Phallocentric Womanhood

How “Woman” Cannot Be “Female” Without the Phallus’ Intrusion

Males (Transwomen) have more wisdom regarding womanhood because they are not female and therefore earned their rightful claim to be women.

Womanhood has been typically considered the unified reality shared by “women” or adult human females who grow from girls, through infanthood, childhood, pubescence to adulthood. Woman is a human condition based on this material embodiment within a female body. Typically, womanhood’s membership prerequisite is femaleness.

Redefinition of womanhood has been prompted by Transgender Rights Activists (TRAs). TRAs divided “women” into ciswomen (females, assigned female at birth, natal women, the neologisms abound) and transwomen (males, assigned males at birth, etc.).

To include males in the definition of “women,” the elements of female humans have been minimized as biologically essentialist.

Indeed that males and females are divided primarily by their dimorphic sex is a biological precept. Even TRAs have acknowledged, essentially, that trans women are not ciswomen, who are, by their own admission, females. Simplified, this would mean that transwomen (males) are not ciswomen (females) or what we already know instinctively: males and females are different because, at the very least, we learn early that only one of these types of people can birth other humans.

TRAs have patented and dissiminated phallocentric womanhood which maligns female bodies and privileges the penis, “girldick,” and cosmetic surgery or body modification as evidence of “woman.” Pallocentric womanhood goes so far as to exclude motherhood, something experienced by every single human because humans are formed in the female body (a mother). While not all women experience motherhood as mothers, every human being experiences motherhood because they are born of this biological circumstance referenced by this mammalian embodiment.

Phallocentric womanhood separates the female body from its natural formations and instantiations as a bearer of breasts and a uterus, vagina and clitoris, to name a few, and as the only human with the capacity to make life through gestation — this never insinuates that a woman has to use gestation, it only means that only she can have this potential and others might in fact use her for this. Phallocentric womanhood foregrounds chemical modification and hormonal use, cosmetic surgery, and genital mutilation as fundamental elements of womanhood. It refuses that the female body can be and often is untechnologized and that femaleness is not achieved by choice or any intervention other than nature and chance.

Phallocentric womanhood normalizes amenorrhea, which is the absence of menstruation in healthy adult females, because males cannot menstruate, therefore this abnormal condition is made a normal aspect of womanhood. It also deludes the uniqueness of female organs, asserting that the penis can become a clitoris or vagina, substantively denying how female organs function as integral parts within a female body.

Most often, the literal phallus, the penis, is considered a fundamental element of woman’s existence. In this sense, phallocentric womanhood excludes common female modes of existence that do not require a penis. Specifically, in the case of non-mothers and homosexual women, where the penis is never present but only exist a priori as the one whose sperm made her.

Phallocentric womanhood redefines sexuality. Homosexual sex can be between a male and a female, if the male is a transwoman and the female is a woman. Heterosexual sex can include a male (transwoman) and male (man).

Phallocentric womanhood has even redefined parenting. A mother can be the sperm-producing parent, while the father can be the gestational parent. In that case, the father experiences motherhood’s embodiment of gestation, birth and breastfeeding while the mother has low reproductive costs during the pregnancy of the resulting child. The father’s motherhood encumbered body might be said to produce an auxiliary form of gynocentric manhood but its existence is predicated on the boundaries, potentials and capabilities of the natural female body and not a technologized manhood— therefore, it does not intervene in definitions of the male body because it is only demonstrating the capacities of a female body.

The body, the material conditions of our physical embodiment, is the only place in this world where we can relate to each other as sufferers of the human condition. The human condition is the common understanding replicated in every human life that we, all humans, are born into this world without deciding the terms of our existence. We are born into bodies without choice and it is our minds that must accommodate this existential discordance.

But, phallocentric womanhood severs sex from the body and places it in the mind, in definitions provided by the State, and in technology’s interventions. In the mind, sex exists second, as that which requires perception, not first, that which is self-evident and experienced. When sex is unseated from the body, it becomes a fetish rather than an embodied, material state of human existence.