there are billions of women in very differnet socio cultural settings around the world who all feel differently. I identify with my biology but not unified gender identity that would make me a women like all women.

Quite. It's nothing more than a male imagining of how they perceive a woman would feel. Because there is no way to be a woman other than to walk around in a biologically female body, and anything done by someone in a female body is 'being a woman'. It's the only thing every single woman on the planet has in common.

But this male imagining is the source of the odd ideas such as Hayton's that we award each other status based on boob size....

A Greek philosopher said that you cannot put your foot in the same river twice. I am a woman. My sister who is two years older than me is also a woman. We have had different experiences of being a woman. Expand that tiny difference to all women across the world and there is no meaningful experience of being a woman. The only thing that we have in common is our sex. How can anyone who doesn't share our sex claim to be a woman?

Interestingly, my employer is marking Pride month and there is a webinar later this month on “what it means to identify as a woman”. Might be interesting to attend.

Can you just define what a woman is, please?

Cis is a made up word of recent times.

Cis woman is not an acceptable replacement for woman, because it requires everyone to enter into the unevidenced belief system of gender identity, a belief system that not everyone holds and many find harmful and regressive. Expecting everyone to accept ‘ciswoman’ for adult human female is like expecting society and to now refer to people as either ‘saved’ or ‘not saved’ after intense lobbying from Christian fundamentalists

Absolutely!

I asked that days ago, @TheShellBeach. I don’t think we’re going to get an answer.

When they said they knew their gender identity was a woman - what does that mean?

@Freefall212 I’ve been asking that question for years, making the same points as you, and never had an answer yet. Who is the archetypal “woman” that men claim to be feeling like? Their mum? Me? The woman who runs the chip shop? Anne Boleyn? Mother Theresa? Myra Hindley?

It’s ridiculous, regressive and insulting to reduce womanhood to a “feeling” based on sexist stereotypes of femininity.