"Bodies with Vaginas" is a term men would naturally use about us, because that is what interests them. If we are going reduce women to bodies only, "Bodies with Wombs" is at least more powerful. I have often thought that our power to bring life into the world is a trigger for womb envy and therefore misogyny. Of course they would like to neutralize, or neuter, us. But I hope we do not start using physical words only for women: we are so much more than just that.
I can do identify with the comment or you referenced who went to electronics camp. I think I was 15 when my mom told me “most girls don’t think like you.” What she meant was that most girls didn’t love to program computers the way I did and still do. It not only stung, but felt wrong. I later learned why. In college a professor introduced me to a PhD thesis by a former student of his. The thesis examined not only the different ways women were drawn to computing, but also the different strengths women brought to computing. That speaks to the end of what you said, that there should be a feminism that values women as women. That doesn’t have to look the same across all women-shouldn’t. Computing, hockey, electrical engineering, and military history can be feminine. So can pink and sparkles. There are many ways to be feminine. But it is still a thing.
I've got to say that I feel pretty confused about the idea that we face a dichotomy between abandoning the idea of a gender binary and enforcing adherence to a gender binary via violence. I would even want to push back against the idea that we are finding a "middle" between the two, because I don't think it makes sense to frame them as a spectrum at all. There's nothing intrinsic that suggests that norms around gender must be enforced via violence if they are to be enforced at all. At best we're in some sort of two dimensional space where one axis is your beliefs about gender and another is whether/how those beliefs should be enforced.
However, I get that Martha was using this framework in part to express her frustration that many ideologies of gender and the treatment of trans people don't address the world that we're really living in right now, and how it could realistically change. I want to put forward the idea that there is plenty of room for improvement in treating trans people with dignity and love without saying things about gender that I believe are false. Taking violence and harassment against trans people extremely seriously is an obvious starting point. We could modify building codes such that many more buildings are required to have a single-occupancy, gender neutral bathroom. And that's not even to start on things that would make life easier for *everyone,* such as reducing licensing fees for therapists and allowing them to practice across state lines and remotely.
I touched on this before, but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me how using terms like “menstruaters,” “people with vaginas,” “people with wombs,” etc., totally ignores how *these are more or less all the same people.*
It’s not like uteruses, vaginas, ovaries, etc., are disassociated traits randomly scattered throughout the population with no more relation to each other than height, brown hair, and intelligence. They *go together,* and there is one cohesive group of people in whom they go together, and that group of people has distinct needs that benefit from use of a collective noun.
It was kinda just a throwaway point to me when I first made it, a warmup for me getting to the things that really hit me in the feels (the “electronics camp” issue, as I will call it), but ugh the more I think about it the more it bothers me.
Sure, not all women (women used here to mean “adult human female”) have uteruses or ovaries or breasts, via various surgeries and whatnot. When we say “women’s health” to refer to issues surrounding childbearing etc., we are absolutely ignoring big constituencies of women, like women who have had hysterectomies, women who are lifelong celibates, women who are infertile, women who…..insert circumstance here.
Therefore, when we reduce each women’s health issue to its one most-salient body part (say, idk, appropriate research into the optimal frequency of mammograms), we divide and fracture the group that is really invested in that issue. It undermines solidarity, splinters the collective group, and reduces our social power — all while engaging in a weird doublethink effort to pretend that, again, there is no meaningful correlation among the various owners of uteruses, breasts, ovaries, and vaginas—when there is not only a correlation, there’s a deeply salient underpinning biological reality.
The fact that this weird doublethink effort seems to be led in large part by people who *don’t* have uteruses, vaginas, ovaries, etc., really makes my skin crawl. I can’t think of a single time in history when people with penises decided that the needs of people with vaginas were unimportant. Oh wait.
I was with you in your own comment, till I got to "Being able (at least in theory) to have a baby is also a big part of how I understand who I am as a woman." I felt some jabs of pain for the women who find they're infertile, and for all women who live long enough to experience the loss of this potential -- through a needed hysterectomy, an abortion or other surgery gone bad, or simply through inevitable menopause. It's extremely important to value women as mothers and potential mothers -- and also extremely important to value women simply as women -- whether or not we ever bear children. It's really painful to me to think of non-mothers been seen as less womanly or less valuable.
(Subsequent website changes have erased the formatting of the headers, so that they blend with the text, but it should still be readable).
Serano is transgender, and her view of femininity is from the perspective of someone who wasn't socialised into it -- who was, in fact, quite strenuously socialised out of it, as a child -- but who chose to embrace it anyway. Reading the above piece of writing was a bit of a turning point, for me, as I realised that I, too, have ways in which I actively choose and identify with womanhood and femininity -- not as compulsory behaviours but simply as positive traits that feel natural to me.
Serano also has some insightful writing on the notion of what sex and gender are, and on how to delineate them. In her book "Excluded," she advocates for a holistic understanding of gender as a complex trait that involves biological, psychological and cultural factors acting in concert. Because they are complex, and involve a wide variety of factors that are not the same for everybody and cannot really be controlled, we see a wide variety of ways in which gender is experienced and expressed by different people, in real life. As someone who is still trying to figure out how to include important biological variations between men and women into my feminism -- biological variations that may not be absolute, but that nevertheless exist in the aggregate -- I really appreciate her efforts to create a framework in which we can appreciate the role of biology in creating gender differences without falling into the trap of thinking that gender works in the same way for everyone.
Some people feel like they are "cisgender by default" -- they don't really care about their gender, they just take the one they're given. Some people feel like they've been shaped by the gender they were given in ways that they like, even if they might not have intrinsically chosen it. They're glad of the confinement provided by the notion, because "a cage is also a frame," and being given structure can be an essential element of growing an identity for many people. And some people actively embrace a gender identity, be it cisgender or transgender or nonbinary, and find that they identify with it in a way that feels at least partially intrinsic to them, even as it can also be shaped by societal forces.
Gender is experienced by different people in such different ways. Societal forces are an important part of that, which cannot be erased. So we face a situation in which the collective institutions of society play a pivotal role in creating and maintaining identity factors that are nevertheless intensely personal. We cannot simply default to an individual and atomised view of these things, but nor am I willing to accept a society that callously leaves people behind when they don't fit in.
On a broad level, I feel like "gender should exist, but be optional and flexible" is a reasonable compromise. But this still leaves a great many details unwritten. On the whole, I hope we can find compromises that allow society to give us all the support we need.
Other Feminisms is one of the few spaces that allows for an engaging and not-terrible cross-ideology dialogue on this topic. Thank you!
I *love* the call out of the lancet for a) not being consistent and b) using "bodies with vaginas" when talking about menstruation instead of, say, people with uteruses or as Laurie points out, wombs. Folks who have had a vaginoplasty surgery don't menstruate!
That said, I do find it hard to imagine a not-violent murky middle on this subject, although I'd love to hear more thoughts on what that would include. Like I mentioned in the thread with Magdalen, one option could be to take violence against trans folk (in addition to physical violence, withholding employment, deadnaming, using wrong pronouns, etc) a *lot* more seriously than we do now. If women and men were used as broad terms in situations where they aren't inclusive of trans men or trans women's biology *but* trans women and trans men were given legal and social protections and not treated as a less-than-human minority, the choice of words could be a significantly smaller issue. I think I'd still be in favor, but a lot less wedded to the idea than I am.
But, in our current reality, I wonder what the murky middle really looks like? 50% of trans men have attempted suicide according to at least one survey. We know that using inclusive language reduces suicidal ideation: the language we use can save lives! And yet in most debates on the topic 90%+ of the discussion is about vague possible futures, most of which maintain the status quo idea that being trans is unnatural or an affront to truth. I truly don't see how anyone could create a non violent or less violent world where that idea persists?
"Being able (at least in theory) to have a baby is also a big part of how I understand who I am as a woman. When we claim these parts are neutral, or that linking them to womanhood is factually or morally wrong, it feels like we're stripping out the positive capacities of womanhood and reducing it to the negative experience of being affected by sexism."
Women's inherent femaleness being compromised in the face of a greater sexism, a refusal to acknowledge that there is an inherent femaleness that's worthy of recognition and respect.
Some of this comes, I think, from those biological women who become transmen because they want to like like men and become men. They resent that they are being identified as biologically female.
It really makes me wonder whether those transwomen--men who become women--who resent recognition of biological femaleness, won't be satisfied until they can take away everything that biological women have and seize it for themselves.
They want to look like us. They want our restrooms. They want our sports. Stay tuned for the womb transplants.
I have a PROFOUND distaste for being reduced to my anatomy, and a profound discomfort with the gender policing of women-only spaces. Personally, being a parent and having given birth to 3 children: I greatly prefer 'pregnant people' as language, instead of 'pregnant women', or 'birth room' or 'birthing partner' or whatever, if we're talking about places where the pregnancy and birth is the relevant part of the experience. As anecdotal experience: people referring to 'this is where pregnant people go to give birth', or whatever, have made it explicitly clear that the point was people (a variety of people, each individual, with individual desires and needs - accurate, even in a group of completely cis women! People tends to be a group of individuals, women tends to be a group of people with a similar set of desires and wants and needs, in the language used... and that tends to mean pushing people into the wants and needs the speaker thinks they should have) being pregnant and giving birth (biological process, role change, responsibilities: logistical and emotional concerns, addressed here), whereas people discussing 'women giving birth' have generalized 'women' to a very narrow slice of experience, which I've generally had to argue my way out of to get what I need out of institutions or organizations.
I've had incredibly difficult experiences in places that try to center the womanhood (or, rather, the expected experience of womanhood, with the fairly obvious expectation that to not conform to that is to fail) - for example, language I'm seeing here about 'women's power is bringing life to the world' or 'women get pregnant', which is HUGELY (and I'm sure unintentionally!) excluding women with fertility issues, women with breastfeeding issues, women who have hysterectomies or mastectomies or who simply don't want to ever be pregnant or be mothers! 'Biologically' women, at that, and yet, still excluding. And the line is pretty straight from there to 'women are X (nurturing, mothering, etc)', even if, individually, that's ... not the case, or not exclusively so? For example: I work, my husband is a stay-at-home dad, and we're both delighted with the arrangement. People who talk about 'parents' include him in homework discussions and childcare groups, people who talk about 'moms' don't and message me exclusively, and then I have to transfer stuff to him to handle. Anecdotal, but so is the rest of this!
Also: I worked in insurance. A lot of companies will only cover breast cancer treatment for women, which is a HUGE issue (like, survival issue!) for men who get breast cancer. It's not a about 'eww, women', it's that the gender specificity means that people can't access necessary medical treatment, and need to beg the pharmaceutical company for compassionate access. It's horrible! De-gendering, in these cases, means access to medical treatment! From there, experiences with cancer and breast cancer is likely different, but there's legitimate medical value in de-centering the experience and ensuring access to care. (And, frankly, I've also seen a fair number of women who didn't want reconstructive surgery and wanted to stay flat - I sure would, I'm not a huge fan of the weight and back pain and bras are uncomfortable - and doctors leaving extra skin for reconstruction because 'women want reconstruction' - there would be a lot of value in asking what the people involved want, vs assuming a gendered monolithic experience.)
That said, honestly, the same applies to 'men' - an institution that de-genders 'women' but keeps 'men' as a category gets full side-eye. Either you open up language to individual experience, or you don't, but don't ONLY decenter women, that's nonsense.
there's a problem here in identifying women as those who have vaginas. while that is/may be physically true, it's harsh. having a vagina implies that one can have children and that is an identifying characteristic of womanhood. does a woman have no value if she does not produce a child? of course that's not true, altho' i see that as a subtext. having a child should also not be the main reason that a woman exists, unless that's what she wants. not all woman are able to have children. and, there are people who identify as female who do not have vaginas. the pronouns matter, words matter, but actual treatment matters more. the flip side of this coin is that there are plenty of mothers who have never given birth. they have never 'birthed'. i hate that term. they are still mothers. kindness in one's words may be the surest guide.
Would you be willing to write about "Difference Feminism", Mrs. Libresco? As in italian and french alternative to 2nd wave? Luce Irigaray, Carla Lonzi... I feel like it is the "lost genealogy", young women doesn't know about it and it's been kind of ridiculed by some strands of liberal or even radical feminism... We might find some particularly useful wisdom for today, from those women.
"Bodies with Vaginas" is a term men would naturally use about us, because that is what interests them. If we are going reduce women to bodies only, "Bodies with Wombs" is at least more powerful. I have often thought that our power to bring life into the world is a trigger for womb envy and therefore misogyny. Of course they would like to neutralize, or neuter, us. But I hope we do not start using physical words only for women: we are so much more than just that.
I can do identify with the comment or you referenced who went to electronics camp. I think I was 15 when my mom told me “most girls don’t think like you.” What she meant was that most girls didn’t love to program computers the way I did and still do. It not only stung, but felt wrong. I later learned why. In college a professor introduced me to a PhD thesis by a former student of his. The thesis examined not only the different ways women were drawn to computing, but also the different strengths women brought to computing. That speaks to the end of what you said, that there should be a feminism that values women as women. That doesn’t have to look the same across all women-shouldn’t. Computing, hockey, electrical engineering, and military history can be feminine. So can pink and sparkles. There are many ways to be feminine. But it is still a thing.
I've got to say that I feel pretty confused about the idea that we face a dichotomy between abandoning the idea of a gender binary and enforcing adherence to a gender binary via violence. I would even want to push back against the idea that we are finding a "middle" between the two, because I don't think it makes sense to frame them as a spectrum at all. There's nothing intrinsic that suggests that norms around gender must be enforced via violence if they are to be enforced at all. At best we're in some sort of two dimensional space where one axis is your beliefs about gender and another is whether/how those beliefs should be enforced.
However, I get that Martha was using this framework in part to express her frustration that many ideologies of gender and the treatment of trans people don't address the world that we're really living in right now, and how it could realistically change. I want to put forward the idea that there is plenty of room for improvement in treating trans people with dignity and love without saying things about gender that I believe are false. Taking violence and harassment against trans people extremely seriously is an obvious starting point. We could modify building codes such that many more buildings are required to have a single-occupancy, gender neutral bathroom. And that's not even to start on things that would make life easier for *everyone,* such as reducing licensing fees for therapists and allowing them to practice across state lines and remotely.
I touched on this before, but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me how using terms like “menstruaters,” “people with vaginas,” “people with wombs,” etc., totally ignores how *these are more or less all the same people.*
It’s not like uteruses, vaginas, ovaries, etc., are disassociated traits randomly scattered throughout the population with no more relation to each other than height, brown hair, and intelligence. They *go together,* and there is one cohesive group of people in whom they go together, and that group of people has distinct needs that benefit from use of a collective noun.
It was kinda just a throwaway point to me when I first made it, a warmup for me getting to the things that really hit me in the feels (the “electronics camp” issue, as I will call it), but ugh the more I think about it the more it bothers me.
Sure, not all women (women used here to mean “adult human female”) have uteruses or ovaries or breasts, via various surgeries and whatnot. When we say “women’s health” to refer to issues surrounding childbearing etc., we are absolutely ignoring big constituencies of women, like women who have had hysterectomies, women who are lifelong celibates, women who are infertile, women who…..insert circumstance here.
Therefore, when we reduce each women’s health issue to its one most-salient body part (say, idk, appropriate research into the optimal frequency of mammograms), we divide and fracture the group that is really invested in that issue. It undermines solidarity, splinters the collective group, and reduces our social power — all while engaging in a weird doublethink effort to pretend that, again, there is no meaningful correlation among the various owners of uteruses, breasts, ovaries, and vaginas—when there is not only a correlation, there’s a deeply salient underpinning biological reality.
The fact that this weird doublethink effort seems to be led in large part by people who *don’t* have uteruses, vaginas, ovaries, etc., really makes my skin crawl. I can’t think of a single time in history when people with penises decided that the needs of people with vaginas were unimportant. Oh wait.
I was with you in your own comment, till I got to "Being able (at least in theory) to have a baby is also a big part of how I understand who I am as a woman." I felt some jabs of pain for the women who find they're infertile, and for all women who live long enough to experience the loss of this potential -- through a needed hysterectomy, an abortion or other surgery gone bad, or simply through inevitable menopause. It's extremely important to value women as mothers and potential mothers -- and also extremely important to value women simply as women -- whether or not we ever bear children. It's really painful to me to think of non-mothers been seen as less womanly or less valuable.
One of my favourite pieces of writing about embracing femininity as a positive thing was written by Julia Serano. You can read it here:
https://msmagazine.com/2014/07/28/empowering-femininity/
(Subsequent website changes have erased the formatting of the headers, so that they blend with the text, but it should still be readable).
Serano is transgender, and her view of femininity is from the perspective of someone who wasn't socialised into it -- who was, in fact, quite strenuously socialised out of it, as a child -- but who chose to embrace it anyway. Reading the above piece of writing was a bit of a turning point, for me, as I realised that I, too, have ways in which I actively choose and identify with womanhood and femininity -- not as compulsory behaviours but simply as positive traits that feel natural to me.
Serano also has some insightful writing on the notion of what sex and gender are, and on how to delineate them. In her book "Excluded," she advocates for a holistic understanding of gender as a complex trait that involves biological, psychological and cultural factors acting in concert. Because they are complex, and involve a wide variety of factors that are not the same for everybody and cannot really be controlled, we see a wide variety of ways in which gender is experienced and expressed by different people, in real life. As someone who is still trying to figure out how to include important biological variations between men and women into my feminism -- biological variations that may not be absolute, but that nevertheless exist in the aggregate -- I really appreciate her efforts to create a framework in which we can appreciate the role of biology in creating gender differences without falling into the trap of thinking that gender works in the same way for everyone.
Some people feel like they are "cisgender by default" -- they don't really care about their gender, they just take the one they're given. Some people feel like they've been shaped by the gender they were given in ways that they like, even if they might not have intrinsically chosen it. They're glad of the confinement provided by the notion, because "a cage is also a frame," and being given structure can be an essential element of growing an identity for many people. And some people actively embrace a gender identity, be it cisgender or transgender or nonbinary, and find that they identify with it in a way that feels at least partially intrinsic to them, even as it can also be shaped by societal forces.
Gender is experienced by different people in such different ways. Societal forces are an important part of that, which cannot be erased. So we face a situation in which the collective institutions of society play a pivotal role in creating and maintaining identity factors that are nevertheless intensely personal. We cannot simply default to an individual and atomised view of these things, but nor am I willing to accept a society that callously leaves people behind when they don't fit in.
On a broad level, I feel like "gender should exist, but be optional and flexible" is a reasonable compromise. But this still leaves a great many details unwritten. On the whole, I hope we can find compromises that allow society to give us all the support we need.
Other Feminisms is one of the few spaces that allows for an engaging and not-terrible cross-ideology dialogue on this topic. Thank you!
I *love* the call out of the lancet for a) not being consistent and b) using "bodies with vaginas" when talking about menstruation instead of, say, people with uteruses or as Laurie points out, wombs. Folks who have had a vaginoplasty surgery don't menstruate!
That said, I do find it hard to imagine a not-violent murky middle on this subject, although I'd love to hear more thoughts on what that would include. Like I mentioned in the thread with Magdalen, one option could be to take violence against trans folk (in addition to physical violence, withholding employment, deadnaming, using wrong pronouns, etc) a *lot* more seriously than we do now. If women and men were used as broad terms in situations where they aren't inclusive of trans men or trans women's biology *but* trans women and trans men were given legal and social protections and not treated as a less-than-human minority, the choice of words could be a significantly smaller issue. I think I'd still be in favor, but a lot less wedded to the idea than I am.
But, in our current reality, I wonder what the murky middle really looks like? 50% of trans men have attempted suicide according to at least one survey. We know that using inclusive language reduces suicidal ideation: the language we use can save lives! And yet in most debates on the topic 90%+ of the discussion is about vague possible futures, most of which maintain the status quo idea that being trans is unnatural or an affront to truth. I truly don't see how anyone could create a non violent or less violent world where that idea persists?
"Being able (at least in theory) to have a baby is also a big part of how I understand who I am as a woman. When we claim these parts are neutral, or that linking them to womanhood is factually or morally wrong, it feels like we're stripping out the positive capacities of womanhood and reducing it to the negative experience of being affected by sexism."
Women's inherent femaleness being compromised in the face of a greater sexism, a refusal to acknowledge that there is an inherent femaleness that's worthy of recognition and respect.
Some of this comes, I think, from those biological women who become transmen because they want to like like men and become men. They resent that they are being identified as biologically female.
It really makes me wonder whether those transwomen--men who become women--who resent recognition of biological femaleness, won't be satisfied until they can take away everything that biological women have and seize it for themselves.
They want to look like us. They want our restrooms. They want our sports. Stay tuned for the womb transplants.
I have a PROFOUND distaste for being reduced to my anatomy, and a profound discomfort with the gender policing of women-only spaces. Personally, being a parent and having given birth to 3 children: I greatly prefer 'pregnant people' as language, instead of 'pregnant women', or 'birth room' or 'birthing partner' or whatever, if we're talking about places where the pregnancy and birth is the relevant part of the experience. As anecdotal experience: people referring to 'this is where pregnant people go to give birth', or whatever, have made it explicitly clear that the point was people (a variety of people, each individual, with individual desires and needs - accurate, even in a group of completely cis women! People tends to be a group of individuals, women tends to be a group of people with a similar set of desires and wants and needs, in the language used... and that tends to mean pushing people into the wants and needs the speaker thinks they should have) being pregnant and giving birth (biological process, role change, responsibilities: logistical and emotional concerns, addressed here), whereas people discussing 'women giving birth' have generalized 'women' to a very narrow slice of experience, which I've generally had to argue my way out of to get what I need out of institutions or organizations.
I've had incredibly difficult experiences in places that try to center the womanhood (or, rather, the expected experience of womanhood, with the fairly obvious expectation that to not conform to that is to fail) - for example, language I'm seeing here about 'women's power is bringing life to the world' or 'women get pregnant', which is HUGELY (and I'm sure unintentionally!) excluding women with fertility issues, women with breastfeeding issues, women who have hysterectomies or mastectomies or who simply don't want to ever be pregnant or be mothers! 'Biologically' women, at that, and yet, still excluding. And the line is pretty straight from there to 'women are X (nurturing, mothering, etc)', even if, individually, that's ... not the case, or not exclusively so? For example: I work, my husband is a stay-at-home dad, and we're both delighted with the arrangement. People who talk about 'parents' include him in homework discussions and childcare groups, people who talk about 'moms' don't and message me exclusively, and then I have to transfer stuff to him to handle. Anecdotal, but so is the rest of this!
Also: I worked in insurance. A lot of companies will only cover breast cancer treatment for women, which is a HUGE issue (like, survival issue!) for men who get breast cancer. It's not a about 'eww, women', it's that the gender specificity means that people can't access necessary medical treatment, and need to beg the pharmaceutical company for compassionate access. It's horrible! De-gendering, in these cases, means access to medical treatment! From there, experiences with cancer and breast cancer is likely different, but there's legitimate medical value in de-centering the experience and ensuring access to care. (And, frankly, I've also seen a fair number of women who didn't want reconstructive surgery and wanted to stay flat - I sure would, I'm not a huge fan of the weight and back pain and bras are uncomfortable - and doctors leaving extra skin for reconstruction because 'women want reconstruction' - there would be a lot of value in asking what the people involved want, vs assuming a gendered monolithic experience.)
That said, honestly, the same applies to 'men' - an institution that de-genders 'women' but keeps 'men' as a category gets full side-eye. Either you open up language to individual experience, or you don't, but don't ONLY decenter women, that's nonsense.
there's a problem here in identifying women as those who have vaginas. while that is/may be physically true, it's harsh. having a vagina implies that one can have children and that is an identifying characteristic of womanhood. does a woman have no value if she does not produce a child? of course that's not true, altho' i see that as a subtext. having a child should also not be the main reason that a woman exists, unless that's what she wants. not all woman are able to have children. and, there are people who identify as female who do not have vaginas. the pronouns matter, words matter, but actual treatment matters more. the flip side of this coin is that there are plenty of mothers who have never given birth. they have never 'birthed'. i hate that term. they are still mothers. kindness in one's words may be the surest guide.
Would you be willing to write about "Difference Feminism", Mrs. Libresco? As in italian and french alternative to 2nd wave? Luce Irigaray, Carla Lonzi... I feel like it is the "lost genealogy", young women doesn't know about it and it's been kind of ridiculed by some strands of liberal or even radical feminism... We might find some particularly useful wisdom for today, from those women.
Yes! Your last comment, Mrs. Libresco, "chapeau" :)