#what is a woman

[saint-augustines-pears]

Actually, no, we should know what a woman is. If you’re going to challenge a term, you have to come up with a new definition. If we are going to have a rational conversation, all terms must be defined.

If woman doesn’t mean adult female human, what does it mean? If you’re getting defensive reading this, that’s a problem. You should be able to know what you’re arguing for. You should be able to tell people what you’re arguing for. Otherwise, what the fuck are you even doing? Why are you arguing about something that, if undefined, logically does not exist?

I would love for everyone to be happy. Delusion is not happiness. I need to know whether this is delusion or not.

[regularwomen]

You say you feel like a woman. Why does that make you a woman?

There are people who feel they are animals. Why aren’t they animals?

There are people who feel like they are fictional characters. Why aren’t they fictional characters?

There are people who feel like they are people of colour. Why aren’t they people of colour?

Why is womanhood uniquely available for parody and mockery? Why is woman a term that can’t be strictly defined? What is it you feel that is inherent to womanhood? I don’t think most women feel anything like that, does that make them not women? Are you somehow an expert on womanhood to the point that you can say that what you feel is related to being a women, despite not being one?

What is a woman?

Why does that make you a woman?

[sailor-rowling]

Never forget!

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Reminder that "What Is A Woman", the best and most important documentary of the past year, is still available to watch for free on Twitter here, with over 180 million views in the past 10 days.

[elierlick]

I spoke with NBC about how What Is a Woman? inspired a new form of far-right pseudo-documentary. Deceptive editing that aims to delegitimize the existence of trans people isn't innovative, but it is more widespread now than ever (link)

[radsplain]

a TRA talking point about "cis privilege" that drives me absolutely insane is the idea that "cis" women (ie. adult human females), who "ID with the gender that aligns with their birth sex, have never had to think critically about their identity as women and take their womanhood for granted, while trans women, who do not have the same privilege, have had to critically think about and dissect their identity as women, and therefore understand the nuances and complexities of womanhood more intimately than cis women ever will."

it's just completely nonsensical, for multiple reasons.

firstly, the idea that trans women appreciate and understand their "womanhood" more intimately than "cis" women ever will is downright laughable when you realize that gender ideology is built upon a post-modern faith-based spiritual belief that identifying as something actually does indeed make you that thing. like by that logic, Rachel Delezol, who identifies as a black woman even though she's ethnically caucasian, understands and appreciates her identity as a black woman more than actual black women because she wasn't granted with "race privilege," despite being born as a white woman (this is also a funny parallel to how statistically, most "trans women" are white, heterosexual males; people who by all accounts are born with the epitome of privilege).

that besides, how can trans-identified males understand womanhood more than actual women, when they've never and will never know what it's like to be a woman (ie. adult human female), and all of the stages of development and embodiment that entails, from birth all the way until death? how does a trans-identified male appreciate his "womanhood" more than an actual woman, when, when asked how he knew he was even a woman in the first place, can only come up with sexist, regressive stereotypes that align with the fake, man-made, misogynistic version of womanhood we call "femininity"?

secondly, the insane idea that "cis" women haven't had to critically dissect or think about our "gender identity" and therefore don't appreciate or understand womanhood like trans women do is such a blatant form of gaslighting and rewriting of base reality.

the reality is, actual women do not "identify" as women. your first mistake was believing that we all buy into the dissociative, disembodied concept of "gender identity." your second mistake was believing that being a woman means being content with the sexist, regressive, misogynistic gender roles that have been placed on the female sex in the form of femininity. what makes women women is not identifying with harmful, patriarchal stereotypes of gender; it's being female. women don't "identify" as women any more than people identify as blonde or brunette, 5'2 or 5'6, far-sighted or near-sighted, etc. you either ARE those things or you aren't. you either ARE an adult human female or you're not. your body is EITHER oriented around producing large, immobile gametes (despite the lack or ability of proper functionality) or it's not. you either ARE a woman or you're not. we do not use the term 'woman' as a form of gender self-identification. we use it as a form of class identification and categorization to describe the material differences in humans based on biological sex. that's literally it.

women don't need to "appreciate" or "critically dissect" our existence as women to be women, because we simply ARE. end of.

[butch-reidentified]

“ask the average reader to guess whether a male or female wrote this based on the fact that the author used coarse language I bet they’ll tell you male 😏” this is what you sound like. that person clearly wasn’t even saying that women with body hair are disgusting, they were likening themselves to them, and condemning holding yourself and others to pedophilic beauty standards and you have to be reading it in the worst faith possible to have any other takeaway

yeahhh you're making shit up lmfao

post being referenced:

I never said he said women with body hair are disgusting. I never thought he said that; he was clearly trying to say that we're all just gross animals. If other people claimed he said that, talk to them. HOWEVER. he said "u are a nasty little slug too and having a vachina does not absolve u of that." I take issue with this specifically because radfems take a very "humans are just animals like any other" view. We do not believe "having a vagina" makes us superior or cleaner or less animalistic or whatever the fuck he was trying to say with that weird ass sentence.

my saying that any rando on the street would more than likely read that and assume it was written by a male is not about "coarse language" (this literally made me laugh out loud, so ty). have you looked at my blog?? it doesn't get much more "coarse language" than my writing 💀 you can say "this is what you sound like" all day, but you made that up completely while dozens if not hundreds of women knew exactly what I was referring to. Not that I actually believe that you were confused what I meant by that, but to be clear, his post reads as male because it reeks of porn-induced brainrot. "breedable 12 year old anime girls floating in a glass jar of formaldehyde waiting for some old man to come and fuck them and tell them they are so teeeeeeeeny tiny and worth it" specifically is simply not a turn of phrase (or even abstractified image) that would ever enter my mind in a million years, nor that of any woman I know. I've never seen a woman say something quite that far porn-rotted. not that it's never happened at all, but I've never seen it and I would bet my life it's exceptionally uncommon.

Everything within that image he painted is the polar opposite of how radfems see women/what radfems want for women. "Holding yourself and others to pedophilic beauty standards" - you mean the exact ones radfems speak out against relentlessly every single day??? Search my blog for terms like "female body hair," "shaving," "beauty myth," and the like, and tell me how on earth you came to the conclusion that I think women should shave or tweeze or laser or whatever a SINGLE hair even once in their entire lives. I don't shave my legs, which were wildly god-tier hairy BEFORE even I was on T. I don't shave my bush, I don't shave my armpits, I don't shave my mustache or the chin hairs cross-sex hormones gave me.

Radfeminism is opposed to every single thing that has to do with the gender construct. We absolutely do not have any requirements or expectations or criteria for womanhood beyond simply being a human + female. Like I said about viewing humans like any other animals, radfems see "woman = female human" the same way one means "doe = female deer." Woman is not a gender; it's a term referring simply to species (human) and to sex (female). That's it. No further expectations or criteria apply.

Before you try to argue that this definition excludes women who are infertile or intersex, let me be very clear about sex:

> "of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs"

"the sex that CAN" is crucial to defining female/male. the female body has biologically, genetically, and physiologically developed from before birth to support the POTENTIAL capability of producing large gametes (eggs aka ova). It is totally irrelevant if one has a medical complication that prevents her from actually producing those gametes; which gametes your body has clearly developed structurally and functionally to produce is what defines your sex, no matter what.

The fact that this is how we view "woman" and "man," as simply referencing one's sex and humanity - this is why we maintain that trans-identified males are men. Again, we don't see "man" as a gender in the slightest. We don't engage with the gender construct at all beyond our desire to dismantle it entirely so that everyone would be able to live free from those roles/stereotypes/expectations that are assigned on the basis of sex.

This makes it a ridiculous thing to assert that we have to "go so far to prove that trans women are actually men...." We do not feel that it requires any effort at all to say "a drake is a male duck, a buck is a male doe, a man is a male human." It CERTAINLY does not in ANY capacity require us to "reduce women" to that horrific sentence, or to "reduce women" at all. Is it "reducing" a doe to state that she is a female deer?

It also makes it ridiculous to insist radfems "dehumanize" women by using this definition - the definition which includes "human" as a non-negotiable criterion.

About the first of his two-part post pictured above, last but far from least: There will NEVER come a day when women - ESPECIALLY lesbians & ESPECIALLY extremely gnc lesbians - calling out misogynistic males for their behavior counts as "punching down." No matter how he identifies, how he dresses, where he works, what his talents are, what he likes/dislikes, his sexual orientation, or anything else, women (and again, lesbian women especially) do not hold institutional/systemic power over men.

as for the 10 foot pole part, I really couldn't care less what he meant or why, tbqh, because the supremely creepy pedophilic rant that made up the first part was the thing we all truly took issue with in that screenshot.

and let's not forget, this all started bc he called an ND woman the r slur for her critique asserting that he was appropriating a type of religious trauma specific to the sex-based oppression of women/girls, and profiting from doing so. personally, as a human female with a history of such religious trauma, while this has been resolved for approximately 7 years in my case, I still vehemently object to any male claiming it as his own for profit. especially if said profit is hoarded rather than given back to victims of such trauma.

NOTE: this answer was written while I'm barely staying conscious. I will come back to edit/clean up a bit later after getting some rest 😴

[anamericangirl]

I watched Matt Walsh's film What Is A Woman? and if you believe there is nothing unique about a woman and anyone can just wake up one day, say they're a woman, and then be a woman, and there is no universal agreed upon defining characteristics of a woman and a woman is whatever anyone imagines them to be, then you are saying a woman is not a real thing. Women do not exist in reality. We are products of imagination.

[mandyfem]

TIM defines "woman" for us.

[hestiasroom]

At first I wasn’t particularly inclined to watch Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman? I know the answer to that one already. Everybody does.

A woman is someone who isn’t allowed a final say on what a woman is. Pretending not to know this — that defining “woman” is incredibly complex and bewildering — is an age-old tactic deployed by non-women, usually in order to excuse treating us badly. 

Are women fully human? Do they have souls? What do women want? Far greater men than the host of The Matt Walsh Show — Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud — have tried and failed to answer these questions (they could always have asked an actual woman, but first they’d have had to establish whether women can think, and then they’d have been back to square one).

As Matt himself says at the start of his film, “I like to make sense of things. Making sense of females is a whole other matter”, noting that “even astrophysicist Stephen Hawking” was “completely dumbfounded by women”.

Even astrophysicist Stephen Hawking! Honestly, ladies, if the author of A Brief History of Time hasn’t a clue what the hell we are, what hope do any of us have? 

The thankless nature of the task may be why the twenty-first century version of The Woman Question has now been allocated to those somewhat lower down the male intellect hierarchy: Edinburgh fringe comedians, disgraced MPs, right-wing shock jocks, Owen Jones and Billy Bragg. 

The proposal that a woman is anyone who defines themselves as a woman — and that no woman may say anyone isn’t a woman — has led to a particularly unimpressive stage of the debate, one which can only be described as the Summa Theologica meets incels r us. 

On the bright side, it’s clear the men are bloody loving it. If you’re left-wing, it’s your chance to put those TERFs in their place after years of having to “do feminism” as part of the right-side-of-history package deal. If you’re right-wing, it’s your opportunity to own all those feminists who suggested female bodies weren’t inferior and that pink, fluffy ladybrains were a myth. As Walsh declares of his film, “the movie makes utter fools of educated elite liberals”. I’m guessing that’s the point. 

I confess to having known very little about Matt Walsh up till now. “I’m a husband, I’m a father of four, I host a talk show, I give speeches, I write books,” he tells us by way of introduction. Hey, that sounds nice! Alas, a quick perusal of his twitter account shows that he’s the kind of renaissance man who tweets things like “feminism is an ugly and bitter ideology” and “rapists love abortion. It helps them cover up their crime”.

He’s also the kind of man who, should feminists show themselves to insufficiently appreciative of his recent woman-defining efforts, tells us we would “rather be a victim than win the fight” and that we “just want to sit on the sidelines and whine”. He’s been, like, getting death threats due to his challenge to contemporary gender mores! Would you risk that, eh, feminists? What’s anyone ever done to you, JK Rowling, you massive coward? 

I first wrote about the problematic nature of a gender identity-based definition of women over eight years ago. Other women, such as Julie Bindel, were sounding the alarm far earlier, and with little support. I know we’re supposed to be eternally grateful to Matt for stepping into the breach. What a gent! As the Onion once put it, Man Finally Put In Charge of Struggling Feminist Movement (admittedly it’s a man who thinks feminism is an ugly and bitter ideology but hey, we can’t have everything). 

In any case, I gave in and watched Matt’s film, just on the off-chance I’d missed something (more fool me; I read Gender Trouble on that basis, and look where that’s got me). There was little in What is a woman? that I didn’t already know from the work of feminists themselves, but that’s no reason to discount it. What’s wrong with alerting the normies to the excesses of trans activism too? 

Walsh never acknowledges the role his own rigid beliefs play

Perhaps the most difficult thing about conveying the absurdities of extreme trans activism to anyone who hasn’t yet encountered it, is that you either sound as though you’re making it up (usually in order to “stoke moral panic”) or the person to whom you’re talking concludes you must have missed some essential point (it would indeed be horrific if teenage girls were having their breasts removed due to social contagion and “progressive” institutions were cheering it on, therefore it can’t be happening. There must be something else afoot).

One of the great things about Walsh’s film is that he shows, first, that harmful things are indeed taking place, and second, that there is no hidden meaning behind them. The therapists, surgeons, academics and politicians to whom he speaks don’t suddenly pull back the curtain and reveal, yes, this is the reason why it isn’t total bollocks to claim that no one really knows what sex anyone is. That moment never comes (and believe me, I’d have loved it if it had. Being a Known TERF is a pain in the arse).

Instead they say things like “a chicken has an assigned gender” and that the word truth is “condescending and rude”. Ha! Aren’t liberals ridiculous? At one point Matt interviews someone who identifies as a wolf (or some other animal. I got bored and went to the kitchen for a biscuit at that point). What’s striking is that you sense his interviewees know on some level that they’re bullshitting. That’s why a number of them end the interview early, citing Walsh’s alleged bad faith as the reason why. 

There are some genuinely moving sections to the film, such as the interviews with female athletes cheated out of prizes by the inclusion of males in the girls’ categories. The contribution from Scott Newgent, a trans man deeply concerned about the impact of medical transition on young females, was incredibly engaging. I could have watched a whole film on Newgent alone, as someone clearly driven by both personal trauma and compassion for others. 

So why, overall, did the film leave a bad taste? Am I just an “ugly and bitter” feminist, peeved that a man has come along and claimed a number of feminist observations as his own? Am I a purist, unwilling to accept any support from anyone whose views don’t align precisely with mine? 

I don’t think so. The problem for me is that Walsh never acknowledges the role his own rigid beliefs play in creating and perpetuating the current situation. 

He finds countless people convinced that the only way to avoid imposing harmful social norms on individuals on the basis of their sexed bodies, is to pretend we can’t define said bodies or impute any social meaning to them at all. Yet he does nothing to suggest one shouldn’t impose said norms, or that his own pink/blue fantasies of girlhood and boyhood might be leading those who don’t conform to feel they are somehow “wrong”. 

“Give my son a BB gun and that’s just about all the emotional support he needs,” he muses over a children’s party scene, all boys in blue jeans, all girls pink princesses. “My daughter on the other hand … I’ve heard people say that there are no differences between male and female. Those people are idiots.”

Hmm. I have three children, all biologically male, all of whom have played with dolls houses and worn dresses. Two of them have Frozen-style long blonde hair and I’ve never bought any of them a toy gun (nor have any of them asked for one). 

Women are caught between two forms of misogyny

According to Walsh’s own gender ideology, I’m on the slippery slope towards the erasure of any stable definition of “male” and “female” at all. This is the mirror image of the absurdities of trans activism. Both Walsh and the people he interviews conflate sex difference denialism with the rejection of gender stereotypes. He thinks we should suffer the stereotypes; they think we should suffer the surgery. Feminists believe we shouldn’t suffer either. 

There’s a particularly grim scene where Walsh attends a Women’s March, and delights in harassing female protestors who don’t want to give a precise definition of the word “woman”. Much as this reticence frustrates me, too, I know where it comes from. The polarised politics of the day has told these women they must choose between denying their sex and accepting an anti-choice, conservative vision of what it means to be an adult human female. It’s a vision Matt Walsh shares.

These women are caught between two forms of misogyny but to Walsh, it’s all “own the libs” fun and games. This man is not on our side, nor will he win over the women he lazily misrepresents as not knowing what’s good for them. 

At the end of the film, Matt returns home from his gender odyssey to his waiting Penelope. She is, of course, in the kitchen, and happens to be struggling with a pickle jar. 

“What is a woman?” he asks her.

“An adult human female — who needs help opening this!” she responds. Got it, ladies? He’ll defend our right to exist as a sex class, as long as we can all agree it’s the weaker one. 

In the end, I’m just so fed up with the machismo. Last year I spoke to one of the founders of Woman’s Place UK, who told me sex-based rights will ultimately be defended best by those in it for “the victory, not the glory”. The people, mainly women, often lesbians and women of colour, who do the dull, behind the scenes work of compiling data and challenging unfair practices one by one. The people who aren’t seeking to reimpose other, equally oppressive beliefs about sex and gender. 

It may be that What is a Woman? helps, by showing some still on the fence that the problem is real. Others, it may push in the other direction. Either way, women themselves won’t be thanked for their own hard work and significant risks. 

After all, that’s just what being a woman is.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

The documentary What Is A Woman is still presently viewable for free on Twitter, with 150 million views in the last 24 hours.

[whatisawoman]

you can leave womanhood. you can love womanhood. why make yourself miserable?

[elierlick]

Come to think of it, this technically meets the definition 💀

[radsplain]

every single person knows what a woman is, there is no confusion whatsoever, we all know what we’re talking about when someone says ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ and so on. it’s just that some people have committed themselves to being purposefully obtuse in the name of “inclusion and kindness” and “being a good liberal” and have therefore continued to try and convince (yes, convince) themselves that upholding the delusion and lie that men can be women is much more important than stating basic reality and fact, because god forbid! some men’s feelings might get hurt

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Matt: Male gametes. That’s what makes me male.

Michelle: No. No, your sperm don’t make you male.

Matt: Then what does?

Michelle: It’s a constellation.

Matt: In reality. In truth.

Michelle (confused): Whose truth are we talking about?

Matt: The same truth that says we’re sitting in this room right now, you and I.

Michelle: No. You’re not listening.

Matt: If I see a chicken laying eggs and I say that’s a female chicken laying eggs, did I assign female or am I just observing a physical reality that’s happening in the world?

Michelle: Does a chicken have gender identity? Does a chicken cry? Does a chicken commit suicide? Let’s frame it...

Matt: What’s that have to do with...

Michelle: Because you’re talking, you’re trying...

Matt: A chicken has sex, like any biological organism.

Michelle: A chicken has an assigned gender. But a chicken doesn’t have a gender identity.

Matt: So we “assign” female to chickens when they lay eggs? That’s a...

Michelle: We assume they’re female if they lay eggs.

==

It wasn’t so long ago that we were being told “NoBoDyS SaYiNg bIoLoGiCaL SeX IsNt rEaL”. Now they’re saying so out loud.

A licensed medical doctor and professor of pediatrics at Brown University who doesn’t think biological sex is observed or even real. Yet is allowed to advise, prescribe drugs to, and transition children based on the mental virus of postmodern social constructivism, and teach others the same.

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/mforcier

Michelle Forcier, MD, MPH has been in Rhode Island and at Hasbro Children’s Hospital since 2009. She is a Professor of Pediatrics, Assistant Dean of Medicine (Admissions) at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.