What is Woman? What is Man?

I made the mistake of getting into an MWMF discussion and used up most of my rhetoric for the day. I was also thinking about the discussion from yesterday’s post, when DaisyDeadhead asked

A lot of that is just nonsense, though… what are “real women”? A William Faulkner character made it clear that post-menopausal women like myself were not “real women” either. I can no longer menstruate or reproduce, which BTW, doesn’t bother me at all. But seriously, that is obviously what the character was thinking, yes? Lots of people have historically taken that view. Faulkner gave the character this attitude to illustrate that he was backward. Like the stuff Jennifer Roberts is saying here.

Until these terms are fully defined, as far as I am concerned, they are totally subjective and don’t mean shit.

And they won’t be… if you are going to start issuing orders like: must have uterus, must menstruate, blabbity blah, well, someone assigned female at birth and is as XX as the dickens, will STILL fall outside of your definition. As a child, I lived next to a girl born without a uterus. Poor girl, her mother told everyone and the neighborhood gossiped about her and how she would never have babies. But, it would never have occurred to ANYONE that she was not a girl. In fact, she was pretty girlie, which made it all the more “tragic” to the busybodies…

So, is it supposed to be the presence of uteruses (uteri?) or what?

I’ve been thinking about it, because, you know, transition from one side to the other, I should know definitively what “woman” is, right? Well, I don’t. I mean, I don’t have an easy answer. I know I’m a woman, just as any woman does. There’s no part of me that thinks “am I other than a woman?” and such thoughts are just nonsensical to me, like random passersby who tell me I should try being a man. They may as well shout “Banana orange rutabaga toothpaste!” for all the weird moon language they’re spouting at me.

I know someone may call this essentialist, but at this stage, I really don’t care. I’m talking about my self-awareness, not my politics.

But seriously, when I think of “woman,” I can’t distill the concept down to breasts, or vagina, or womb, or any part of the anatomy, even though those are parts of a woman’s anatomy. That reduces womanhood to, well, breasts, vagina, or womb. Even if I use all three, plus the ovaries, and name everything from the clitoris to the cervix, I’m not going to define womanhood, but I will get a hell of a lot more porn searches hitting my blog. I can’t define it as XX chromosomes. It’s bad enough to define womanhood on the basis of physical traits like breasts, but no one can see chromosomes. Plus, you have things like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and transsexualism messing that up by giving us perfectly good XY women. Never mind chimera, who might have different genes in different organs. A woman’s liver might be XY, or heck, even her uterus.

I guess we could define “woman” by who can have babies (and thus, who menstruates when she’s not having babies). One radical feminist defined women as “the tribe that bleeds.” This fails because not all women can have babies. Yes, a healthy cissexual woman will be able to carry a baby, but if we can’t really define a woman by having a womb, then we can’t define her by the ability to give birth. We can say that the majority of women can, but those who can’t remain women. Menstruation may be a bit tougher, because it’s often described as a “rite of passage” into womanhood. But, this goes back to defining a woman as having a womb, rather than as [i]very likely[/i] to have a womb. We still have women who do not menstruate, who are still women. If a woman can’t be defined by her body parts, she can’t be defined by the function of those body parts.

Julia Serano says on page 239-240 of Whipping Girl:

Another popular excuse for our exclusion is the fact that some trans women have male genitals (as many of us either cannot afford or choose not to have sex reassignment surgery). This “penis” argument not only objectifies trans women by reducing us to our genitals, but propagates the male myth that men’s power and domination somehow arise from the phallus. The truth is, our penises are flesh and blood, nothing more. And the very idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can be somehow trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric.

It’s distressing that such phallocentric arguments, along with related arguments that harp on the idea that trans women “physically resemble” or “look like” men in other ways are so regularly made by lesbian-feminists, considering that they are based in the society-wide privileging of male attributes over female ones. In what is now considered classic research, sociologists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna showed that in our culture, when people (both women and men) gender others, we tend to weigh male visual cues as more significant than female ones, and almost invariably consider the penis as being the single most important gender cue of all (i.e., its presence trumps all other gender cues; the presence of a vagina does not elicit a similar effect). In their words,”There seem to be no cues that are definitely female, while there are many that are definitely male. To be male is to ‘have’ something and to be female is to ‘not have’ it.” Kessler and McKenna view this privileging of male cues as resulting from male-centrism (similar to how people often favor using the pronoun “he” when speaking generically). Taking this into account, it becomes rather obvious that when cissexual women deny trans women the right to participate in women-only spaces because of their own tendency to privilege any “mannish” or “masculine” traits we may have over our many female attributes, they are fostering and promoting male-centrism.”

So we gender people by whether we see masculine traits, but this doesn’t define us as men or women. We can gender men as women or women as men for any number of reasons. Women can have visibly masculine features and men can have visibly feminine features, so perception cannot define whether the person we’re looking at is a man or a woman.

So I’m kind of stuck. I can’t define woman in a way that won’t trip me up. I could try to define man, and then pretend everything not-man is woman, but that would be stupid. Not everyone who isn’t a man identifies as a woman, even though people might subconsciously gender them as women. And, I’m stuck defining man, which I find is problematic as well. If I can’t really reduce womanhood to the vagina, or the breasts, I sure as hell can’t reduce manhood to the penis. Based on what I said about XX not being a firm definition for women, I’m stuck with not defining men as having XY chromosomes. I mean, sure, you can expect men to have those, but trans men will have XX, and you can have guys running around with XXY as well.

I think the problem is that man and woman are culturally and biologically axiomatic, and proving axioms is a pain in the ass. I also believe that gender is social - It’s not just who you are, but how you’re treated. Men are treated as men, reinforcing the man thing. Women are treated as women, reinforcing the woman thing. Trans people experience both sides of this - we grow up being treated one way, transition, and are treated the other.  So, gender is something you are, but your perceived gender is how people treat you, for lack of a better phrase. To borrow one of the radical feminists’ favorite offensive stereotypes, for example, one way in which trans women show our inherent and ineradicable male privilege is by “taking up a lot of social space.” That is, we talk over other women, dominate social settings, and try to be the center of attention.

This has two elements. The first is that the man doing it has internalized that it’s okay to do this, and so he does it. The second thing is women have internalized that it’s expected* for men to do this, and let him do it. In other words, for this trick to work, everyone participates. Now, in my experience, I find that around women, no one really dominates the conversation like that. I don’t. When we talk over each other, we stop, apologize, and one of us keeps talking. We acknowledge when this happens. I’m not generalizing that all women do this, I’m just saying this is how the dynamic works when I’ve been with women and no men. When men are around, they just talk over you and when you say “Dude, wtf? I was talking,” he didn’t even realize you were still talking.

Of course, the thing is, before transition, I wasn’t the “talk over women” person. I didn’t operate that way, I didn’t have the expectation that this was the way I should deal with people, and I didn’t do it. It wasn’t a conscious thing, it’s just not what I did. Boys didn’t try to talk over me the way they would someone they saw as a girl, and I didn’t really talk over girls - if I and a girl started talking at the same time, we’d apologize and one of us would continue.

But, I’m back where I started: What the heck definitively lays out “this is a woman,” and “this is a man?” I don’t think it’s really that easy to get there from here. I don’t have a short answer, not one that encompasses all women and all men. One that accounts for the variety of men and women, including intersexed and trans people who identify as men or women but are not anatomically exactly male and female. I definitely don’t have an answer that accounts for two-spirits, genderqueers, transgender people who do not identify as strictly male or strictly female, or for those on the transfeminine or transmasculine spectrum.

I’m sure many people reading this will say “what are you smoking? I know I’m a (wo)man,” and I’ll just point back up to where I admit I know I’m a woman, and I expect most people know what their gender is, even if they don’t really think about it. I’m not talking about whether you “feel like a man” or “feel like a woman,” although people are certainly welcome to feel that way if they want. I’m not here to judge.

I know I’m a woman, I’ve known all my life - well, I knew I was a girl at a young age. I wasn’t socially seen as one, and that can really be frustrating and even traumatic, but I’m talking about what I knew about myself, not what people saw when they looked at me (although lots of people who saw me before puberty thought I was a girl, so nyah). If I trust my own self-knowledge, I guess it’s fair to trust everyone else’s self-knowledge. It’d be fair of them to trust mine, assuming they trust their own. 

I realize that Daisy reached this conclusion in about 1500 fewer words.

What do you think?

*I don’t know many women who think it’s okay - it’s bloody annoying