UK

What is a woman?

A recent court case brings up older debates about who is and isn’t a woman. But reducing this to biological ‘fact’ won’t help the struggle for liberation, writes Judy Cox

Demanding equality for trans people in 2023 (Picture: alisdare1 on Flickr)


By Judy Cox
Monday 02 December 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2934

The Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal from the group For Women Scotland on the definition of a woman. This is an attempt to push through a major attack on trans+ rights.

Aidan O’Neill KC, acting for the transphobic Scottish women’s group, told the court to pay heed to “the facts of biological reality”. Biological sex, he asserted, is determined in the uterus and is an “immutable ­biological state”.

Transphobes such as JK Rowling have rushed to back the appeal. “If a man is a woman, there’s no such thing as a woman,” she posted.

These reactionary ideas play to a “common sense” view that men are men and women are women.

The idea that our biology is fixed and unchanging is used to justify all the most reactionary ideas about society—that men are naturally competitive and assertive while women are naturally loving and caring.

The women’s liberation movement launched a fierce challenge to these ideas back in the late 1960s and 1970s. They said, “Our biology is not our destiny.”

This challenge rested on drawing a sharp distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender.

Women rightly challenged the gender stereotypes and norms that limited and stifled their lives. They showed how women could escape both the confines of the home and a role in society centred around caring for others.

But the distinction between sex and gender meant that some feminists began to accept a version of biological determinism, arguing that men’s biology made them violent and dominating while women’s biology made them nurturing and collaborative.

This biological determinism has led some women to accept transphobic ideas. For them, the idea of a fixed biological sex being key to our ­understanding of oppression has been reinstated.

Some argue that gender is formed by society while biological sex is a material reality. They claim that trans+ people can challenge ideas of gender, but they must never challenge ­biological sex.

But for at least 40 years, ­biologists have explored how biological sex is a spectrum not a binary. Many complex ­processes interact to influence the sex of a foetus.

New DNA sequencing shows that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells. The sex of cells might vary, and chromosomal sex might differ from genitalia.

Levels of testosterone can vary enormously among those assigned female.

Scientists are ­developing this nuanced view of biological sex, but society is still imposing intense pressure to conform to the binary model. Surgery is still undertaken to “normalise” the genitals of intersex babies so that their bodies fit societal ­expectations. The number of intersex babies could be as many as one in 60.

It is true that gender is ­constructed as soon as babies are born and layered on throughout life by language, clothing, toys and by the expectations and interactions with parents and teachers.

Rigid gender norms are one the most insidious features of our society. They are “grafted on to the biological body like a parasite”, as author Jacqueline Rose has written.

Many people develop a gender identity, a deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender. This gender identity can align with that assigned at birth, with a different gender, or with no gender at all.

But biological sex and gender do not exist in separate worlds. There is no solid, materialist cake on which the flimsy icing of gender is spread.

Gender is shaped by ­biological sex, the way people’s bodies are perceived by others, social factors like gender values and expectations and a person’s ­development as a sexual being.

But biology is also shaped by gender and other social factors. Poverty and deprivation impact on women’s bodies and those of the children they bear. The bodies of women deprived of contraception are broken by the “natural” process of childbearing.

Girls might be discouraged from the physical activities and play that develops ­physical strength.

We change our bodies, our hair, our teeth in multiple ways to conform to gendered ­standards of appearance.

How we experience sex, our ability to control our fertility and coercion and violence all shape how our bodies develop and how we experience them.

Biology and gender ­interact with each other. Women’s capacity for child-rearing has been constant for millennia. But the way that biological reality has shaped their lives and experiences of having children has varied enormously through history.

Theorist Judith Butler argues that it is not possible to separate what we think of as biological sex out from gender. Instead, they say that gender is “a site where biological and social realities interact with one another”.

Some argue that to ­acknowledge that trans women are women is to erase women’s rights. These arguments rest on a crude and ahistorical ­understanding of oppression.

Many cultures have ­recognised more than two genders, such as the Hijras of South Asia and different genders recognised by many Native American groups.

The obsession with the sexual binary emerged with class society and was intensified by the capitalist reorganisation of the family in the nineteenth century. The sexual binary was also a tool of European colonialism that was imposed on people in the name of civilisation.

There is no universal ­experience of being a “woman” that trans women can never fully share. This is the argument used to exclude trans women from representing other women.

Wealthy white women in the Global North will never deal with a period in a refugee camp, raise a child in fear of police violence or go through the menopause fearing to take a day off work. But those wealthy white women do not hesitate to speak for all women.

The idea that the presence of trans women in single-sex spaces and refuges ­undermines women’s safety rests on the idea that they are really frauds. Trans women may have penises and penises bring the threat of rape. This is biological ­determinism at its worst.

These ideas are not new. In 1979, Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Raymond argued that trans women were “frauds” who should be excluded from women only spaces. All “transsexuals” rape women, Raymond asserted, simply by existing.

Today trans women are framed as predatory males who go through the enormously ­difficult process of ­transitioning so they can attack women in public toilets.

The tiny number of cases of trans women assaulting other women in prison are used to reinforce the idea that all trans women are dangerous. In 1980s Britain, it was gay men who were seen as dangerous paedophiles.

But sexual violence is not rooted in our biology—it’s rooted in society. Most rapes are not committed by strangers but by partners or ex-partners.

The impossible expectations of the privatised family and the commodification of sex inherent in capitalist society all help to create a violent society for women.

Many of us envisage the possibility of a future society cleansed of sexual violence but not cleansed of penises.

Transphobes dismiss rising interest in gender non-conformity as a fad. But historians have shown how intersex and trans children were used as medical guinea pigs in the United States back in the 1920s and 1930s.

Today, people over 65 are nearly as gender fluid as the young. They are liberated from family responsibilities and work and are freer to explore their gender identities.

Trans+ people do not live in isolation. They live in families and are employed in workplaces. Women play a crucial role in the social reproduction of labour in the privatised family and the expectations built on the family shape all women’s lives—whether those women live alone, have babies, are lesbians or are trans.

Trans+ people are often forced into low paid insecure jobs. Trans+ people, especially black trans women, are ­increasingly threatened by violence.

They share the same ­interests as anyone else in demanding childcare and healthcare and uniting against low pay and inequality.

Sexual binaries are a form of coercive control, which is deeply embedded in capitalist society. Anyone who challenges that control is contributing to the dismantling of the prison walls for us all.

What a woman is and can be is not just dictated from above but also contested from below by resistance to discrimination and oppression.

Women’s rights will not be advanced by transphobia. The only strategy to defeat oppression is solidarity and the fight for “Buen Vivir”, a life free from the suffocating confinement of colonialism, capitalism and their gender binary.

GB News blew £100,000 getting rid of ‘woke’ gender neutral toilets after posting an operating loss of £42.4 million

Basit Mahmood 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward

Bosses at the channel are reported to have been so furious at the "woke" bathrooms at their Paddington studio that they spent eye-watering sums to "fix" them.

Right-wing channel GB News has spent £100,000 getting rid of ‘woke’ gender neutral toilets after posting an operating loss of £42.4 million.

Bosses at the channel are reported to have been so furious at the “woke” bathrooms at their Paddington studio that they spent eye-watering sums to “fix” them.

The Mirror, which first reported the story, states: “It was revealed in March that GB News’ rented Paddington studio features unisex facilities – prompting then-Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers declared to tweet: “This doesn’t seem entirely consistent with their apparent enthusiasm for fighting culture wars.”

“But a source told this newspaper senior GB News figures were so infuriated by the “woke” bathrooms that they spent eye-watering sums to “fix” them.”

The toilets have now been separated into male and female facilities.

In March, GB News reported that pre-tax losses at the broadcaster hit £42.4m for the year to the end of May 2023, up from £30.7m a year earlier.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward