An Honest Answer

(“What is a woman?” I asked her)

Photo by AJ on Unsplash

Before she disowned me for my own answer to the question, I once asked a dear friend of mine what a woman was. I wanted to know what she thought we both were, if biology had nothing to do with it. She answered that it was impossible for her to separate being a woman from her experiences of her body but she knew that wasn’t an inclusive enough answer.

It was an honest answer, though.

Without the experience of a female body the whole concept of being a woman is as intangible as a whisper caught on a cherry blossom. What would it even mean? To delete biology from the answer reduces us to an idea, and allows us to be shaped and reshaped by individual whimsy and cultural bias, with no relation to our material beings at all.

It makes women into a mere set of projections, a hall of mirrors, something only briefly glimpsed through the clouded glass of misogyny. Any sexist idea you’ve ever had is given more weight in defining us than our physical existence.

Maybe a world that has so often recoiled from female biology, attempted to sanitise it, or insisted we were broken males, was bound to find it easy to keep pretending it doesn’t matter who we are. It has simply found a new way to proclaim that female bodies are worth nothing.

Female bodies are everything.

They’re full of intricate processes and even those of us who have them may not know too much about them. Some of us feel the moment we ovulate (the Germans call that mittelschmerz), some of us don’t. Many of us bleed regularly or irregularly, some of us don’t.

Both the experience of having a female body that works as it should, and having a female body that doesn’t, are uniquely ours. Whether we feel at home in our bodies, or we feel like they are failing us, only we can know what it is to be female.

I’ve spent much of today walking around my garden, heavy and hurting, because my womb hurts like an exploding Death Star.

There’s nothing intangible about that.

There’s nothing intangible about giving birth, menopause, miscarriage, abortion, the complexity of the female immune system or the joy of female orgasms. There’s nothing ephemeral about having a female body in a sexist world, either.

Having a female body isn’t affirming, or valid, or stunning, or brave; it is something better than all of that because it is real.

The consequences of it are not always easy. Men’s sexual desires frequently invade even our childhoods and those desires, along with the various social controls imposed on women, can shape our relationship to our own bodies in ways that many of us never fully recover from. Especially in adolescence as we are conditioned to believe our purpose is to be desirable and, simultaneously, that we cannot meet the bar; our newly growing hair is unacceptable, our thighs meet instead of shun each other, our reproductive organs don’t conveniently compress to make our stomachs flat enough, our breasts don’t pay heed to the instructions in the magazines and our developing is somehow all wrong.

There’s nothing intangible about being the people at the centre of those stories.

There’s nothing hazy about the consequences of the tales the world tells about us, or the entitlement to our bodies it generates in men.

Somewhere in my heart there is a map of all the shortcuts I have not taken and of the lonely woods and pathways I did not wander, though they called out to me. There is a tally, as well, of all the moments after dark I couldn’t risk myself in. Not because I feel like a woman, but because I am one.

There’s nothing hazy about the gifts of our bodies, either. Whether we use them to create new life or not. There is nothing like female solidarity, after all, and the safety we often find in female company.

I believe, unshakeably, that the strength of women is more powerful than any strength with fists in it, as it is one of resilience rather than of force.

Yet each of us must know that male strength wins out in the moment of physical altercation.

When we are sexually assaulted, when we are raped, when we walk home alone, when men square up to us, when they lay their hands on us, when they become threatening, when other women disappear, we all know what biological sex is.

It’s not an illusion invented by the white man, years ago.

It’s not a cultural myth your mother forced you to believe, to spite you, long after you stopped being an egg she carried.

Even if we say, straight faced and serious, that biological sex is a fable our bodies will go on proclaiming the truth. The indisputable differences of biological sex remain and our societies, with their sexism, do not alter when we lie.

So no one who cares about women should participate in such a lie.

Feminism especially takes its own teeth out if it plays pretend. It should never pretend we are indistinguishable from the male sex. It shouldn’t rest our humanity on the premise that being a woman is only sufficiently worthy of dignity and respect if a man can be one, too.

Or try to hinge our rights on the falsehood that the difference between any man and any woman is only what they choose to say about themselves.

No truly progressive perspective would allow us to become so poorly defined that we can no longer combat female oppression. It is so astonishingly reductive to assert that we are not allowed to have a knowable physical form. As though women must now be made so small they can’t even take up that amount of space.

Yet many women’s organisations, and prominent individuals, are still offering us that level of stupidity and calling it right. They deny the reality of what a woman is and, all over the world, we go on being relentlessly female just the same.

We go on needing sex based resources and protections, sex based medical care and medical research, sex based considerations and recognitions, and sex based language to even start to speak clearly about our lives.

You can float your ideas of what a woman is on any cloud you like. You can say we are a zephyr in the arms of a horse chestnut, if you will, or a gender identity (which means about as much). You can say the word includes men and we are not allowed to name ourselves without them. You can say the earth is a giant banana hammock rocking on the moon, if you really want to.

Most of us will continue to keep our roots in reality because we have to. It’s the only way to ensure women’s lives can be made better.

It’s not a personal slight against anyone when we say that a woman is an adult human female. It isn’t malice.

It is simply an acknowledgement that the half of the human race we belong to actually matters.

That we unequivocally exist, and that we do so for our own sake. Not merely for the sake of men, and to alleviate their feelings.

This is only a scandalous position precisely because we live in a world where women’s humanity is not sufficiently acknowledged yet.

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Adapted from a Twitter thread I wrote in 2021, on a sunny May afternoon in 2023. I hope it reaches one woman who has bought into trans ideology and nudges her awake