Our shared drivel
Let’s read the LGBT Foundation’s guide to watizzawoman.
There are as many ways of being a woman as there are women in the world.
There is so much that unites all women: our shared joys, our unique experiences, and the challenges we face in a patriarchal world. These are often increased and impacted by our other identities such as race, sexuality, and disabilities. We are all multifaceted people who go beyond a simple sentence summarising womanhood. A rigid, simplistic definition both limits and reduces our womanhood.
No it doesn’t, the same way it doesn’t reduce our humanity to say we are humans. A definition is just a definition; it’s not a biography or a public relations statement or an advertisement or a memoir. Of course “adult human female” doesn’t say all there is to say about particular women: it’s not intended to. Purple prose doesn’t change that.
A woman is someone who identifies as a woman.
No, that’s wrong. A woman who is brain-dead and can’t identify as anything is still a woman. What sex you are is an impersonal fact, not a mental state.
Cis women and trans women are women – it’s as simple as that.
No, it isn’t. The simple bit is “a woman is an adult human female.” Insisting that men who have fantasies of being women are in fact women is the complicated bit, and it’s wrong.
Old but interesting Twitter thread on the ‘cis women and trans women’ language:
https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1545473625578278912
How can one ‘identify as’ something, if the word is as meaningless as this? ‘I identify as someone who identifies as the thing which I identify as.’
And, of course, this is really just kicking the can down the road, because they don’t actually define “identify” in any meaningful way, so they leave the definition undefined. Common usage of identify is (ha) transitive, in which you identify some other thing or person as having specific characteristics, and thus as belonging to some category. A witness might identify the perpetrator of a crime; a scientist might identify some fossils as belonging to a specific type of dinosaur,. The whole point is that you use the definition of the thing to identify the thing.
So to define ‘woman’ as ‘someone who identifies as a woman’, you’re saying that a woman is someone who meets the definition of a woman, which is someone who meets… ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Cars can mean different things to different people.
To some they are simply objects that are used to move from a to b or tools for work; for others they can represent the joy and thrill of speed or competition; for many they are simply objects to own but for others they are trusted friends or members of the family.
Horses are not cars