Guest post: The word “female” cannot be permitted any such polysemy
Originally a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject again.
It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that any recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or boys/men) and they do not feel the sort of dysphoria that would lead them to identify as trans.
In other words, there are in reality multiple senses in which someone can be a woman, of which the most common – sense 1 – is being a person born with a female body and not being trans; one much less common – sense 2 – is being a person born with a male body but being trans and identifying as a woman. Workable trans advocacy is based on advocating that senses 1 and 2 be treated as equivalent for most purposes, and that people who are women in senses 1 or 2 have equal human worth. Unworkable trans advocacy, e.g. the sort of thing that got Ophelia hounded off FtB for thinking, seems to rely on denying sense 1 entirely and insisting that all women are women because they identify as women. To me this seems like advocating for gay rights by claiming that everybody is straight.
This feeds over in several odd directions, one in particular being the claim that if a person is female in the identity sense, then their body is female, tout court, as being the body of a female person. This of course relies on ignoring that there’s a sense of male/female for bodies (bluntly, having tab A or slot B) which doesn’t have to map onto the sense of male/female for persons. This seems like a deliberately or unconsciously Orwellian move to disable the language – and it ignores the way languages work anyway. The word “head” has different senses as applied to a human body, a geographical feature (Beachy Head), a sexual act, a pint of beer, an organisation, or a steam engine, but this doesn’t cause any actual difficulties; yet the word “female” apparently cannot be permitted any such polysemy.
YES. Very much what I’ve been thinking.
Although, I don’t know if making “female” have those senses is workable. It’s not really polysemous: it’s opposites meaning the same thing (male parts can be female parts and vice versa). I think “male” and “female” just are binaries, like “up” and “down” can never be polysemous.
I would prefer male and female to refer strictly to physical facts. The terms aren’t a perfect binary, because there are intersex people and certainly, gender confirmation treatments can lessen unwanted maleness or femaleness. But I can’t think my way out of having a vagina. Gender and sex are not the same thing and I think using versions 1 & 2 of women is a recognition of that, while giving female two meanings loses it.
A lot of feminists don’t like the term female to be applied to humans often, because it is also used to discuss the sex of non-humans. But for that very reason, male and female are useful terms for discussing a reality separate from the brain-social-personality functions.
I think I’d prefer that “woman” carry the polysemy.
Male and female are biological categories – and biology being messy, it’s entirely possible for a man or a woman to have any combination of male or female chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, neural body maps etc. (Including “intermediate” and “neither” as options in addition to “male” and “female”.) Male and Female are binary classifications – but far too messy to apply to persons, rather than systems. Trans women are women who have enough male body systems to be unhappy and wish to change. That way, a penis is never a female organ, even if it is owned and operated by a woman. Local commenter Tigger is a man with a female body.
I’ve often seen people having a problem with the word ‘female’ when used as a noun – it is dehumanising to see the construction ‘men and females’. But not so much as an adjective, at least until recently.
If I couldn’t describe myself, as Alethea says, as a man with a female body, then what makes me trans?
I, too, would prefer that it is the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ which carry multiple meanings. Then we could continue to use ‘female’ and ‘male’ as adjectives to apply to biological parts and processes without confusion.
If we accept the new reasoning that says that because I perceive myself as a man, therefore everything I have and everything I do is male, then what does it mean to have a ‘male socialisation’?
No, I don’t accept the distortion of meaning of words that are too useful as they are.
‘Woman’ and ‘man’, however, are words that already, throughout history, have been used to apply to two groups of people with a great deal of overlap. We know that we cannot make any assumptions about someone who is introduced to us as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ beyond how the other person has likely been socialised (and not much, even then). Some people would have us make assumptions about their genitalia, but I think that they are weird to do so – I’ve never thought about the genitalia of other people unless I’ve been having sex with them, or changing their nappies. It simply doesn’t occur to me as relevant and I very much doubt that it occurs to most people, other than doctors, to speculate; unless they are planning to have sex with them (or change their nappies).
Without being told, there is no way to know which (if any) sexed bits someone has, and whether those bits ‘match’ the usual set of someone in their category. We’re actually aware of this, and demonstrate that awareness when we continue to refer to a woman as a woman, even when we know that she’s had a total hysterectomy and double mastectomy. We also cannot know which group(s), if any, someone else finds sexually and/or romantically attractive without them telling us.
My opinion is that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are biological categories that are useful to keep precise and distinct as adjectives to apply to bodies and their parts (including hormones). ‘Man’ and ‘woman’, however, are social categories, and are therefore flexible enough groupings to encompass people with biological bits that fall into either biological category (or both) or who lack any of them. As social categories, they say nothing about the personalities of the people so labelled; that is why we have words such as ‘androphilic’ or ‘gynephilic’ to describe their sexual orientation and ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to describe their presentation.
People who insist that social categories change biological ones are mistaken.
Then what exactly do they say?
At the bare minimum – which pronouns to use (if one’s language has gendered pronouns). Beyond that – depends on how differently one’s society treats men and women.
Bjarte Foshaug:
That is the question that we have been trying to answer, even though there are people out there calling feminists ‘TERFs’ for daring even to ask it. They want the word ‘woman’ to be entirely unexamined, and to apply without thought to anyone who desires the label (and to rather a lot of people who don’t).
What the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ denote varies from culture to culture, across time and distance. They don’t merely refer to the way a person feels; they also carry connotations about the way that person is treated by other members of society.
For example, read Do growing pains exist? in the Guardian, and note how, without any kind of self awareness, the author claims that for adolescent boys the cause of leg pain is deemed to be hormonal (lack of adequate testosterone) but for adolescent girls it must be psychological (fear of secondary school). That is the kind of rot which is endemic in the medical world. Most women get at least one psychological diagnosis before a physical disorder is properly recognised, leading to years, or even decades, of missed treatment; whereas most men get the correct diagnosis off the bat. My ‘psychological’ growing pains were, in fact, a congenital connective tissue disorder (finally diagnosed when I was 55).
Another example – one of my sons has a heart arrhythmia. It was diagnosed a few weeks after his first attack, when he was 17. My heart arrhythmia also started at the age of seventeen. It wasn’t diagnosed until thirty-two years later. Instead, I was diagnosed with ‘panic attacks’. I could go on (and on, and on…) and I can bet that every female-bodied person here, everyone deemed to be a woman by the system, can tell similar stories.
Women miss out on (amongst other things) medical care, educational opportunities, appropriate employment, fair pay, political appointments, status, respect and bodily autonomy, compared to men of the same social class. Much of what is currently being labelled ‘TERF’ is simply ‘cis’ women pointing out that transwomen are being treated the same way that their sisters have always been treated, and is not some kind of unique ‘transphobia’.