What Is A Woman?

07/23/2023

Since time immemorial, the question of what a woman is has haunted humanity like a specter. How could you possibly even understand, let alone define such a thing? Recently, as trans theories have spread, there has been renewed interest in this question by essentialists that want to restrict womanhood (and all the stereotypes and expressions of women) in an immutable biological essence.

Unfortunately, some trans theorists have done a very poor job providing a definition that includes all the social aspects of gender and is inclusive of trans women.

In case you didn’t notice, this statement is a tautology. We in the philosophy biz would call it a trivial statement because it provides no information. Calvin Broadus is Calvin Broadus is a trivial statement. But, Calvin Broadus is Snoop Dogg is an informative statement.

Definite descriptions can have multiple definitions. Multiple referents can refer to the same sign. Definite descriptions are context-dependent anyway. But, a definite description can’t have infinite definitions, otherwise it ceases to be definite. It literally becomes indefinite. And, it literally becomes meaningless.

Now, the reason many trans theorists seem to rely on this tautological answer is because they don’t want a totalizing and essentialists definition of what a woman is. Essentialism invariably leaves out people that are, in fact, women, including cis women. If you rely solely on gametes, then people who are infertile or born without gametes are excluded despite having all the other characteristics of their sex. If you rely purely on chromosomes, you exclude people with XY chromosomes with androgen insensitivity that mostly develop female sex characteristics. Etc.

You can create multiple definite descriptions for a shared referent without, on the one hand, creating such a rigid definition that you exclude people who should be included (ultimately, essentialism falls into the trap of idealism), and, on the other hand, without getting lost in a meaningless relativism.

Womanhood itself, or the definition of what a woman is, has already done a great deal to expand beyond mere biology.

It used to be, seemingly since time immemorial, that women are passive, immanent, not-transcendent, the lack or absence of good male traits, baby-making machines, vessels for the production of heirs (preferably male heirs), inherently inferior to men, more emotional and less rational than men, more stupid, fragile, the property of men that had the explicit goal of creating more wealth, governed by monthly rages that rendered them hysterical.

All of these things were believed to be biological, concrete sex characteristics, as if they were an invisible part of a person’s morphology and psychology hard-wired into a person’s being.

The discovery that there is a difference between biological sex and societal gender roles has already done a great deal to expand what it means to be a woman, what society believes women can do, and what can a woman be beyond her sex characteristics.

In these times, we recognize that women can be brilliant, strong, athletic, leaders, exist independently of men, is an equal to men, so on & so forth. So, we already recognize that women are more than their biological sex and have aspects of their lives entirely independent of biological sex.

I’d like to propose a definition that won’t be a simple tautology and seemingly refer to everything & nothing, but also isn’t reducible to biology.

A woman is an adult human…. with more female sex characteristics than male sex characteristics and/or a female embodiment.

And, a man is an adult human… with more male sex characteristics than female sex characteristics and/or a male embodiment.

And, someone who is non-binary, or gender non-comforming, or gender queer (they all seem like the same thing; leave a comment if you can actually articulate a difference between them); and someone is genderqueer if they are a human… with incongruent or nonnormative gender traits and whose gendeed embodiment is not limited or exhausted by their sex characteristics.

I never said they’d be simple definitions. These things are far more complex than the gender critical dinosaurs would have you believe.

You may have noticed my focus on this word embodiment and my omission of the word identity. Let me explain. Identity… honestly this word has just gotten so exhausting. Everyone has an identity, in fact, you could make an argument that people have multiple identities related to different social grids of intelligibility.

But, this word identity is so nebulous and so subjective that it can be hard to make heads or tails or whatever else lyeth betwixt of it.

And, identity really reeks of the old Cartesian mind/body dualism, a soul or mind which you have no access to with your senses but are just supposed to assume exists.

Even if you substitute the word soul or mind for brain, it’s still a fallacy. Your brain is just as much a part of your body as any other organ and its honestly inconceivable to even think of yourself without some type of corporeal form or body image. And, your brain is just as much effected by your body as your body is it. The brain is constantly rewiring itself depending on your bodily conditions and your environment.

There is no mind vs. matter. Instead, there is a minded matter, or embodiment. One’s embodiment is the way one inhabits space & time, the relations between oneself and the world. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said:

“I am not in space & time, nor do I think space & time; rather I am of space & time; my body fits itself to them & embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of my existence.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty¹

As soon as one is born, one’s physical body is always already being absorbed and extended into a world. Furthermore, an embodiment is not like a costume which can be taken off and place in a closet. One can no more remove one’s embodiment than they could remove one’s entire skin or skeleton.

One’s embodiment is not limited by the physical body, but naturally extends beyond it. Referencing Merleau-Ponty, philosopher Gayle Salamon says, “A body becomes so by virtue of its interactions with what surrounds it, not because it is composed of a stuff that is radically foreign to its surroundings.”²

Since our body exists by virtue of the world around it, our embodiment extends to those things in the world in which it concerns itself or shares solicitude with. Merleau-Ponty says:

“What I ‘am’ I am only at a distance, yonder, in this body, this personage, these thoughts, which I push before myself and which are only my least remote distances; and conversely I adhere to this world which is not me as closely to myself, in a sense it is only the prolongation of my body –I am justified in saying that I am in the world.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty³

Our thoughts are connected through the medium of our embodiment to the objects in the world which we perceive. Because of my embodiment, my thoughts only exist in an always already existing relationship with objects in the world.

Our embodiment is of our body, just as our sex characteristics are of our body. The phenomena of sexual desire, where our erogenous zones (which includes, but is not limited to, some sex characteristics) extend or desire towards others reveal that our sexed characteristics are inherently extended by our embodiment as any other part. How do our sex characteristics fit themselves into space & time outside of the realm of sexual desire?

Well, I am theorizing that sex characteristics fit themselves into space & time by attaching to gendered expressions as dictated by gender roles. I am proposing that embodiment, not gender identity, is the link between biological sex and the social construction of gender.

We as humans are always already implied in a shared world with other humans. Merleau-Ponty says, “The scope of this hold measures the scope of my existence; however, it can never in any case be total. The space & time that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain other points of view.”⁴ Our embodiment has a natural sense of Being-with other humans, from our copulation from two others, to our birth from a-nother, to the mouth of an infant’s relation to the breast of another, to all of our familial and social relations.

Gender roles are the societal rules, the laws of proper gender expressions expected of sexed bodies. As Gayle Rubin says, gender “is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”⁵ Gender roles are simply what One does, what is expected by One, One’s inauthentic relationship to oneself. One’s male body is expected to be masculine in his expressions. One’s female body is expected to be feminine in her expressions. Though, and this is important, there is no necessity that female sex characteristics must attach to feminine gender expressions. Or that male sex characteristics must attach to masculine gender expressions. Normatively, they do. But, this is not a necessity, and just because something is normative does not mean it is good, and conversely, just because something is non-normative does not mean it is bad. Our embodiment can express whatever gendered traits it damn well pleases. There are masculine females and feminine males. This is why sex & gender are two different things.

Earlier I said, a woman includes someone with a female embodiment and a man includes someone with a male embodiment. I didn’t say a feminine embodiment or a masculine embodiment. I implied that our sex characteristics directly determine our embodiment because an embodiment seems to fall within a female or male category. And, I left open the fact that male bodies and female bodies can attach to, become extended through, gendered categories across the spectrum and in directions hitherto unmentioned.

At the same time, in an attempt to include trans people within the gender categories of woman and man, I explicitly included an and/or. A woman is an adult human with more female sex characteristics than male sex characteristics and/or a female embodiment. Under this definition, an adult human could still be a woman but have no female sex characteristics as long as they have a female embodiment, though they would still be biologically male (or intersex).

So, if sex characteristics determine embodiment why would a person develop an embodiment opposite to their sex characteristics? Well, [picture of a well] this isn’t as surprising at it may seem. Because a person’s embodiment extends beyond the physical body, there are situations in which part of a person’s physical body do not perfectly align with said person’s embodiment. A person’s embodiment can be viewed as a type of body image or map, though it would be more accurate to say that a person’s embodiment is continuously in the process of cartography, of generating our body image.

This can be seen in phantom limb phenomena.

Many amputees report still feeling sensations in part of their arms which are no longer attached. This implies that our embodiment is constantly remapping the limits of the body.

People born without arms can also have vivid phantoms limbs. They can swing them around, wave goodbye and make complicated gestures. This implies that people are born with embodiments that while always incomplete provide a type of totality.

To return to the sexier elements of bodily cartography, cis males who have been castrated often report experiencing a phantom phallus. Cis females who have received double mastectomies sometimes experience phantom breasts. On the other side, trans females sometimes report experiencing phantom breasts, and also do not typically experience a phantom phallus post-bottom surgery. Trans males typically do not experience phantom breasts post-mastectomy, and most report experiencing a phantom phallus (and sometimes even phantom phallic orgasms) prior to male bottom surgery. ⁶

A few cautions are worth mentioning. While people appear to be born with a body image, including a sexed body image, it is not complete and is constantly adapting. For one, an infant actually has to experience its existing sex characteristics in order for a sexed body image to become in the flesh so to speak. For two, an infant has no experience of secondary sex characteristics, which do not develop until adolescence. We can see this as some trans men report only experiencing a phantom phallus after taking testosterone.⁷

A second caution: just because a person does not experience a phantom limb relating to a specific sex organ should not automatically exclude them from a certain sexed embodiment. Just because a trans man has never experienced a phantom phallus does not necessarily entail they do not have a male embodiment (I’m not a trans-medicalist, after all).

Though pre-adolescent children have not experienced secondary sex characteristics and the ways those bodily changes effect the way a person interacts with the world, many gendered expectations of male bodies & female bodies prepare boys & girls for the type of embodiment they are expected to have. The way we move our body, our reactions, our dress, our dance, so on and so forth are just as much a part of our embodiment as our specific physical characteristics. Our embodiment is always a mobius strip between our body and our environment making it difficult to always tell where one part begins and another part ends, and difficult to tell what effects are caused by nature and what effects are caused by nurture. All the more reason to assume such a duality is false.

I am, in effect, suggesting there are other phantom phenomena which are not explicitly connected to a sexed organ that can cause someone to develop a sexed embodiment that does not match their physical sex characteristics. I am attempting to avoid a trans-medicalist approach which would necessitate a rejection of physical characteristics in order to be “truly trans”. This way a transsexual woman, i.e., a person who desires to medically transition away from their birth sex of male, would still fall into the category of woman or girl prior to medically transitioning or if they are unable to medically transition despite having the desire. This also includes trans people who do not choose to medically transition, or do not have dysphoria related to specific sex characteristics.

A third caution: this embodiment is not reducible to gender identity because how could a baby have a gender identity prior to being categorized in a gender role and gaining the knowledge of gendered expressions. A baby is born with a constantly adapting embodiment. Based off of the sex characteristics a baby has, they are assigned to a gender role, either masculine or feminine. A person is assigned a gendered role and expected to comply, and through the continuous re-iterations of gender expressions, develops a gender identity that is relatively stable, that can be very rigid in some people & more fluid in others.

It is this, preliminary conception of embodiment, that I am using to justify the possibility that someone born male or intersex can nevertheless still develop a female embodiment. And someone born female or intersex can nevertheless still develop a male embodiment. And someone born male, female, or intersex can nevertheless still develop an embodiment that is not limited or exhausted by their sex characteristics.

But, and it’s a bigger butt than the one I sit on, have I really said much different by switching out the concept gender identity for gender embodiment? How is “I identify as a woman” different from “I embody a woman?” Is identity itself separate from embodiment? Is it the same? Is it a species of embodiment or is it a genus? Both statements are self-identifications. Self-id is epistemically a pain in the ass, because it relies on pure subjectivity and lacks any objective way beyond faith of determining the truth content of the statement. It’s why self-identified fascist theocrat, Matt Walsh, can make trans theorists that rely purely on self-id look ridiculous.

Part of the problem with those who rely solely on self-id in the documentary “What Is A Woman?” is the absolute unwillingness and even indignation that they must define their terms. Regardless of whether you say “I identify as a woman” or “I embody a woman”, if your thesis rests on “because I said so” as its ultimate presupposition, then you are as dogmatic as the medieval priests who said, “Ugh, we keep the bible in Latin for a reason, just trust us.” You must be able to ground your argument in something more than mere self-id.

I believe that focusing on embodiment allows us to more easily accomplish this then continuing to rely of word identity, a word which carries an enormous amount philosophical baggage already beyond the realm of sex & gender. We can perceive a person’s body, and we can perceive the way their body interacts with the world meaning we have at least some objective perceptions of their embodiment. As soon as a human is born, it immediately begins the process of attempting to make sense of the world it is thrown into. We also can perceive that a newborn has a body and therefore an embodiment. We cannot perceive whether a newborn even has an identity or not, let alone a gendered one. Research shows that by 18-24 months, toddlers already begin to understand gender expressions and the categories or social laws which organize these expressions. This appears to be the earliest we can empirically confirm that a person’s embodiment has become gendered, which is to say a body is able to actually interact and utilize gender expressions as a means to understand social patterns and relations, i.e., as a way to relate to others.

I could be completely wrong. This is just some strange sketching out of this concept of embodiment, a concept that I plan on returning to in future strange thoughts. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

PHILOSOPHY

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1. 
   Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.
   Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2014. 141.
2. Salamon, Gayle. “The Sexual Schema: Transportation and Transgender in Phenomenology of Perception.” “you’ve Changed”: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. 91.
3. 
   Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.
   The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, 1968. 57.
4. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 141.
5. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy” of Sex”. 1975. 151.
6. Blakeslee, Sandra. “Gender Identity and Phantom Genitalia.” SFGATE, 10 Feb. 2012.
7. Ramachandran, Vilayanur & Mcgeoch, Paul. (2008). Phantom penises in transsexuals: Evidence of an innate gender-specific body image in the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 15. 5-16.