If It Quacks Like a Duck

Thoughts on what a woman is

When my then-husband Jamie first announced he was a woman, I tried to understand what “woman” meant to him. “It's a question of semantics,” I once argued. “At best, people like you and people like me belong to a superset—'women-in-effect,' or something.” But Jamie denied it was a semantic matter. Something about him was fundamentally female, he insisted. Exactly what that femaleness entailed remained unclear.

During these discussions, a phrase kept occurring to me: “for all practical purposes.” We could argue for days about clownfish, sex stereotypes and social roles, but why? In the end, Jamie wasn't terribly similar to a woman, in my opinion or in anyone else's. No useful information was conveyed by applying the term. No real-life activities would be facilitated or improved by what seemed a fairly contrived redefinition.

“Woman” can be defined along many axes, someone will say. By physical attributes, by socialization, by shared experiences, by social roles. It's trivial to argue that in this particular case, it isn't that complicated—and has only been made so by a small number of politically motivated activists we'd perhaps do well to ignore. Nonetheless, let's put that aside for a moment. The meanings of words do arise by social consensus, however infuriating the recent drift of “literally” into “figuratively.”

But if “woman” is defined by physicality, Jamie fails that test. He is not, after all, intersex. His height and weight and strength fall well inside the average for males. His body is not ordered for the production of large gametes. He didn't have breasts or a vagina, even if he has since acquired facsimiles. He doesn't have two X chromosomes. How do I know? Let's put a thousand dollars on the table and order that test.

If “woman” is defined by socialization or shared experiences, Jamie fails that test, too. He banged around in his dad's wood shop and got in fist fights with his brother. He was bad at baseball, but was expected to be good. He was good at theater, but wasn't expected to be. When he got side-eye for wearing makeup, it wasn't because women get side-eye for wearing makeup. It's because men do. Same with social roles. Jamie wasn't going to become a matriarch or a nun or a doula; he wasn't interested in caring for babies or joining a quilting circle. For all practical purposes, even—a really low bar to entry—Jamie was not a woman.

What was left? Wearing makeup? David Bowie does that. Being passive during sex? To suggest that's a universally feminine trait is to play into sexist stereotypes. Getting an erection when wearing lace panties? The idea that a set of aesthetic and sexualized traits are the essence of womanhood is an especially male idea.

If it quacks like a duck, what's the point in calling it a tiger?

In any case, the concept so often used to defend these redefinitions—that words have blurred boundaries—is neither complicated nor interesting. It's notoriously difficult to define "salad," for example. A salad can have lettuce or not have lettuce; it can be cold or hot. And yet, we don't point to a 32-ounce t-bone steak and say "this might as well be a salad!" Nor do we force others to eat whatever we put in front of them, ignoring their dietary restrictions, religious beliefs and personal preferences.

Ironically, what allows people to redefine themselves as women—”that’s what woman means to me”—is the same thing that allows others to reject that definition—”That’s not what woman means to me.”

My concern about transition is not one of mislabeling. It's that it leads young people to cut themselves off from opportunities for love and intimacy before they understand what they're doing. It’s that there’s not one way to be a woman or a human. It's that violence against women's bodies is sometimes self-inflicted.