Materially Female in the Age of Self-Identified Womanhood

What is a woman? I don’t actually know either. Maybe a house with appliances, i.e. sexual organs, which now may include penises. The following simplified definitions illustrate at least four gendered states identified by Trans-activists:

Cisgender woman — female living as woman Cisgender man — male living as man Transgender woman — male living as woman Transgender man — female living as man

Alternate definitions of woman are described as “gender critical” and discussed in quiet corners, demurely and delicately.

Feminism and legal ramifications of the State’s understanding of sex and gender are causing women to redefine themselves.

Ain’t I a woman? is a rhetorical question (presumably) posed by Sojourner Truth during her infamous American speech. Her obvious answer: yes, because she explained that she had the lived-in female body to prove this true. Truth’s female body would no longer be sufficient to define her as a woman, due to new terminology from Trans-activists. The Trans Movement has divided womanhood into categories: there are cisgender women or women who were assigned female, and there are transwomen or women who were assigned male. Some are convinced that both are the same, but I am having trouble finding commonalities with any of these labels as they are defined.

There are numerous material differences that make cisgender women, i.e. females assigned female at birth, more related to transmen, i.e. females who, after being assigned female at birth, cosmetically, surgically and/or hormonally seek to mimic males. Growing sentiment has made it difficult to understand the material differences the human body doesn’t allow us to erase cosmetically and technology hasn’t quite allowed us to design.

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter”: Sojourner Truth’s speech is mired in wit and incredulity.

Truth may be incredulous to know that I, as a 21st century American female, am no longer sure how to answer her question. Whether I am a woman is gate-kept by “this thing in the head,” as she humorously called intellect, or the war of words among those free with leisure to exploit and impose on the rest of us definitions about our lives, and not by the incurred bodily realities of being female, and thus a woman, an embodied state which Truth vigorously defined in her speech.

If you were born with a vagina and breasts, which are like unwanted beacons that attract males, you know what liabilities female embodiment can cause; Truth was intrinsically aware of this as well. If you have these parts, you didn’t choose them. You were just lucky enough to land on one side of one of life’s many coins flipped just for you: male-female, alive-dead. Before a fetus has thought, self-knowledge or reason to self-identify, its body becomes male or female (this is visible at 12–16 weeks on fetal bodies in utero). No one has pronounced you (the fetus) as such, no one denies that you are this, you have no capacity to question this physical maturation because a fetus has no language and discourse is not incantation that changes material instantiations, and no one has named you in service of your bodily developments. Your life has no other rationale except becoming a male or female human (and exceptionally rarely a mutation of the healthy human form), a process which lasts no more than thirty years, and is then sustained for often up to sixty additional years, assuming death is the end of this process of human becoming.

Humans are large land mammals with a lot to do during their long lifespans, not least of all is producing more of themselves, by choice, accident or, more often, impulse. We’d like to assume that we have enough self-obsession in the age of social media to disavow familial reproduction entirely, but not quite yet. It is less conventional to suggest that people in their teens or twenties would even want children or families. Regardless, fertility and reproduction is an important topic to understand about our human bodies. It’s important to teach humans how we reproduce with our bodies. It is specifically important that humans with high reproductive costs, those with healthy uteri, ovaries and vaginas, are provided with as much factual, practical information on how to manage their reproductive costs over their lifetimes. Those humans born with healthy penises and sperm have scant reproductive costs, save for those financial costs fairly recently enshrined in legal statutes making males liable for their offspring.

A female human, unlike her male counterpart, and like most other female animals, has particularly high reproductive costs that nature has bestowed upon her. Male human reproduction does not come with the risks of death, bodily disfigurement as in cases involving trans-vaginal mesh and forced hysterectomies, or the encumbrance of lifelong ill health. Females don’t choose whether to incur reproductive costs. The consequences of reproduction cannot be muddled for females and must be expressed plainly and openly so that females may have freedom to plan their lives, as males can, and their own destiny, regardless of identity or sexuality.

Eggs or sperm must be personally produced by a healthy human for fertilization to ensue. That trans people can only provide one side of this equation is accepted as fact. Fertility, what is given by healthy sex organs alone, is important to human identity, though eschewed by gender and sexuality. While it’s generally accepted that trans-identified people will naturally accept infertility as a cost of medicalized treatment, it is unreasonable to believe this because they are human.

A popular transgender woman, Gigi Gorgeous, shares her struggles with fertility caused by changes in her sexual organs due to long-term hormonal treatments and her desire to save her sperm for her female partner’s eggs. Human fertility requires healthy sexual organs and sexed experiences differ for males and females, regardless of gender or sexuality preferences. Gigi and her partner are both women, yet separated by reproductive costs. Womanhood now includes issues related to sperm production, penis and scrotal function which is a historic redefinition of human experience that excludes females.

Identifying sex is simpler than various iterations of gender and sexuality.

This age old story of the birds and bees is becoming complicated by notions of sex, gender, and sexuality which we’d like to separate from the human bodies they inhabit. Let’s unmuddy those waters real quick: Sex is the inborn tools given to bodies, our sexual tools which when combined with their counterparts under healthy circumstances bear the capacity to produce more humans. Gender is the window-dressing we put on these tools because in and of themselves they may not appear particularly appetizing and for some even the idea of reproduction must be veiled. Sexuality is the stories we tell ourselves about what we do with our tools vis-a-vis other people’s tools, and the agreements we have about these stories constitute convention. It sounds simple enough.

We can’t linguistically de-sex our bodies, though parents are trying, even if we wanted to begin by talking about the social implications of sexuality or gender first. Whatever I choose to call myself, I am materially female regardless. I had no choice in the matter.

(This is a video link to Jazz Jenning’s consultation with Dr. Salgado on TLC’s I Am Jazz where Jazz’s lack of sexual maturation, due to transgender medical treatment, is discussed. The clip was removed perhaps because of recent controversy over Dr. Salgado’s reputation.) Unlike Gigi Gorgeous, not all transgender women have fertility options. Sexual maturation occurs during puberty and in healthy cases, results in reproductive potential. Pre-puberty, early interventions in transgender treatments can effectively de-sex bodies, rendering sexual organs dysfunctional and the individual infertile.

We can surgically and functionally de-sex our bodies, but our sex is apparently bone-deep, meaning forensic anthropologists sex the bones of our ancestors regardless of considerations for current definitions of gender or sexuality because the latter two are not measurable — gender and sexuality are more akin to ethereal subjectifications in the grander scheme of the human specie.

Healthy females are frequently reminded that sex is a matter of material reality. Every bloody month, their body insinuates that they are fertile, healthy and expending eggs. Female fertility is in high demand and costly. Females are the ones who have the lonely surprise of realizing that another human is growing inside them, and will continue to grow until it comes out of a hole that seems quite too small, which could be a deadly health hazard in the making. Females can be prosecuted for how they treat their bodies, litigated against when it comes to the human that exists in their bodies, charged for murder if that human is dead, whether or not the female consented to her body being used.

There is evidence to demonstrate that I am a female, but no evidence that I belong to womanhood because womanhood is obtained through self-identification. I have nothing to prove that I have anything in common with self-identified womanhood. When we say transwomen are women, we are saying women, as newly defined in the 21st century, can now get themselves pregnant. We are also saying that women’s reproductive costs differ. But, that isn’t true is it? Transwomen can get cisgender women pregnant; cisgender women cannot get transwomen pregnant. Specifically, a fertile healthy transwoman could get me pregnant because I am a cervix-having, vagina owner and not because someone calls me a woman. That means we are not the same and perhaps because of this, I am the one who is no longer a woman because I never chose to claim the title in the first place. I live as a female and don’t understand the new standards of living as a woman, making me not even cisgender by self-identification standards.

To adopt the current style of language use, I may have to cede any claim to the title of “woman” to transwomen and others vocally committed to womanhood, and adopt “transman,” as it more accurately represents the life I was materially born into: i.e. a female’s life who is not woman. Transmen, as I understand it, are female and never agreed to the ramifications of being female, they are the only men to experience menstruation (which I have in common with them). They breast(or chest, though it is specifically mammalian breasts that produce infant nourishment, not chests)feed their young, gestate and give birth to their genetic offspring, and thus have all the attendant reproductive costs and characteristics as me, without ever electing to adopt being materially female. Both transgender women and cisgender women choose to be women. If a woman is defined by this choice and not specifically as a vagina owner and a cervix-haver, an unwilling owner of breasts and dainty wrists, who is inundated with the overwhelming share of the reproductive costs of human animals writ large, then I may no longer be a woman.

I may not be a woman in the same way as a transwoman is a woman because I cannot get other women pregnant with my body no matter how healthy and fertile I am, and I may not be a transman, because I do not identify as a man. My bodily characteristics and experiences are in common with transmen because they are female, not non-women or men.

I return to the idea that someone on Medium offered, that “women’s bodies are houses.” I appreciate this for its poetic value, but let’s talk about real estate. The taste market determines housing values. If women’s bodies are houses, they are show houses in a real estate market that is in great flux, unsure about how to price its equity, where people come and peek in and decide how and what to do with the walls and the ceilings, squatting in rooms without consent, even renaming parts of the house, claiming other parts for themselves unjustly, or deciding to demolish the housing structure altogether, while the house itself cannot lock its own doors and has no agency.

I’d ask that the author retool their metaphoric language, explicitly stating that a woman’s body is her temporary house as long as she lives and that house requires upkeep, repairs, protection from graffiti, explicit rights to exist as private property by the State; it must endure the terrors of environmental upheavals that it cannot escape and eventually crumbles into the dirt leaving no evidence of its foundation, her wants or needs, or history.

In its fleeting nature as an impermanent object of variable desire, a woman’s body is indeed like a house. Since being female does not make me a woman, my last option in naming my body is as my corporeal dwelling; I sleep in it, I eat in it, I’ll die in it, and there’s nothing I can do about it.