Conservatives do not know what a woman is. I know this because they keep asking people to define it for them. Famously Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked the question of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. On the other hand, conservatives do not ask what a man is. That seems sexist.
Because conservatives are confused about gender, I will help them out. Let us start with the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines “woman” as
“an adult female person”
That is both concise and unhelpful. I think people can agree on “adult” — the mature stage of the lifecycle. Although, when that starts is open to discussion. In traditional societies, a person becomes an adult after puberty. In the western legal canon, a person usually reaches adulthood at 18.
In the US, there are a variety of ages. To sign a contract, or die for your country, you have to be 18. To drink or smoke, you have to be 21. And when it comes to crime, minors can be tried as adults. The youngest on record was Nathaniel Abraham, who in 1999 was tried as an adult and convicted of murder at 11.
”Person” is a human being. In most societies, that means someone who is born. Traditional religions imbue a fetus with “personhood” at the “quickening” stage of pregnancy — aka the “ensoulment”. In the US, back under Roe, the standard was “viability.” Now conservatives would like the measure to be conception. Regardless, we all agree that after birth, a person is merely a member of the species Homo sapiens.
So the crux of the definition rests on how you define “female.” Here is Merriam-Webster again. They say “female” is
“of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs.”
At this point, conservatives would like to close the conversation, point fingers, and say, “I told you so.” However, their high-fiving is premature. Consider the word “typically” — which is shorthand for “most of the time.” Take the phrase, “blacksmiths are typically men.” It is both accurate and non-exclusionary. There are women blacksmiths.
Dictionaries are not encyclopedias. They need to keep definitions brief. And in doing so, they need to take shortcuts by saying things like “typically.” Mostly, that is reasonable. But it keeps the door open for a more nuanced definition.
For instance, most people would consider a woman who has had a total hysterectomy to remain a woman — even though she does not have the “capacity to bear young or produce eggs.” Some people are born with female genitalia but are incapable of producing eggs or giving birth — society still considers them to be women.
The conservative could then play what they consider their argument-crushing card — women lack a “y” chromosome. Wrong again. Some people are born with Swyer’s syndrome. Here is an explanation of the condition.
“Girls with Swyer syndrome have an XY chromosomal makeup (as boys normally do) instead of an XX chromosomal makeup (as girls normally do). Despite having the XY chromosomal makeup, girls with Swyer syndrome look female and have functional female genitalia and structures including a vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes.”
Further:
“Because they appear female on the outside, babies with Swyer syndrome are usually raised as girls and develop a female gender identity.”
However: “Girls with Swyer syndrome lack sex glands (ovaries).”
Then there are people who are born “intersex” — once known as hermaphrodites, the term is now antiquated and insulting. Essentially these are humans born with a combination of sexual expressions. They could have one ovary and one testis. Sometimes they are born with neither a penis nor a vaginal opening.
The condition can arise from rare sex chromosome combinations such as XXY, known as Klinefelter syndrome - or XXXY, XXXXY, and XYY, known as Klinefelter variants. The point is that chromosomes may “typically” correlate with gender, but not always.
So far, we have only considered the physical expression of gender — morphology and chromosomes. That does not take into account the psychological aspect. What makes someone the gender that they are? To my core, I feel that I am a man. And I do not have to look in my pants to confirm it. It is innate to me.
My “maleness” is mental. If you got rid of my physical body and hooked my brain up to a life support machine, I would still be a man. And it seems reasonable to me that someone born looking like me could feel just as absolutely that they are a woman. It is also none of my business.
Legally, there is no consistent definition of a woman. Red states pass laws saying that your gender is what it says on your birth certificate. New York, on the other hand, defines it thus:
“Gender” includes actual or perceived sex, gender identity, and gender expression including a person’s actual or perceived gender-related self-image, appearance, behavior, expression, or other gender-related characteristics, regardless of the sex assigned to that person at birth.
Federal civil rights laws do not need a definition of “woman” — or “man”. Because while politicians enacted those gender-related laws to bring equality to women, they do not explicitly prohibit bias against women per se. They make bias on the basis of gender, in toto, illegal — not just bias against a specific sex.
Aside: Ruth Bader Ginseberg’s genius in promoting women’s equality was to do so by arguing cases in which men were the victims of discrimination. She realized the all-male court would empathize better if they could relate to the victims. She also promoted the word “gender” over “sex” — so the Justices would not get distracted.
Gender does raise some considerations. Take the trans woman swimmer Lia Thomas. Conservatives say that growing up with male hormones gave her an unfair advantage. Her defenders point out that although she won, she did not break records. I confess I go back and forth on the issue. And would welcome thoughts on the matter in the comments.
Regardless, it is a distraction. Conservatives do not give a damn about women’s swimming. They pick something to blow out of proportion and rile the base — just as they have done with the medical and psychological treatment of teens with gender dysphoria.
Politicians should never decide on medical protocols. It is cynical and inflammatory to call sex reassignment surgery (SRS) “genital mutilation”. Ripping out a girl's clitoris to satisfy some atavistic sexist tradition has nothing to do with medical procedures giving psychological relief to people whose gender identity does not conform with their appearance.
Besides, teens rarely get SRS. A study by Komodo Health showed medical insurance had paid for just 56 gender dysphoria genital surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2021 — with maybe a few more paid out of pocket. In 2021 doctors performed 282 gender dysphoria mastectomies, prescribed puberty blockers to 1,390, and treated 4,231 with hormone therapy. This is out of a total population of more than 26 million youths aged between 11 and 17.
The trans population is minuscule. The DSM-5 estimates that about 0.005% to 0.014% of people assigned male at birth (roughly one in 10,000) and 0.002% to 0.003% of people assigned female at birth (two or three in every 100,000) are diagnosable with gender dysphoria.
To make banning transgender care a cornerstone of your political philosophy is sadism. To badger people to define “woman” is cynical hyperbole. To those horrible people, I offer my definition of a woman.
A woman is a person who identifies as a woman.
I suppose there are a few men who identify as women for some nefarious purpose, but that number is so vanishingly small it can be dismissed as irrelevant. And in the rare case where a man masquerades as a woman to commit a crime, the criminal justice system can deal with him as they would with any other criminal.