They have an affinity
This is the kind of labyrinth of circular reasoning people get themselves into when they decide reality is all in the mind.
Women are all totally different, there is no one thing that defines them, they can be anything, everything, nothing, they can be dandelion fluff or the scent of grilled mushrooms or a dream someone had but doesn’t remember – you can’t pin them down, you can’t say what they are, they are infinite – except for just this one magically exempt item: they all have an affinity with being members of the category woman.
A member of the audience asks: But if you can’t define woman, if they are all different, then what does “the category woman” mean?
Patiently, our sage replies – Women are all totally different, there is no one thing that defines them, they can be anything, everything, nothing, they can be dandelion fluff or the scent of grilled mushrooms or a dream someone had but doesn’t remember – you can’t pin them down, you can’t say what they are, they are infinite – except for just this one magically exempt item: they all have an affinity with being members of the category woman.
We may be here some time.
Most people are sadly vulnerable to this sort of “argument”. It identifies that there is no prototype that works for all uses/senses/applications of a word, and from that it concludes that the word straight up doesn’t refer. It’s also vaguely similar to a Sorites in that the argument proceeds from the observation that a space is continuous, and from that it concludes that the space is misunderstood/miscategorized/misnamed.
It’s poor reasoning, of course. Tables and chairs both exist, as do beards and heaps, male and female, man and woman, blue and red, ten-ish and noon-ish, etc. That there are spectra and vague concepts and cluster concepts and continua does not invalidate any of that. The linguistic/psychological/philosophical problem to chew on is how those concepts work and interact, not whether they refer at all.
Nullius, that is spot on, and most of the things you mentioned – tables, chairs, birds, heaps – are actually more nebulous than woman. Woman isn’t actually a nebulous category; it is quite simply an adult human female. But there are many ways of being a woman, so the fact that I am a scientist and a playwright, that I like poetry and hate opera, that I rarely wear pink, don’t wear high heels, and have long hair…none of these can categorize woman. Make up and nail polish cannot categorize woman, because not all women wear them, and wearing them cannot make you a woman when you are not.
The ability to bear children is shared by females of all species, and this is a constant, which is not negated by the fact that some women cannot bear children from infertility or other reason. That doesn’t alter the reality, because in theory, they would be able to bear children in the absence of whatever condition of body or mind prevents them from doing so.
They are playing a tricky game. Using the feminist ideals that women can be many different things, and we shouldn’t be restricted to a narrow definition of womanhood, they are arguing that there is, in fact, nothing that determines who is a woman. This is probably as ridiculous to most people as it is to us, but there are people who will be convinced not only that the argument makes sense, but that it is feminist and empowering.
Who decided that the category “woman” is now anyone that has an affinity with the category women, and no longer simply, an adult human female? When was this decided? And most importantly, why? Why this specific category and not any other one?
Imagine if you woke up one day and it was suddenly decided that the category “bat” is now anyone that has an affinity with the category bat, and no longer simply, a flying mammal of the order Chiroptera. Immediately you’d think: who the hell decided that? When did this happen? And most importantly, why? Who does this change benefit, and how? What’s the point?? Has, like, some new group of people emerged who have decided they want really really badly to be seen as batpeople? Is that what this is about? (Batmen are all over the media these days after all. There’s Batwomen and Batgirls now, too. And by the sound of things, these Batpeople are portrayed as very interesting, appealing, rich, powerful and sexy characters in the media. I can definitely see the appeal.) So, like I can imagine these Batpeople have formed a movement and gained political power and are exerting it to change the definition of “bat” so that they can all be affirmed as the Batman they feel they are inside, right? That it’s their human/chiropteran right to be affirmed as bats?
So are we all obligated to affirm all batpeople as bats, or is it ok to tell these people to grow the fuck up and take off that ridiculous cape?
It’s also an argument which resembles a generous and open call for recognizing variations and nuances — which trans activism shamelessly exploits. If you pin the definition of “woman” down too narrowly, you miss the minorities. You’ve accidentally left out black women, or women with hysterectomies … or trans women.
What would it mean to have a deep, strong identification with womanhood, but be incapable of defining what is meant by that? I’m reminded of a book I read by Oliver Sacks, who wrote about some patients who had brain disorders which eliminated their “sense of space”(?) — the knowledge of where the parts of one’s body are when one is not looking. It’s an aspect of self so basic that nobody thought of it as separate until there were cases where its existence was indicated by its absence. A woman’s arms and legs would flail around randomly while she looked at the speaker, without any awareness on her part. She notices the movement, it stops. We can prevent it from happening in the first place, because we don’t have a brain tumor which is infringing on a particular area of the brain.
The Sense of Being a Woman is apparently supposed to resemble our sense of knowing where our body is in space. It’s not necessarily attached to body parts. It’s a sense about body parts which can get out of whack. But the problem here is that the analogy requires a mismatch between body and body-sense. Sacks could never have described the syndrome by saying that our “sense of space” is our sense of space is our space, and if we feel our arm is not moving, it isn’t. If we feel we’re not a man, we aren’t.
Doesn’t work.
Sastra: proprioception. Good analogy.
And yet I don’t hear black women or women with hysterectomies screaming about the definition of woman as adult human female. Why? Because that definition actually includes them, no matter what the transwomen say. The only humans left out of the definition are people who are not female – in other words, men.
As a woman who has had a hysterectomy, I do not see any need to redefine woman to include me. It already does.
Thompson’s reasoning just seems so disingenuous, because physical reality is obviously very important to trans people.
Perhaps there are some exceptions — in a large population, there are sure to be at least some — but as far as I’ve seen, every person who comes out as trans makes at least some change to their physical presentation to conform to the general characteristics and/or cultural standards for their identified gender. At a minimum, they’re dressing differently, using (or ceasing the use of) makeup, changing their hairstyle, etc. Many are taking hormones to change their physical characteristics, or, if they’re too young for that, puberty blockers to at least prevent changes that would otherwise occur. Some, of course, have surgery to alter their bodies. In fact, being denied such medical interventions can cause great distress and, we’re told, lead to suicides.
So it’s a little jarring to be told now that oh no, there’s no particular characteristics that define “woman.” Ignore all those things that many (most?) trans women do to create or simulate physical characteristics of “cis women” that are so vital to their psychological well-being and self-concept.
I presume that the reason for this little dance is that people like Thompson fear that acknowledging that there are physical components to the category “woman” would invite a discussion of what (if anything) is “enough” physical change for a trans woman to qualify.
It’s as though they’re saying, “Woman are people who have ticked the box ‘woman.’ Ticking the box indicates nothing except which box you have ticked. We can draw no conclusions about you except that you ticked that box.”
But no one (not even them!) thinks that being a woman is only a matter of selecting a meaningless, empty category.
(Nor does anyone actually believe that sexual attraction is based on what label people have chosen to identify themselves with.)
It all gets kind of hilarious after awhile.
It’s not as though that’s what they’re saying. That is exactly what they’re saying.
They do as they say it. If that sounds ridiculous, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s just how compartmentalization works.
And what they don’t get is, what that leaves out is…it’s not ticking a box, it’s being told it from birth onward. We don’t remember being told it from birth onward, but we can tell we were told it from birth onward, because we’ve always known it. We are told it, and we are told the rules about it, as are men about being men. Our parents may tell us very open-ended “you can be what you want to be” rules, but the larger culture tells us a whole huge mass of different things, and many of them are not open-ended at all. The larger culture tells female people our first duty is to be cute or hot, it tells us we’re second best, it tells us we’re weak, it tells us we’re subject to violence from male people…it tells us a lot of things, not personally and directly but in the form of advertisements and sitcoms and movies and songs and all the women we ever see and on and on.