Women are not the problem to be solved. Their objections may be telling us where the conversation still needs work.A woman is filling out a form a
Women are not the problem to be solved. Their objections may be telling us where the conversation still needs work.
A woman is filling out a form at the doctor’s office.
She reaches a question asking whether she is a “cisgender woman.”
She pauses.
Not because she hates anybody.
Not because she wants another person mistreated.
She pauses because she has never thought of herself as cisgender.
“I’m just a woman,” she thinks.
Across town, another woman doesn’t mind the word at all. She uses cis regularly and considers it useful.
A third woman supports transgender people but doesn’t want cisgender used for herself.
A fourth has deeper objections. She believes woman describes her sex, not an internal gender identity.
These women don’t necessarily have the same politics.
And that should tell us something.
Maybe women’s resistance is not one thing.
Maybe instead of asking, “Why are women being difficult?” we should ask:
“What are women trying to tell us?”
Because women and girls deserve something that has been strangely absent from too many conversations about womanhood:
Curiosity.
Here are some of the answers we might hear if we actually listened.
1. “I never chose this identity.”
Imagine being 55 years old and discovering that institutions now have another word for what you have been your entire life.
Cisgender.
Some women accept it.
Others say, “But that’s not how I understand myself.”
That’s worth hearing.
There is an important difference between a technical classification used for a particular purpose and a personal identity someone is expected to embrace.
We have spent years teaching people that they deserve some authority over how they describe themselves.
2. “I don’t experience womanhood as a gender identity.”
This objection is deeper than vocabulary.
Ask ten women what it feels like internally to be a woman and you may get ten completely different answers.
One feels deeply feminine.
Another never has.
One loves dresses, lipstick and flowers.
Another has been climbing trees, fixing engines, and avoiding dresses since she was six.
Neither believes the other is less of a woman.
Some women therefore struggle with the idea that being a woman involves an internal gender identity that “matches” their sex.
Their answer is much simpler:
“I am a woman because I am female.”
They aren’t necessarily describing an inner sensation at all.
“A girl does not have to feel feminine correctly to qualify for her own sex.”
3. “Women fought against stereotypes being confused with womanhood.”
There is history here.
Girls were once told that certain ambitions were unfeminine.
Women who didn’t behave properly could be considered abnormal, difficult, masculine, or even psychologically defective.
They institutionalized women and girls and lobotomized women and girls, and they still beat and kill women for this “offense.” Some of the laws around mental health that we have today come from women who were institutionalized for not being the “right kind of woman.” Gratitude to Elizabeth Packard for one.
Feminists fought those ideas.
A girl could have short hair.
A woman could hate makeup.
She could become an engineer.
She could love another woman.
She could refuse motherhood.
She could be loud, athletic, brilliant, awkward, masculine, feminine, glamorous, bookish or strange.
And none of it made her less female.
So when today’s conversations connect womanhood with an internal relationship to gender, some older feminists hear an alarm bell.
They want to know:
What exactly is this thing a woman is supposed to identify with?
That question deserves an answer, not an accusation. And a female human being has every right to reject the answer because she’s is living the reality of being judged harshly as a woman or girl.
4. “I don’t believe my sex was assigned to me.”
A mother remembers the delivery room.
“It’s a girl!”
Nobody asked the baby what she wanted to be.
But the mother doesn’t remember anyone choosing either.
She remembers the baby’s sex being observed.
I knew the sex of my child from the ultrasound. You could see the urination and everything.
This is why some women object to assigned female at birth when it is used as though it were simply another way of saying female.
There are particular medical situations where sex classification can be complicated. But most women understand their sex as something that was observed and recorded, not created by somebody writing an F on a certificate.
That difference matters to them.
5. “Why did ‘woman’ become something I have to qualify?”
This is where the feeling of being subsetted enters.
For generations, woman named the female population.
Now a woman may encounter:
cis woman.
And she may wonder what happened.
She isn’t necessarily objecting to another population having terminology.
She may be asking a different question:
When did the category I already belonged to become an umbrella category, and who decided that? No one asked her anything, but she is expected to become compliant. Immediately. To do otherwise is evidence of being “hateful.”
Before you rename a population, you should probably be willing to hear from the population being renamed. People aren’t concerned with the origin of the word. I don’t care about a lot of words people call women or Black people. I know I don’t like them. You telling me the historical origin isn’t going to make me embrace them. You renamed me—called me out of my name as we might say- without asking me, and that matters to me. You don’t know me like that.
6. “Some real life and death issues really do require the word female.”
A doctor is studying ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, adenomyosis, endometriosis, or fibroids.
A researcher is studying maternal mortality.
An advocate is examining female genital mutilation.
A sports scientist is studying puberty.
A criminologist is investigating patterns of sexual violence.
An advocate studying the prevalence of femicide.
Someone studying period poverty, girl child marriage, female rape, and genocide during war and conflict.
Someone studying violence against lesbians.
Studying violence against wives, girlfriends, or pregnant women or girls.
Sometimes sex is the relevant variable.
Sometimes gender identity is.
Sometimes both are.
Good research requires knowing which one we’re talking about.
If a study recorded biological sex, its findings shouldn’t casually become findings about cisgender people unless researchers actually established that information.
Precision isn’t disrespect.
Precision is how we discover what is actually happening to people.
And women and girls need good data. Required.
7. “Please don’t erase the history attached to being female.”
A little girl born in 1920 did not have fewer opportunities because someone had discovered her internal gender identity.
People saw that she was female.
That could determine whether she received an education, inherited property, controlled money, entered certain professions or was expected to marry and obey a husband.
Across the world, girls continue to encounter discrimination because they are female.
That material history is enormously important to many women.
Womanhood isn’t merely a personal description to them.
It is connected to generations of female lives. That remains the case today even in the West. How the police treat female human beings that are arrested or pulled over. How technology has changed how girls are being trafficked. How technology has changed how women and girls are being stalked.
Often, not enough is being done because these are common obstacles women and girls face, and our society has been stuck in neutral going back generations.
8. “Why are women’s words changing so much?”
Some women have noticed something else.
Cis woman.
Pregnant person.
Birthing person.
Menstruating person.
People with uteruses.
Chestfeeding.
Again, no one asked women a doggone thing. Just walked into our demographic and started moving our stuff around.
Why is the language surrounding the female body changing so rapidly?
That’s not an absurd question.
And another question follows:
Has comparable linguistic restructuring happened around men?
We shouldn’t guess.
We should investigate it.
Because if women perceive an asymmetry, the answer shouldn’t be, “Stop noticing.”
The answer should be: let’s look.
9. “Don’t use ‘cis male’ when the evidence only says male.”
This sounds technical.
It isn’t.
Suppose research finds that a particular form of violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by males.
Someone summarizes the research by saying the perpetrators were cisgender males.
But did the researchers actually establish every perpetrator’s gender identity?
If they didn’t, something has quietly changed between the evidence and the sentence describing it.
Cisgender and male do not measure exactly the same thing.
Women and girls deserve accurate violence research.
So do male victims.
And violence data become especially interesting here because male victims themselves complicate simplistic narratives.
CDC data show that among American male victims, perpetrator sex varies substantially according to the kind of sexual violence experienced. For example, 87% of male victims of completed or attempted rape reported only male perpetrators, while 79% of male victims who were made to penetrate reported only female perpetrators.
Older CDC national data likewise found that the overwhelming majority of female rape victims reported male perpetrators, while perpetrator patterns among male victims differed according to the offense.
So yes, saying broadly that men “experience violence from cis males” can conceal important information. Men experience violence from males, but they also experience some forms of intimate and sexual violence from females. Research specifically examining female-perpetrated violence against men exists precisely because those victims have often been overlooked.
Use the variable the evidence supports.
10. “Supporting someone else’s dignity shouldn’t require me to surrender my own boundaries.”
This may be one of the most important misunderstandings.
A woman can believe transgender people deserve housing, employment, medical care, safety, dignity and protection from harassment.
And she may still have questions about sports.
Or prisons.
Or shelters.
Or medical language.
Or intimate spaces.
Or lesbian boundaries.
Those questions aren’t automatically answered by establishing that transgender people deserve civil rights.
There can be two legitimate human interests in the room.
Women aren’t merely outside observers being asked to become kinder.
Some of these questions directly involve women’s bodies, categories, resources, safety or boundaries.
Women cannot be treated as privileged outsiders to their own category.
11. “Sometimes it feels like women’s objections are treated as the real offense.”
There is a family dynamic many people recognize.
Everybody knows there is one subject that must be handled carefully.
So everybody accommodates.
Someone changes the subject.
Someone whispers, “Don’t bring that up tonight.”
Someone decides it isn’t worth the argument.
Eventually the family becomes very peaceful on the surface.
But nothing has actually been resolved.
Societies can do this too.
People can use the expected language at work.
Stay quiet at dinner.
Avoid the conversation online.
Smile.
Nod.
And remain completely unconvinced.
Then election day arrives.
Inside a voting booth, there is no social penalty for disagreement.
That is why silence must never be confused with persuasion.
Accommodation can keep the dinner peaceful. It cannot tell you what everybody believes.
12. “Please remember that women have an oppression story too.”
This is where some conversations have gone especially wrong.
Women are sometimes positioned as though they are simply members of a socially dominant population being asked to accommodate a marginalized one.
But women have their own history.
Political disenfranchisement.
Marital subordination.
Economic dependency.
Educational exclusion.
Reproductive control.
Sexual violence.
Domestic violence.
Medical neglect.
Sex discrimination.
Women are not equivalent to heterosexual relatives being asked to accept that someone in the family is gay.
Some contemporary gender questions concern institutions and categories women already inhabit.
A women’s shelter concerns women.
Female sports concern female athletes.
Pregnancy language concerns women who become pregnant.
Lesbian sexual boundaries concern lesbians.
The definition of woman concerns women.
Recognizing this doesn’t require denying anyone else’s hardship.
There is room in human compassion for more than one history.
13. “If this feels misogynistic to women, can we at least ask why?”
Intent matters.
But intent isn’t the only thing worth examining.
Imagine telling women:
Your discomfort isn’t important.
Your boundaries are exclusion.
Your terminology needs updating.
Your questions are harmful.
Your objections prove something bad about you.
Your job is to accommodate.
Women have heard variations of those instructions before.
From husbands.
From employers.
From churches.
From governments.
From doctors.
From institutions.
From schools.
That historical echo can make even well-intended inclusion feel disturbingly familiar.
It doesn’t prove that everybody advocating these changes hates women.
It tells us something more useful:
The method may be reproducing patterns women recognize.
And if that’s happening, we can change the method.
14. “Please don’t assume every woman who objects believes the same thing.”
Women disagree.
Of course we do.
Some women proudly call themselves cisgender.
Some consider the term harmless.
Some use it only when distinction is necessary.
Some dislike it personally.
Some reject the underlying concept of gender identity.
Some decide that focusing on women and girls sex based rights is a huge enough undertaking.
Some oppose much more.
That’s a population thinking.
Not a population failing.
Women should be allowed the intellectual diversity routinely granted to everybody else.
15. “Maybe we could actually solve some of this.”
This is the part I don’t want us to miss.
We don’t have to begin with enemies.
Suppose we begin with questions.
What problem was this terminology created to solve?
Did it solve that problem?
Did it accidentally create another one?
Where is sex important?
Where is gender identity important?
Where are both important?
When does a qualifier provide useful information?
When does it unnecessarily redefine somebody?
Can institutions distinguish courtesy from scientific classification?
Can disagreement be permitted long enough for actual persuasion to happen?
These are solvable questions in at least some circumstances.
But first we have to stop treating the women asking them as the problem.
Women Are Telling Us Something
Picture that woman at the doctor’s office again.
Her pen is still hovering over the form.
Instead of somebody leaning over her shoulder and explaining why she shouldn’t object, imagine someone asking:
“What about this doesn’t describe you?”
Maybe she gives an answer we disagree with.
Maybe she raises something nobody considered.
Maybe the form needs changing.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe she changes her mind.
Maybe we do.
That is conversation.
And social change built through conversation is stronger than social change built upon people being afraid to admit they remain unconvinced.
Women and girls deserve to be seen inside conversations about womanhood.
Not as obstacles.
Not as inconveniences.
Not as people whose compassion must be demonstrated through endless accommodation.
As human beings with history.
As stakeholders.
As thinkers.
As people capable of compassion and boundaries.
As people worth persuading rather than silencing.
And perhaps that is where we should begin again.
“When women resist a new name, don’t begin by asking what is wrong with the women. Ask what their resistance knows that the conversation has not yet heard.”
There is enough dignity to go around.
But dignity that requires women’s silence was never a sustainable solution.
What Knowledge Are Black Women Assumed Not to Have? – WE Survive Abuse