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Woman, Defined

Now that 2022 is officially in the books, we can formally enshrine it as “the year when Americans decided they didn’t know what a woman was.” Dictionary.com has made this official by selecting “woman” as their Word of the Year. The announcement was accompanied by some hilarious commentary, which made clear that the dictionary people were calling attention to the word partly to emphasize that they don’t know what it means. “The word belongs to each and every woman—however they define themselves,” said the Dictionary.com statement.

It was an appropriately nutty way to cap off a year jam-packed with gendered insanity: a man winning all the women’s swimming prizes, fractious fights about whether men had the right to be naked in female locker rooms, and a (now) Supreme Court Justice declaring publicly that she doesn’t know what a woman is. There were forerunners to all of this: the attempted cancellation of J.K. Rowling, the rise of “birthing people,” and the AMA’s formal recommendation in 2021 that a newborn child’s sex should no longer be recorded on a birth certificate. There is something particularly Orwellian, though, about the dictionary’s formal capitulation. Have we reached peak insanity yet, or is there still more?

What is a Woman?

Right-wing polemicist Matt Walsh got in on the conversation this year with a documentary simply titled What is a Woman?  It’s a “hostile engagement” piece in the tradition of Fahrenheit 9/11, presented as a kind of ideological exposé in which Walsh skewers the gender-ideology gurus with ease. I dislike this genre, mainly because it opens such wide pathways to dishonesty and distortion. A documentary, by its nature, cherry-picks details to create a smooth narrative. It is a singularly terrible medium for exploring hot-button topics like this. Still, I mostly agree with Walsh on substance, and he did a fairly good job of illustrating some of the deep contradictions in modern gender theory. 

I still had one major complaint. When a documentary is titled with a question, I read this as an implicit promise to answer that question. But he doesn’t, or not really. Supposedly Walsh is a guy who just “likes to understand things,” and he presents that wide-eyed faux-curiosity to the activists and gender theorists. If understanding is really the goal of this film though, it ends in tragedy. Walsh chuckles at Jordan Peterson’s observation that a man who wants to know what a woman is should “marry one and find out.” Then he returns home to his own wife, preparing food in their kitchen, and poses the question to her. She tells him nonchalantly that a woman is, “An adult human female… who needs help with this jar of pickles.” Cue the laugh track. 

Call me a no-fun feminist, but I’d have preferred an answer thoughtful enough to stand on its own, sans pickle gag. I think the audience deserved that, after watching Walsh crusade around like a truth-in-gender Socrates, demanding honest responses to “the question you’re not allowed to ask.” I realize, of course, that the plebeian ending was very deliberate. Walsh wants to imply that sensible, grounded people should not need to pose this question. They know what a woman is, just like their grandparents and great-grandparents before them. From the mouths of sandwich-making housewives, we can still receive commonsense truths now forgotten by our “learned scholars.” I get it. But I still do not approve.

It’s clear enough, certainly, that most humans historically would have laughed at Walsh’s title question. And they did know what a woman was, at least in the sense that they were able to distinguish men from women with a high degree of accuracy. Even today, most people can do this, despite the changed names and puberty-blocking medications. Most of us can tell when the clerk in the frilly pink blouse is a man, even if the name tag reads “Jessica.” We don’t say anything. But we can tell. Gender ideology feels insidious in part because it asks us to “forget” or decline to notice things that we all really see and understand.

At the same time, it often happens in life that people are able to identify things with a high degree of accuracy, without being able to define them clearly. St. Augustine once remarked that everyone knows what time is, until you ask them to explain it, at which point they become quite perplexed. Many things are like this. It’s not necessarily a problem so long as our functional understanding is sufficient to guide prudent action. For instance, I can set an alarm clock perfectly well without having a sophisticated theory of time. That all changes when we find ourselves embroiled in controversy over the true nature of a particular thing. Then, it is generally worthwhile to formulate a clearer definition. Since the dictionary people have thrown in the towel, other people of goodwill must step in and try to define “woman.” Let’s curb the pickle jokes for at least long enough to get something on the table.

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

In analytic philosophy, a gold-standard definition gives necessary and sufficient conditions for being the thing defined. Definitions of this sort may not always cut to the heart of a thing’s true nature, but they offer a good starting place for dispelling serious confusion. Can we specify necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman?

Biology is the obvious starting point. It’s clear enough (or was before the trans movement got underway) that physiology is relevant to sex. However, it would be a mistake to root a definition in observable, external features such as genitalia. Surgeons can already mimic those reasonably well, and in any event, I almost certainly cannot see “Jessica’s” genitals when I recognize that person as a man. An adequate definition of “woman” must recognize that the body is sexed in its totality; the distinction between male and female is not located in one particular part of the body. 

If we can look at that Croatian mother and say, “yes, she’s a woman,” it is clear that womanhood means more to us than biology alone can explain. We’re not prepared to let the microscope have the final say.

Chromosomes and DNA seem like the next natural place to look. These offer a more comprehensive “blueprint” for building a complete male or female body, and happily, we already more or less know what features most clearly distinguish men and women on this level. Women have two X-chromosomes, while men have one X and one Y. Perhaps, then, we could define “woman” as “an adult human whose cells have two X-chromosomes.” That definition would give gender-traditionalists like myself the outcome we want in the vast majority of cases: almost every person could be unambiguously classified as an “M” or an “F,” and the ruling would generally fit our intuitions. Perhaps the double-X is both necessary and sufficient to mark a human being as a woman.

Unfortunately, a closer study of genetic anomalies raises some serious difficulties. For instance, there is a condition called “46,XY” that causes a person with XY chromosomes to have female reproductive organs and genitalia. Often people with this condition are infertile, but when a young woman in Croatia was diagnosed with “46,XY,” leading researchers found and tested her biological mother’s DNA and determined that the mother had the same condition. Was that person a woman? I would give an unambiguous yes. But if she is, then the double-X cannot be a necessary condition for womanhood. Similarly, there is a condition known as Klinefelter syndrome, which doubles the X-chromosome in a person who has both X and Y. People with this syndrome generally appear masculine, and some have produced sperm and fathered children. In my book, those are clearly men. Anyone who agrees with that assessment, however, must let go of the double-X definition of womanhood. It is neither necessary nor sufficient.

What this exercise proves is that biology alone is insufficient—the matter resists reduction to genetics alone. If we can look at that Croatian mother and say, “yes, she’s a woman,” it is clear that womanhood means more to us than biology alone can explain. We’re not prepared to let the microscope have the final say. That shouldn’t surprise us anyway, because our ancestors were ordering life around the binary of manhood and womanhood long before they knew anything about chromosomes. What did they take a “woman” to be?  

Having already tipped my hand, I may as well acknowledge that I do really believe that “woman” can be defined in a conceptually simple way. A “woman” is the sort of person who can gestate and give birth to a child. A “man” is the sort of person who can beget a child. Women and girls are potential mothers; boys and men are potential fathers. Call this the “functional-reproductive” definition of sex. It has been operative in most human societies for centuries, and it can supply both necessary and sufficient conditions for womanhood. The sufficient conditions are relatively simple: All mothers are women, along with anyone who might become a mother under the right circumstances. Men do not give birth.

To specify the necessary conditions for the functional-reproductive definition, we must lean more heavily on an Aristotelian concept of potentiality. Clearly there are women who never bear children. Some, for various reasons, are not able to bear children at any point in their lives. They are still women, which we can understand when we view potentiality in a broad sense. A woman with severe endometriosis or a thyroid disease still has the type of body that could, but for the disease, gestate a child. That is the necessary condition. A male body simply was not built for childbearing, no matter how healthy it is. Critics of Aristotelianism sometimes claim that this conception of “potentiality” is vague and unhelpful, but I find that they understand it with ease when we move into the realm of flora and fauna. No one has trouble understanding that an apple tree planted in stony soil is still an apple tree, even if it never manages to produce any apples. It will never be a tomato tree, nor an apricot tree, even if its owner would prefer to think of it that way.   

The functional-reproductive definition of sex gives us everything we need. It classifies every obvious case in an intuitive way and opens ambiguities only in those rare cases that are genuinely ambiguous. Those cases do exist and are perhaps a bit more common than was recognized in antiquity. In a newborn, genitalia is overwhelmingly the clearest indicator of sex, but occasionally a child discovers, as he or she matures, that chromosomes or internal organs hold some surprises. Our understanding of gender dysphoria is still very incomplete, so it is possible that research will eventually offer some physiological explanation for people who feel intensely that their bodies ought to be other than they are. When teenagers start switching genders with reckless abandon, it seems obvious that groupthink and attention-seeking are causal factors, but strongly gender-dysphoric people may truly be looking for words to express something “real” about themselves that is not yet fully understood. Working from a functional-reproductive definition of womanhood, there is no need to deny this. Subjective experiences are not as relevant to determining a person’s sex.

From Biology to Culture

Many people will be dissatisfied with this definition. Tying femininity to childbearing will offend many on the left, while on the right, many traditionalists would prefer to define womanhood in a thicker and richer way. Like Walsh, they are already confident in their ability to identify men and women, but they would like to understand more fully what womanhood means. For that sort of person, the functional-reproductive definition may seem disappointing. It has little to offer to the person who understands that she is a woman, but wishes to better exemplify the characteristic excellences of her sex.

Far be it from me to discourage anyone from pursuing excellence. Sometimes, though, it is best to settle for modest definitions that say just enough. This one says considerably more than Walsh’s; it offers substantive grounds on which to explain why Jazz Jennings and Caitlin Jenner are not in fact women. It does not adequately explain why womanhood is good or meaningful, but that may be just as well. Those are deep questions, calling for lengthy, reflective answers. Must every meaningful aspect of femininity be tied into a definition? Gender maximalism has a lot of appeal for traditionalists, and I can sympathize, but I would recommend caution where definitions are concerned. A lot of mistakes can arise when we make too many sweeping generalizations about a group of people who do, after all, represent fully half the human race.

Women’s sports showcase and develop the female body, which is why it is unjust to allow a man to win the top prizes. That undercuts the purpose of the sport, just as a men’s race would be rendered pointless if a horse were permitted to win first prize. 

The functional-reproductive definition can help with the fractious issue of gender stereotypes. It liberates us both from needlessly restrictive stereotypes, and from gender-equality crusades. One need not conform to common stereotypes to be a woman, and yet, it should not alarm us to find that some stereotypes broadly hold. I myself prefer football to fashion, and philosophy to party planning; I recognize that this is somewhat unusual for a woman. So what? Most people are outliers in one way or another, and this need not be either laudable or shameful. People are unique. In social settings, we may sometimes find ourselves leaning on “soft stereotypes,” simply because we don’t have time to get to know every person intimately. However, if we properly recognize the difference between defining features of sex and more incidental broad-based trends, we should be able to cultivate some flexibility, abandoning inapplicable stereotypes as we get to know particular individuals. 

Moving beyond the realm of etiquette, we can see that sex has real social and ethical implications, which the functional-reproductive definition makes clear. Men have a stronger sex drive, while women’s biological role in reproduction is far more arduous. Those two facts fundamentally explain why women have sex-specific vulnerabilities, which must be accounted for in both law and culture. Women sometimes need sex-specific protections against the possibility of male predation, and human societies must also compensate somehow for their disproportionately-heavy reproductive burden. Mothers need help, and fathers need to be encouraged to develop relationships with their offspring. The human race has long had a solution to both problems: marriage.

In modern times, we have also become more sensitive to the potential for women’s opportunities to be limited unreasonably when protection becomes the overwhelming social priority where their sex is concerned. Motherhood is a very good thing, but it does not exhaust the full range of women’s potentialities. Women’s sports exist because it seems fitting, in an opportunity-rich society, to cultivate and celebrate the athletic potentialities of both sexes. Women, as a group, are a bit slower and weaker than men, but the female body was built to run, jump, throw, and swim, just like the male body. Women’s sports showcase and develop the female body, which is why it is unjust to allow a man to win the top prizes. That undercuts the purpose of the sport, just as a men’s race would be rendered pointless if a horse were permitted to win first prize. 

Sex is biological, but it goes beyond biology precisely because human reproduction is very important. Children need protection and nurturing, and adults need to learn to respect both their own, and the opposite sex’s, sexual and reproductive powers. But we also need to learn not to reduce people to their reproductive potentialities. Women are more than wombs, just as men are more than Darwinian “selfish genes” seeking to leave the greatest possible number of offspring. Sexed bodies have real significance, but this is just one aspect of human life; people are much more than just representatives of their sex. It can be difficult to understand all of this in a society that is obsessed with identity, and deeply confused about sex and reproduction.

That’s why it is important to define “woman.” The goal is not to vanquish ideological enemies with a knockdown conversation ender. Instead, the conversation should start right here.

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