What is a Woman?

And what happens if we take the question seriously?

Source image by Ming-yen Hsu

At this point in the history of the 24-hour news cycle, “what is a woman” has become practically a cliché: a four word gotcha-question embodiment of right-wing and transphobic attitudes towards trans people and their supporters. Examples aplenty, though you need not watch them.

To recap, if the rock you’ve been living under somehow still doesn’t have WiFi: the game these people play is to ask a question with a seemingly obvious answer, but which backs the trans person or ally into saying something that seems (to the transphobe’s eye) nonsensical. If the ally answers that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, then the transphobe counters by saying, “so if a man says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman?”

In the heat of the moment, the ally usually won’t think to point out the logical inconsistencies in the question itself, they’ll say “yes.” And then the transphobe says “so according to you, a woman can have a penis?” And then everybody listening to this exchange—the audience the transphobe was playing to all along—laughs and the ally gets flustered because even though the ally knows that the correct answer to this question is also “yes,” they also know the answer flies in the face of the Kindergarten-level understanding of gender that most people (including the transphobe) likely holds.

To the transphobes, “what is a woman?” is never treated as a serious question. It is only a rhetorical device meant to “own the libs” or whatever. This is a shame, because it’s an excellent question. As a trans woman myself, I love this question because if treated seriously, it yields some surprising and uplifting insights into the nature of identity itself.

So that’s what we’re going to do today: take it seriously. And for the sake of clarity, the rest of this article will refer to “what is a woman?” as The Question.

But first, a quick ontological tangent

If you took any philosophy classes in college, you may recognize The Question as fundamentally an ontological one. It is a question about categories, which are sufficiently interesting that an entire branch of philosophy dedicates itself to examining them and how they work.

I am not going to try to cover the contents of an Ontology 101 class here, but we at least need a basic grounding in its core ideas as those will frame this article’s analysis of The Question.

The broad strokes of ontology are about how categories are defined and how you determine which things in the world do or don’t belong to a given category. In that sense, The Question is clearly ontological because it implicitly posits that a category called “women” exists, and then asks for a definition of that category.

Why? Because we would presumably like to have a rigorous way of knowing which people belong to that category and which do not. That is, we would like to be able to use that definition in a social context to do useful things like decide who gets to marry whom, who gets to use which bathroom, and who might get sent off to fight in foreign wars.

Keen readers will observe that there is a circularity problem here: to define a category, we must examine members of that category to see what traits they have. But without an a-priori definition of the category, how do we know that the things we’re examining actually belong to the category? Ontologists take a variety of approaches to this circularity problem. The ones that are most relevant for our purposes are prototype theory and iterative refinement.

Prototype theory takes the existence of the category itself for granted and builds a definition of the category around uncontroversial examples. If examining the category of “birds”, the prototype theorist more or less says, “look, we’re not sure about penguins, but we all agree that crows and robins and sparrows are birds, so let’s just start there, ok?”

Iterative refinement takes a prospective category definition and refines it by examining additional candidate members of the category, to see whether they should be rejected from the category or whether the category definition itself should be refined to properly recognize them. The iterative refiner says “Ok, so penguins don’t fly, but they do lay eggs. Should we refine the category definition to exclude flying as a necessary attribute, or should we reject penguins from the category of birds?” And they probably decide to exclude flying from the definition, because a broken-winged sparrow is still a bird.

We’ll use those approaches: recognizing that we all hold an intuitive definition for the category of “women”, then using examples to determine what attributes are truly required for a formal definition.

What are we starting from?

I’m not going to try to prove that the category of “women” exists. Prototype theory does not require us to, and it seems redundant anyway: if there is one thing that transphobes and trans women agree on it is that the category of women exists. The disagreements only arise over how that category is constituted and where its boundaries lie.

Besides, if you somehow don’t believe that the category exists, why are you reading an article about the definition of that category to begin with?

We all hold an intuitive definition of the category, accumulated through our lifetime of observing the similarities and differences between people. That intuitive definition is experiential more than anything; it does not come with a ready-made translation into language. Yet, it is a precise translation into language that we seek. Loosely, that intuitive definition might translate into something like “Women are the mothers. The curvy ones. The skirt-wearers and long-hair havers. The caretakers.” You could go on and on, further attempting to capture the essence of womanhood in this manner.

If you did, you would be amassing a list of typical attributes that women have. This is fine. It is even useful, because it is precisely these attributes we will evaluate with our iterative refinement, looking at examples to determine whether each attribute should or should not be part of the definition.

The rules of the game

It’s worth talking about what criteria we will hold ourselves to when evaluating different attributes. If we want a rigorous outcome—an answer to The Question that stands up to scrutiny—then we need to be fairly careful about this. More to the point, the goal of this whole game is to arrive at a definition. Which, as its etymology would suggest, is definitive about what constitutes a woman.

It’s worth remembering that the attributes we’ll be evaluating are equivalent to potential definitions, in a one-to-one manner. As a silly example, suppose we were evaluating the criteria “wears hats with flowers on them”; this is equivalent to the definition “a woman is a person who wears hats with flowers on them.” For our purposes, definitions and criteria are two sides of the same coin.

Whatever potential definition we end up with must also be complete. That is, it must properly include all members of the category and reject all non-members. That is: all women must be recognized by the definition, while simultaneously all men, enbies, etc., must be rejected by it. No false positives. No false negatives. No “exceptions that prove the rule,” because an exception is just a lazy fix for a weakness in the underlying definition. We will prefer to fix any weaknesses the right way, without requiring exceptions.

Thus, if a potential attribute leads to a definition that would exclude some uncontroversial examples of women, it’s no good. Same for an attribute that would include some uncontroversial examples of non-women. And likewise any that would create or require exceptions. If a potential attribute does any of that, it’s no good.

A lot of such attributes have been proposed, both historically and recently, for what constitutes womanhood. These could be taken in any order, without ontological harm to our final result. I will take these in order from outside to inside; from most-external to most-internal.

Presentation

A person’s gender presentation, their willful use of style either in or out of alignment with masculine or feminine presentation standards, is about the most external attribute I can think of, so let’s start there. Can we define “woman” in terms of clothing, hairstyles, and makeup?

Well, obviously not. Examples of false positives and false negatives are ubiquitous. Whatever your opinion of the show, Ru Paul’s Drag Race has plenty of false positives in the form of obvious examples of men—who themselves agree they are men—with feminine gender presentation. And one need look no further than butch lesbians who are recognized as women despite eschewing feminine presentation altogether.

As well, modes of presentation are so different across cultures and have changed so much across history that no presentational definition of woman could ever avoid false positives and negatives.

This does not work. We cannot answer The Question this way. So, let’s go deeper.

Life experiences

If not how people dress and style themselves, then what about something less tangible? Maybe it’s life experiences. After all, women are socialized differently and have different experiences growing up. Women are subject to marginalization that men aren’t. Perhaps this is the definition we need. Certainly, this is a perspective I have seen voiced within the TERF camp.

Except it doesn’t work, because socialization and marginalization are very different from one society to another. Thus, there is no “standard life experience” that correctly identifies all women. You would need a culturally-dependent definition, which violates the rules of the game: we need a definition that correctly identifies all women. Everywhere, regardless of their cultural norms. A definition based on life experiences for women in western/patriarchal societies would, coarsely speaking, declare that women in matriarchal societies where women are the socially dominant gender, are not women. Or that the Queen of England was not a woman because she had too much status and power. This is a clearly nonsensical outcome.

(Since I mentioned the TERFs, it bears reminding that one of their canards against trans women asserts “you can’t be a woman because you were socialized male.” This fails to recognize that just because trans women may have grown up being subjected to the same external messages about gender roles does not mean that they experienced or responded to those messages in the same way as their cis-male peers. This is likely a subject for another article, but the core themes there are similar to the ones in Trans Women vs. Male Privilege.)

However you look at it, life experiences are far too variable from person to person, place to place, and period to period for them to contribute anything useful to a definition of “woman.”

Secondary sex characteristics

One level deeper, as the heterosexual boys of my middle-school were all too aware, are the secondary sex characteristics strongly associated with womanhood: breasts. Maybe the measure of a woman is her boobs?

Well, let’s see! Do all women have breasts? Many do, certainly, but all? That gets trickier. Where would you draw the line? How much boob is enough to count? Individual people’s boobage varies on a continuous scale from “none-at-all” all the way up to “they don’t make bras that big.” Wherever you draw that line, you’re going to create false negatives among many small-breasted people who are nevertheless routinely considered to be women by themselves and everyone around them.

As just one example, look up some pictures of the actress Sofia Black-D’Elia from her role on the show The Mick. Clearly a woman, and treated as one by every reference I can find online, but so small-breasted that the show makes jokes about it. Flat chests seem to be en vogue in the supermodel industry these days, too—you know, supermodels: women who are deliberately presented as epitomes of womanhood and femininity—though I’ll let you google your own pictures on that one.

Moreover, if you draw that line generously enough that Ms. Black-D’Elia and her supermodel friends fall on the “woman” side of it, so will an endless stream of men who have bigger boobs than that: false positives. Because, surprise surprise, men have breast tissue too. It does not typically develop during puberty, like it does for AFAB people, but it’s there and can develop later on due to ordinary conditions of diet and ageing or unusual conditions that lead to male hormone imbalances.

An ironic example of this is that since testosterone is the precursor molecule for estrogen, and since some people’s bodies happen to convert testosterone into estrogen really well (genetic variability!), the occasional male bodybuilder will inadvertently give himself big tatas after taking testosterone while trying to bulk up. Nobody’s arguing that he’s suddenly a woman because of it.

And if that weren’t enough, a breast-based definition would also need exceptions for women who have lost their breasts due to cancer or other misfortune, and exceptions are against the rules. But I also, I don’t think we’re willing to say that breast cancer survivors aren’t women anymore just because they had a double-mastectomy; the broken-winged sparrow is still a bird.

Bottom line—or, “top” line, as it were—there’s just too much overlap between how much breast men and women can have, and too many reasons why someone’s quantity-of-breast can be different from what’s common for their birth assigned gender category, for breasts to ever adequately define womanhood.

Even the act of drawing that hypothetical line is problematic: Drawing a line on a continuous spectrum doesn’t actually tell you anything about the things on the underlying spectrum. The placement of that line reveals nothing but your pre-existing ideas about different parts of that spectrum. But if we were satisfied with our pre-existing ideas about what constitutes womanhood, we wouldn’t be contending with The Question at all.

Primary sex characteristics

I doubt anyone expected secondary sex characteristics to hold the key, but it was instructive to see why it fails. Nevertheless, we’re hardly done. Let’s go one layer deeper, to the primary sex characteristics, the configuration of your external genitalia. Also known as “Whadda ya got in your pants? A penis or a vagina?”

If we insist on a vagina as the definition of womanhood, again we run into false-negative problems due to a variety of types of congenital birth defect. We need not list or analyze all such conditions; one is sufficient to show that primary sex characteristics don’t work either: vaginal agenesis, which results in a child being born with female external genitalia but only a partial vaginal canal or sometimes no vaginal opening at all. Another spectrum, with the same fundamental line-drawing problems we had with breasts.

(And don’t go thinking you can get around this problem by defining womanhood by the absence of a penis either. Too many soldiers have come home missing theirs, creating false positives, for that to fly.)

Reproductive capability

Beneath the primary sex characteristics is the functional use they can be put to: Makin’ babies.

Many have tried to define womanhood in terms of its signature act: the ability to conceive a child, gestate, and give birth. I am sorry if this is triggering to any readers who are battling fertility issues, but the entire existence of the assisted fertility industry shows why reproductive capacity cannot be the standard for womanhood: far too many people who live as women, see themselves as women, and are routinely treated by the rest of the world as women (that is, ontologically uncontroversial examples of women) are nevertheless unable to reproduce unassisted.

This can happen for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they have really bad PCOS. Maybe they had a hysterectomy. Maybe their bodies never developed a uterus in the first place (this happens in something like 1 out of every 4,500 AFAB births). Maybe hundreds of other reasons.

These women would be ejected from womanhood under a reproductive capacity definition, and yet in the real world no one goes around arguing that their inability to birth a child somehow invalidates their identities. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite: given how intense the urge to have children can be for some women, how much they feel deeply unfulfilled without having children of their own, I think there is a strong case to be made for fertility treatments being viewed as gender affirming care.

That is, assisted fertility helps to affirm these women’s identities, not to undermine them. We celebrate the ability of modern science to overcome these physiological hurdles to fertility precisely because we recognize that infertile women are still women and that their needs matter.

As a sub-category of reproductive capability, a more recent framing of womanhood (especially in TERF circles) is that women are “the producers of the large gamete”. That is, women make the eggs. By now it should be clear why this also falls flat: there’s too many ways for uncontroversial examples of women to nevertheless not produce eggs. Most notably, age, and yet nobody asks women to turn in their membership card when they go through menopause.

(And all of the above, by the way, is why the neologisms “womben” or “wombyn”, as re-spellings of “women”, have become a transphobic dog-whistle: they are unsubtle attempts to bake a reproductive capability definition not just into the definition of “women” but into its very spelling.)

Hormones

At the next layer down we find biochemistry: what kind of hormones do you have in your body? There are obvious false-positive and false-negative problems with this—everywhere you look—though this has not stopped people from trying to define womanhood in terms of hormone levels. Mostly this seems to happen in sports-related contexts. Famously, there was the case of Caster Semenya, a cisgender woman who won a discrimination suit over being barred from competing due to her natural testosterone levels being too high.

While it’s true that there are clear, non-overlapping “reference ranges” for both masculine and feminine hormones, biochemistry fails to give us a solid basis for our definition because hormones change all the time and for lots of reasons.

People’s own genetics plays an important role. Age plays an important role. A variety of medical conditions can mess with your hormone levels, including certain forms of endocrine tumors. Should a woman be declared to be not a woman anymore if she gets a tumor that pushes her testosterone levels higher than the female reference range for testosterone? I don’t know of any reasonable people who make that argument, though that is what a definitional relationship between hormone levels and womanhood would require. Hormone-based definitions would also have to contend with women whose bodies don’t make enough estrogen on their own, such as those who have survived ovarian cancer.

All in all, there’s no way to craft a definition based on hormones which plays by the rules of the game: you’d always end up needing exceptions to handle the many ways in which hormones can be atypical. It is exactly that variability which makes them unsuitable for a definition.

Chromosomes

Below the biochemistry are our genes. After all, biochemistry is just how genes express themselves. Naturally, many transphobes have gravitated towards a person’s chromosomal karyotype as being the ultimate determiner of one’s membership in a gender category. “That’s just basic biology,” they will tell you.

So, does that work? Well, normally, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. In 22 of these pairs, both chromosomes are X-shaped. The remaining pair will be both X-shaped for female bodies (karyotype 46,XX), or one X plus one Y for male bodies (karyotype 46,XY).

Normally.

Except that nature is complicated and does not restrict herself to basic biology. Nature does its thing through the entire complex, messy gamut of molecules bouncing around under Brownian motion, meaning that the actual picture is not so simple as “XX girl, XY boy.”

A chromosome-based definition must contend with exceptions like de la Chapelle syndrome: 46,XX people with male external genitalia because the SRY gene, which normally lives over on the Y chromosome, has migrated to one of the X chromosomes. Or complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: 46,XY people with external female genitalia whose bodies do not respond at all to testosterone but do feminize with hips and breasts like any other girl’s during puberty. Wikipedia has pictures—NSFW, obviously—at the previous link if you don’t believe me. Or this case of a woman with an XY karyotype who still managed to get pregnant and give birth. I genuinely don’t understand how anybody could be aware of these cases and still claim with a straight face that those people should be classified as men simply because “XY boy.”

A real fun one (though not so much for the people who have it) is Turner syndrome: 45,X people for whom the second chromosome of that pair is simply missing. Or 46,XX/46,XY chimerism or genetic mosaicism: people who have some cells with XX chromosomes and some cells with XY, blended throughout their bodies.

What’s a chromosomal definition of womanhood going to say about these people? Do they not get to belong to any gender category?

Those are just a few of the genetic conditions that muddy up the waters of the “XX girl, XY boy” fable, yielding either false positives or false negatives. There are a host of other sex chromosome anomalies as well—such that any chromosomal answer to The Question is going to look more like a laundry list than an actual definition.

What’s left?

So, jeez, where the hell do we go next? Chromosomes are the bottom of the stack! There’s nothing below that but atoms, which are no help at all since every person’s overall atomic composition is roughly equal.

We looked at the entire body, from the outside in, and none of it works because there are always exceptions. And, yup, that’s the problem. Humans are just too diverse, biology too messy, for any of those strategies to work.

So maybe we need to stop looking at the body at all.

Gender identity

If not the body, let’s look at the mind, where lives a person’s gender identity: a real attribute that people have, and the innermost attribute of all.

(Sidebar: If you feel like you’re a bit shaky on just exactly what the phrase “gender identity” means or how it works, read that link and give yourself some grace: the majority of our society, outside of gender-woke spaces, lack a clear understanding of it too. But to recap quickly, gender identity is your own internal, subjective and often subconscious sense of membership in a gender category. It is a feeling of affinity towards a category and towards things which signify that category.)

Can we answer The Question with gender identity? After all, even though most cis people don’t go through the exercise of questioning their gender to ascertain what kind of gender identity they have, of cis women who do, they indeed discover that they have a feminine gender identity. That is, feminine gender identity is an attribute that uncontroversial examples of women have.

A workable definition

So what happens if we try to build a definition that way? Does it hold up? Actually, yes!

If we define womanhood in terms of feminine gender identity we find that the uncontroversial women have the attribute. The uncontroversial men don’t. And of controversial people—the gender diverse ones whose existence prompts The Question in the first place—the ones who have it (i.e. trans women) are women, and the ones who don’t aren’t. No exceptions necessary. No weird edge cases. If gender identity = female, then you’re a woman.

Put more simply, if you yourself feel that you belong to the category of women, that feeling probably indicates that you have a feminine gender identity, and therefore you do belong. That’s it. This definition works in a way that applies equally well to everyone, cis or trans, regardless of anything to do with the messy biological variability of human bodies. It might be counterintuitive, but it’s consistent, it aligns with the boundaries of womanhood as broadly understood, and doesn’t strip womanhood away from anybody who wants it.

At last, here is the workable definition of “woman” and the answer to The Question:

A woman is a person with a feminine gender identity.

Clean. Simple. No false positives. No false negatives. No exceptions.

“But it’s Circular!”

No, it’s not. Let’s break down each keyword in the definition and what it’s doing.

• “Woman” refers to the whole category, the one we assumed from the beginning actually exists, and is the thing we were asked to define.

• “Person” is essentially a scope operator, telling us what subset of all possible things in the universe this definition is relevant to: just people. Don’t go trying to apply the definition of “woman” to things like ice cream sundaes, or love, or the Milky Way galaxy. Those are out of scope.

• “Gender identity” names the attribute that’s relevant for any person being judged under this definition. We only want the people with feminine gender identities. Not the masculine ones, nor the non-binary ones, etc.

• Finally, “feminine” tells us what specific value that attribute should take in order to qualify a particular person for membership in the “woman” category.

It’s true that understanding this definition requires understanding gender identity (which, once again, we already do. If you don’t, yet, then go read that link). This requirement, however, is nothing special; it is no different than needing to understand the meaning of “drawn out” when reading the definition of “wire”: metal drawn out into a thin, flexible thread or rod.

The definition is not circular. It just requires a clear and rigorous understanding of the words in the definition and how they are being used.

“But I don’t like it!”

There will doubtless be people who don’t like this definition at all. I’d bet they will mostly be—ironically but predictably enough—the very ones who were asking The Question to begin with.

To any such people who may be reading, all I can say is, uh, sorry? I never promised you a definition you’d like. I only promised one that works. One that is consistent and logically sound. One that is in fact a definition like you asked for.

After all, The Question was “what is a woman?” Not “what is a woman but no trannies.” The whole point was to find a workable definition so as to clarify the category membership of trans woman, whose status without such a definition is under debate. As such, neither The Question nor the definition can make any explicit reference to trans women (either for or against), or else we’d just be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than proper ontology.

Y’all asked the question. This is just where the logic leads. Don’t get all salty about it now just because you don’t like the answer.

Where does that leave us?

This definition of “woman” brings with it a number of further implications that are worth pointing out, at least briefly.

The main one is that this definition requires us to give up every previous assumption we’ve ever had, every previous belief we’ve ever had, every previous claim anybody may have ever made, that a person’s category membership is contingent on their external, physical body.

This is a direct logical consequence of The Question itself: we’re asked for a definition, which therefore must be rigorous in all the ways outlined earlier. Thus, we had to take a very hard line about rejecting attributes that lead to false positives or false negatives. Under that stringency, humans are too diverse and biology too messy for any body-centric definition to work. Hence, we must give up any reliance on bodies.

This is definitely counterintuitive, especially to anybody who grew up in a society which casually conflates body types with category membership. Which, so far as I know, is everybody. But “counterintuitive” does not mean “wrong.” It just means our prior intuitions were build on a foundation of sand, and now the tide has come in.

Nor am I saying you can’t look at a person and make an inference about their category membership. After all, most people really are cis, and that trick works most of the time. But that’s just it: most of the time. Not all. So feel free to make those inferences—for the most part, they are essential to our ability to have smooth day-to-day social interactions with other people, and I have a whole article on exactly how this kind of inference works and why it’s a good thing—just remember that sometimes your inference will be wrong. The difference between an inference and a conclusion is whether you have access to the right data. For someone else’s gender identity, you don’t; your inference, no matter how certain it seems, cannot guarantee truth.

This definition explains why the statement “trans women are women” is true. As trans women who have completed their own process of gender questioning will recognize, they too have a female gender identity. Which, as we have laboriously established, is the sole criteria for being a woman. “Trans women are women” is not a political statement (though many people will interpret it as one); it’s a statement about category membership, rooted in the singular attribute that all women share regardless of their sex assigned at birth.

This definition also permits us to answer questions like “what does it mean to identify as a woman?” Identifying as a woman means nothing more or less than recognizing that you have a feminine gender identity, and that therefore you are a member of the category of women, irrespective of what’s going on with your body.

It also makes sense out of cis-people attitudes such as, “I don’t identify as a woman, I simply am one.” Well, yes, dear cister, that just means you’re aware of belonging to the category without having done the gender questioning necessary to verify your beliefs about your identity. These two things are not in conflict with one another; they are statements about different things. “I am a woman” is a statement about category membership, while “I identify as a woman” is a statement about self-awareness.

This, then, clarifies the distinction between being a woman and knowing that you are one—a situation that is acutely familiar to any trans woman who discovered her true identity after some period of believing that she was male. The known stability of gender identity (and consequent failures of conversion therapy), plus the scientific evidence we have for how gender identity gets established in utero, mean that I, for example, have always been female even though I didn’t know I was female for a long time: my body tells lies about my identity, and those lies got back around to me before I was old enough to know any better: Being and knowing are different things.

Understanding that category membership depends only on gender identity also reveals what the logical inconsistency is in the transphobe gotcha-question “so if a man says he’s a woman then he’s a woman?” If he’s actually a man, then he has a masculine gender identity and wouldn’t say that unless he was intentionally lying. (And we were never concerned with ferreting out liars; that’s a whole separate problem.) But if she’s a woman with a masculine body who you’re assuming is a man, and she says she’s a woman, it’s because she actually is. This is just back to remembering that inferences are not guarantees.

As well, all of the above logic applies equally well to people of any gender category. Having defined “woman”, we can now write equally simple, robust definitions of “man” or “enby” or “gender fluid” or “agender” or anything else:

• A man is a person with a masculine gender identity.

• An enby is person with a gender identity that is neither strictly masculine nor strictly feminine.

• A gender fluid person has a gender identity that variously associates with masculine or feminine groups at different times.

• An agender person is someone whose gender identity does not associate with any specific gender category.

See how easy it is! Identity, with respect to ontological categories of gender, always boils down to how your specific gender identity goes about its business.

Why does gender identity work when nothing else does?

It should not be surprising that gender identity works. Who we are as people is fundamentally not about our bodies; it’s about our brains, and how those brains perceive ourselves. Gender identity is not some little gland nestled down under the pancreas. It’s not a discrete brain structure that can be seen or measured on an MRI scan. Gender identity is not your clothing or your chromosomes, not your gametes or your genitals.

No. Gender identity is just one aspect of the overall operation of your beautiful, unique human brain and the way its myriad neurons are all wired up and function together. Like your consciousness itself—like your very personhood—your gender identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the operation of your brain. The two are inextricable; consciousness is the very thing that forms subjective experiences in the first place, and gender identity is an aspect of consciousness, so of course gender identity (and the category membership that comes with it) must also be subjective.

Gender identity works. Gender identity gives us a reliable answer to The Question. It only requires us to let go of the idea of one’s category membership being an objective fact that can ever be measured from the outside. It’s not. It is a fundamentally subjective self-perception.

Why I Love the Question

That fundamental subjectivity implies one more thing, a final conclusion that to me is the most important takeaway of all: Since gender identity is fundamentally subjective, you cannot know what gender category another person truly belongs to just by looking at them or examining anything about them. That would just be falling once again into the trap of looking for an objective physical standard for something that simply isn’t physical. Sure, one’s category membership is often marked by physical attributes, but the membership itself is not a physical thing.

Again, make inferences about people’s identities, as we all must while navigating the day-to-day world. But be humble about them. You might be wrong! Truly, the literal and philosophical best you can do to know someone else’s category membership is to ask them, and then when they tell you, believe them.

If you were telepathic, you could read their mind to check their gender identity for yourself. But you’re not. Like everyone else, you’re stuck using the closest thing we have to telepathy, which is language. Ask, and listen. It’s the best you can do.

This is why I love The Question, despite its use as a rhetorical device against trans identities. Because, by treating it with the seriousness it deserves, we discover a conclusion which not only supports trans people’s identities but supports all people’s identities. It is a conclusion which demands respect for every person’s right of self-determination and authority over themselves.

I, and I alone, am capable of observing what my gender identity truly is and with it determining what category I belong to. You, and you alone, are capable of observing what your gender identity truly is and determining your category. And nobody has any authority whatsoever to say a damn thing about another person’s identity based on anything we can observe or even theoretically observe.

I think that’s a very good thing indeed.

Addendum: I am looking to recruit a small crew of beta readers to provide feedback on future articles before they go live. If you’d be game for that, please private message me here on Substack.