r/AskTransgender: What is a woman?
Don't let anybody tell you we're not just conscious minds in meat sacks.
I will be refraining from comment on whether it’s a net-positive for the rights of the people formerly known as women if society becomes too afraid or brainwashed to define ‘women.’ Here’s how r/asktransgender would respond to the question “What is a woman?”:
Information is always lost in the process of categorization. In the deepest reality there are not genders, there are ONLY individual humans. The question is do we value individual humans and allow them to live as they see fit, or do we attempt to hammer them into categories for our convenience and comfort? We must allow people to live and love and just BE as they see fit. They are conscious minds inhabiting meat sacks. The conscious mind is what has value, the meat sack is merely a vessel.
Favorite answer to this is looking to the side, placing an open palm to the side of my mouth like I'm about to tell someone a secret and say "heh hey guys, they don't know what a woman is"
Dismiss them in whatever way seems fitting and move on. (My favorite is "Fuck off with that bigoted shit." or "The opinions of a bigot are worthless.")
Honestly It is such a shit question - It is in bad faith. In a similar vain, what is a man? Unless your answer is really vague, you will just end up excluding and marginalising people.
I’ve never been asked this, but my answer is “Anyone who, in good faith, identifies as a woman.” I add the “in good faith” part to cover the notion, however ridiculous, of someone “pretending” to be a woman for some reason.
The criteria required to be a woman NEEDS to be all encompassing, otherwise the exceptions are, by definition, not women. So when people say it's fertility, then infertile women do not count as women. If it's some bs about how women are "set up" in a certain way reproductively, ask them what that actually means and how are people who don't have certain organs/eggs "set up" a certain way. Bodies are not manufactured. If chromosomes, then intersex women don't exist. And even with that, I counter it saying "so a person could pass as a woman, with no visible Adams apple, big breats, and a vagina, but yet their chromosomes can trump all of that?
If you want a real answer, womanhood is an extensionally defined set, and any attempt to create an intensional definition will result in misclassifying huge numbers of women
"A woman is a female adult human. Everything beyond that is a hotly debated topic because there are biological, social, personal and political aspects of womanhood that are quite complicated because our notion of gender is very ingrained in our society. If you want to read about it, Simone de Beauvoir is a very good start into gender studies - especially since she looks very thoroughly on the question of what a woman is. While I do not completely agree with her assessment, her contribution to the discourse can not be overstated. The problem I do have with it is her dichotomy between the us and the them as a strict dichotomy. I would argue that women are a distinct "other" in the constraints of a system. In Georg Simmels words, they are both "natives" while people who do not fit into the dichotomy are "strangers" or "queer". To patriarchal society, "queer" people are the actual problem, people who do not neatly fit into any category. Fortunately, feminism did push back against those strict boundaries (the feminine mystique is a good book that contributed to the progress). One of the early problems of feminism was their rather narrow implication of what a woman is. The legendary speech by Sojourner Truth 'Ain't I a woman?' exposes how narrow feminism is and serves as a reminder that womanhood is not seperated form other aspects of identity. For example, if we look at black history...." At some point, the person either enrolls in a gender studies course or walks away.
I'm a woman. Any definition that excludes me is wrong.
with a brick to the face
Honestly who cares
This is all part of the Age of Stupid, as Michael Moore christened it. The mind-in-a-meat-sack proposition is particularly out of date, a throwback to Cartesian mind-body dualism, the "ghost in the machine". Whatever happened to all that enlightened 20th century mindbody stuff? Which is not even new: eg tantric Buddhism has been around for 1500 years -- but clearly unknown to Rene Descartes, as well as to the first contributor of this lot. Who is clearly threatened by the idea of being more than a ghost in a meat machine: in warning others off such dangerous notions. One might even think it had something to do with sex: sexual body awareness that can't be fobbed off or fooled by artificial notions about gender.
"What is a man?" Good question. Why are we not discussing "what is a man"? Why is this all about women and their bodies?
Because the controversy boils down to what hyper-aggressive male paraphiliacs want. They are fantastic at disrupting any system that excludes them and they've created an army of destructive followers who parrot the garbage Eliza has listed in this post. (And more.)
No one cared about sad drag queens in bad makeup as long as they stuck to their own lane. No one cares now about "female to male transgenders" because they can't compete with men.
But the autogynephiles are a different breed altogether, highly focused, often quite accomplished, great at terrorizing people, and creating followers.