Final Layer: What Is a Woman? We have finally arrived at the central question, the crux of this whole thing: what is a woman? It’s become a popular question for conservatives. They even asked it to Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. It’s a question that, to them, feels instinctively like it should be answered in a single sentence. One of the most interesting examples of this is a transphobic documentary made by conservative commentator Matt Walsh. It’s called, What Is a Woman?, and one scene in particular proves revealing. Walsh asks a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies the central question, and the professor begins to explain. But we don’t get to hear his full answer because its edited for comedic effect with cross-fades and instrumental music, cutting to different sections of his long answer, sometimes cutting to Walsh making mock faces. The joke is not the content of his answer, the joke is that his answer was long. When conservatives answer this question they usually say something like, Well it’s simple, a woman can have a baby. But some women are born barren, are they less womanly? They get annoyed at this point and sigh, Yeah, but a woman has two X chromosomes. So did Ewa Klobukowska, like we discussed above, and she got pregnant and had a child. And so on and so forth. The main complaint from the transphobes is that none of us—those who are pro- trans—have ever answered this question. Instead, the complaint goes, we just start blabbing about inclusion and the difference between gender and sex. Well, fear not, at the end of this chapter I will answer the question directly. But first I want to explain why trans advocates make this distinction between sex and gender. The standard view that even many trans people themselves will present is that sex is immutable and biological, but gender is cultural, fluid, and malleable. According to this world view, transphobes are “biological essentialists,” those who define men and women according to their sex; whereas those that are pro- trans define men and women based on gender. Despite it sounding like a pretty weak argument, it does have merit. Although I still think it’s ultimately incorrect. In their view, “gender” is defined only as a social construct. Which, for the most part, is accurate. It refers to the social and cultural aspects of gender, such as gendered clothing (e.g. skirts and dresses for girls, trousers for boys), gendered colors (blue and pink), and societal gender roles. Since they argue against biological essentialists, the arguments revolve around proving this concept of “gender” is malleable, and more consequential than biological sex. For example, up until the late 19th century, dresses were commonly worn by boys. You can find childhood photographs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt wearing a dress. Similarly, the colors blue and pink were once reversed. Red was considered the color of passion and aggression, and so the slightly toned down version, pink, was associated with boys. And the calming, tranquil color blue was for girls. It was mostly due to marketing by toy and clothing companies that cemented the gendered dynamics of blue and pink by the 1950s. To take this argument even further, gendered language is also not rooted in biology, and its history is quite interesting. Of course, there are languages that don’t use any gendered pronouns at all, like Turkish, Hungarian, or Mandarin. On the other hand, some languages, like French or Spanish, gender every damn thing. (Who decided that a table is feminine?) But, confining ourselves to English, the pronoun “they” was commonly used in reference to a single person, as opposed to “he” or “she.” Halfway through the period of Early Modern English, a fad called “prescriptive grammar” developed among the ruling classes. Essentially, that meant telling people how to speak “properly.” In 1761, Robert Lowth, the future Bishop of London, wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Twenty years later, Sir Charles Coote expanded on Lowth’s work, but swapped the generic pronoun “they” for “him,” which was a personal preference of his. That work became a textbook in wealthy schools and in 1850, the British Parliament codified those grammar rules into law. These small volumes written by Lowth and Coote laid the basis for our modern grammar rules, and their personal preferences bled into the language. Coote’s personal love of Latin, for instance, caused him to declare that split infinitives were erroneous. Also, the word “man” didn’t always mean “a human male.” It actually just meant “person.” This usage survives in the word “mankind.” The word for “human male” in Old English was “wer,” something that survives in the word “werewolf”—literally, “man-wolf.” The word for woman in Old English was “wif,” and an adult woman was called “wifman”—literally, “woman-person.” That evolved into variations of “wimman” and “womman,” until settling on “woman.” The word’s root, wif, survives in the word “wife.” Anyway, taken all together, we arrive at a pretty convincing argument: Since gender is the language we use, the clothes and hairstyles we wear, and the social roles we adopt, why can’t you people just accept that some amongst us, suffering from gender dysphoria, want to adhere to different gender rules, either of the opposite sex or neither. They want differently gendered pronouns, clothes, hairstyles, and social attributes—in short, transition to another gender. Can’t y’all just accept that and shut the fuck up? And seriously, why can’t you? In my opinion, this should be the end of the argument. Live and let live. You’re life is not more important than anyone else’s. Let people be who they want to be, and love whom they want to love. Right? I described to you in detail why trans people are no threat to anyone’s rights or safety—not in the bathroom and not in the Olympics. I described how transgender people have always existed, that it’s natural. I peeled this like an onion, showing you that the right-wing panic porn is promulgated by perverts and sexual deviants. And the people who end up falling deep into transphobia are like those Christians listening for backwards messages in rock songs. I showed you that it’s the same identical garbage that was already debunked in the aftermath of the first Lavender Scare. Is this not enough? No, it’s not. Because the appeals for love and tolerance, however sincere, fall on distracted ears, claiming to be only interested in that one simple question. Fine. Here goes. First the setup, then the punchline. I’m going to give you a questionnaire, please answer the following queries: 1. A teenager from Boston, Massachusetts, was assigned male at birth and had male reproductive organs. She eventually came out as transgender. During a doctor’s visit, they discovered she had Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome: a rare intersex condition whereby a person is born with male reproductive organs on the outside, but female reproductive organs internally. The 18-year-old teenager (the only name I could find was Mikey Chanel, but I don’t know if that’s her dead-name) was born with a functioning uterus. She eventually became pregnant and gave birth via C-section. Real woman? 2. If you’ve ever seen the film Jurassic Park, you’ll know that some species of frogs can change their sex. The same is true for other animals, like oysters and certain fish. Are oysters biologically gender-fluid? 3. Some whiptail lizards are purely asexual creatures. While some animals can reproduce asexually if they need to—like Komodo dragons and hammerhead sharks—the drawback is that technically it’s some form of inbreeding: there will only be one set of chromosomes, which in the long run would endanger the species. These lizards, however, genetically possess a second set of dormant chromosomes that they give their offspring, thereby preserving healthy genetics. Are these lizards non-binary or all-female? 4. All spotted hyenas have penises. In their matriarchal culture, erections are seen as signs of submission. When two spotted hyenas vie for dominance, and one wants to tap out and concede, they signal this by erecting their penis. We currently don’t understand why this developed, especially since it makes giving birth extremely difficult; 15 percent of mothers die in childbirth, while 60 percent of newborns don’t survive being birthed. Are these hyenas true “females”? 5. According to studies, there appears to be a partial (not complete) biological basis for being transgender. Generally speaking, there are some slight, mostly inconsequential differences in brain structure between men and women. According to a 2018 study from the European Society of Endocrinology—the branch of science that deals with hormones—“Brain activity and structure in transgender adolescents more closely resembles the typical activation patterns of their desired gender,” even before they received hormone therapy. Do these kinds of biological aspects of gender dysphoria matter in determining sex? 6. Is Ewa Klobukowska, the woman with a Y chromosome who gave birth to her son, a lesser woman because of her genetic intersex condition? Last question: What makes you think that your answers are worth more than mine or anyone else’s? I assume that if enough people read this, I would get a veritable smorgasbord of responses. And some people will be utterly convinced that their opinions about what constitutes sex, whether determined by science or God, are objectively correct. But this is not science. This is opinion. An opinion about science is not science. So, what is a woman? Well, there is a ton of philosophical literature trying to determine the essence of things. Essentialist philosophers believe that things have a metaphysical “essence” that is crucial to its nature. Take a mountain, for example, an object on the Earth’s surface. The essentialists argue that the only way for a mountain to stop being a mountain is if the object itself changes—if it is destroyed, let’s say. That means that any mountain is essentially a mountain—it’s an inescapable part of its nature. I think that’s wrong. If the sea level rises, for instance, that object becomes an island.  Or let’s say you are some cosmic giant, holding planet Earth in your hand like a baseball. Most of its surface would feel extremely smooth, almost as smooth as a cue ball. The same elevation of Mount Everest, 8.8 kilometres above sea level, would be about one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper on a billiards ball. The deepest point on Earth, meanwhile, the Challenger Deep, would be about 2000 microinches deep, which would feel like a small divot. Overall, the layer of Earth on which we all live would be about as thick as the skin of an apple. Of course, the object—our “mountain”—doesn’t change under these scenarios. But the cosmic giant wouldn’t use words like “mountain” and “chasm” to describe these formations any more than we would to define the grooves, divots, and nicks on a cue ball. The fundamental error that the essentialists commit is suggesting that these “essences” are metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological. These “essences” exist in our minds, we perceive the world according to these categories, but they’re not determined by science. Science can’t tell us what is or isn’t a mountain, it doesn’t care. It can tell us what materials and elements it’s made of, or how it came to exist, but it doesn’t classify what is or isn’t a mountain—people do that. It is a human definition. There are many such human definitions that are incompatible with science. Like the concept of a person. Since our concept of a person has too many weird intuitive properties, it has to be eliminated from science. In Star Trek, when they beam someone down to a planet from a spaceship, supposedly that’s done by copying the person’s cells, deleting the person, and then, at the speed of light, reconstituting them somewhere else. No physical object in the universe could be deleted and pasted somewhere else and be the same object. But our concept of personhood does allow for that to happen. Or consider that about every seven years, all the protoplasm in our bodies, the substance of our cells, is completely replaced. Are we the same physical object? That’s questionable. Are we the same person? Definitely. For this reason, the field of biology or physics doesn’t allow the concept of personhood to exist. While it’s fine for us, the intuitive properties that our minds assign “person” can’t exist in a natural inquiry into the world. Two other such concepts: male and female. In most instances, the intuitive concepts of sex and gender make sense. But there are some cases where we loose our intuition. Like some of the questions I posed to you earlier. There is not a single category—hormone levels, chromosomes, reproductive organs, height, etc.—where there is a clear and simple binary for everyone. Intersex conditions naturally exist, and medical procedures can create them to treat gender dysphoria. That is not to say that the categories of “man” and “woman” are inherently irrational or wrong. They were obviously constructed by us to group together the majority of people. But science does not categorize anything, not even reproductive organs, as either “male” or “female.” We do that. These are human definitions, and therefore malleable. What trans and other gender-diverse people are saying is: These rigid, strictly binary categories don’t work for us. It leaves us out in the cold. Let’s expand these definitions beyond what type of gamete you produce, and recognize trans identities as real. And of course, they are real. They already exist. If a scientist invents a taxonomy for two separate categories, and subsequently discovers that not everything fits neatly into either box, it is the classification  that must be updated, not the other way around. Reality cannot be rewritten to satisfy an epistemological construct. A scientific classification must always be constructed so as to encompass reality. If your definitions of men and women are solely defined by a narrow binary, it is unfit for purpose. Irrespective of your feelings, transgender and intersex people exist. Thus any definition of gender (or sex) which excludes them is simply unfit for purpose. What is a woman? We get to decide. Trans women are women, just as much as cis women are. Trans men are men, just as much as cis men are. And non-binary people are people, just as much as cis people are. It’s time to start treating them like it. Some people have a problem with that, but truth hurts sometimes. Closing In 1968, Gore Vidal published a novel with a trans woman as the main character. It holds up surprisingly well. Vidal said he didn’t feel as though he wrote it himself. One morning he was just sitting in his apartment and heard “an otherworldly voice” say, “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.” “I felt like a medium,” Vidal recalled. When Myra Breckinridge hit bookstores, it caused an uproar in conservative circles. A television presenter even threatened to punch Vidal “in the goddamn face.” None of that would have surprised Myra, though. As she says in the book, people like that “are reactionary in the truest sense: the unfamiliar alarms them and since they have had no experience outside … their ‘peer group,’ they are, consequently, in a state of near-panic most of the time, reacting to almost everything.” I will leave you with my favorite quote from Myra: The   fluidity   which   I   demand   of   the   sexes   is   diametrically   opposed   to   Mosaic solidity.   Yet   I   am   right,   for   it   is   demonstrably   true   that   desire   can   take   as   many shapes   as   there   are   containers.   Yet   what   one   pours   into   those   containers   is always   the   same   inchoate   human   passion,   entirely   lacking   in   definition   until what   holds   it   shapes   it.   So   let   us   break   the   world’s   pots,   and   allow   the   stuff   of desire to flow and intermingle in one great viscous sea… Happy Pride month, by the way.