Who is a real woman?

I guess now we know!

If you’re invested in dictionary definitions, the gender binary and a social order regulated by violence, this isn’t for you.

Last weekend, a very famous author posted a tweet in support of a woman who’d lost a court case in which she attempted to get legal backing for her transmisogyny. It created a firestorm of debate about who ‘gets to be’ a woman, and what that definition might mean for people who are generally able to consider themselves women without much impediment.

I contributed to the conversation with a few heartfelt threads about the need for solidarity across cis and trans gender lines. I got a lot more white women in my mentions than I recall ever having interacted with online, but what has stayed with me is a response from someone who flatly demanded, twice, that I define ‘woman’. I didn’t get the sense that she was asking in good faith as I had already posted several tweets about what ‘woman/womanhood’ means, so I didn’t humour her. Maybe I’ll send her the link to this publication.

Definitions are useful because they standardise collective understanding. They render various realities into easily digestible data: this is what rain is, that is what a car is, this is what a woman is. Such standardised, rigid definitions have value but this value is limited, especially when the definitions apply to broad social phenomena like racism, gender, sexual violence etc.

A few years ago, I posted a thread (yes, on Twitter — I use it a lot) saying that rape is not just violent unwanted sex. According to the Cambridge dictionary, rape is “to force someone to have sex when they are unwilling, using violence or threatening behaviour.” I argued that rape also includes things like sex without a condom with someone who only agreed to protected sex, sex as a result of emotional coercion, or sex with a ‘willing’ minor.

This was before the #MeToo movement exploded online, so that conversation was perhaps a bit ahead of its time (it was also from the 140-character era when people absolutely refused to read threads, so you can imagine how that went). A lot of people responded with derision. I also got a lot of fury, especially from people who had survived violent rapes. They said I was making rape ‘meaningless’.

I was a bit confused by this response, but eventually, it became clear to me what was going on. We live in a world where even violent rapes aren’t taken seriously. These survivors were afraid that I was undermining what little solace they got from being able to name what happened to them as a legitimate violation. If I called non-consensual unprotected sex rape, for example, then these survivors believed I was giving rape apologists even more of an incentive to disregard or discredit their pain.

But…that’s not how it actually works.

To paraphrase one of my Twitter mutuals Adedoyin Adeniji, rights are not pie. We don’t run out when people who have slightly different experiences from us get some too. Case in point: the #MeToo movement. As we have now seen, an expansive understanding of sexual violence is to the benefit of everyone, especially survivors.

Thanks to the progressive ideas provided by the movement, more people have a fuller understanding of sexual violence. More people understand consent, healthy sexual practices, and accountability. More survivors are on the path to healing as a result of being able to name their violations as legitimate, even when those violations happened in contexts that were previously not understood as rape or sexual violence. And people who always understood themselves to be survivors still haven’t lost anything.

We can theorise beyond our received understandings of any phenomenon, using observable evidence, sociological patterns and lived realities as our foundation. In fact, we must do so, because this is what makes it possible for civil rights to be actualised for everyone, not just those who the mainstream might approve of. The knowledge that we have of the world is not neutral; the systems in which most of us are socialised and educated prioritise certain ideas and vilify others. Whose knowledge are we internalising, who does it serve, and who does it harm?

I know what the dictionary says, but within the Eurocentric gender binary, I would define a ‘woman’ as a person who is a legitimate foil for (white) men’s sexual, social and political dominance, and who is thus worthy of protection from (general, random) patriarchal violence. ‘Women’ exchange their subjection to general, random patriarchal violence for subjection to their husbands’ patriarchal domination when they become ‘wives’. ‘Wife’ is understood as the pinnacle of the social status known as ‘woman’.

Based on this definition, I think it becomes clear why (conventionally attractive, fertile, white) wives or potential wives are the ‘woman-est’ of all women, as evidenced by how they are deemed most worthy of protection and humanity within patriarchy. Sex workers, witches, queer women, disabled women, African women, masculine women, enslaved women, trans women, poor women, ambitious women, women who don’t want or can’t have children, sexually liberated women, uncouth women…the list of people whose personal claim to womanhood is historically or currently delegitimised goes on and on. It really just depends on who you’re talking to, and — as you can see — it doesn’t have that much to do with what genitals or reproductive organs the women in question have.

Lots of papers have been written by gender scholars, feminist academics and queer theorists on the subject of womanhood and/or gender, but I actually haven’t engaged with that much ‘proper’ (read: trackable, citable) scholarship on the subject. What I’m presenting is my own understanding as an unaffiliated feminist thinker/gender theorist, based on various conversations, online interactions, random reading etc. Still, I always recommend Oyeronke Oyewumi’s books, ‘The Invention of Women’ and ‘What Gender is Motherhood’. This thread also has great primary and secondary sources on biological sex and gender.

Feminism, Black feminism, womanism, STIWAnism, trans feminism and many other social theories have been produced in rejection of the Eurocentric, patriarchal definition of womanhood. These theories insist, in various ways, that womanhood must be redefined. This process of redefining womanhood and rejecting patriarchy is ongoing; who does it serve when some people try to put hard limits on womanhood? When you answer that, ask yourself; is that the agenda you want to further?

For those who aren’t interested in gender theory etc, perhaps you’re interested in ending gender-based violence. Gender is complex but rights, respect and safety are not. Our world is misogynistic, which means that women who don’t conform to narrow ideals are always at risk of violence. This is particularly true for trans women. When we affirm trans womanhood, we say no to the idea that women can be violated simply because they don’t neatly fit into boxes that sustain patriarchal dominance.

All women deserve to be safe, protected, autonomous and free. Womanhood is not pie; it has been and will continue to be elastic and expansive, in response to the needs of those women who are most in need of safety, protection and freedom.

The only thing we stand to lose when we affirm women’s right to self-determination is patriarchal power. And who wants to keep that anyway?