What Makes a Woman?

By Katie Krumeich on April 1, 2013

Smith is in hot water as we speak for denying a woman admission to their college on the basis that she was born male. This young woman is Trans*. What does Trans* mean? Well, transgender is an umbrella term for individuals who do not identify as the sex assigned at birth. This raises an important and fundamental question that I think deserves serious consideration: what makes gender, and what gives you the right to police another person?

Let’s throw out the bad logic. She ‘wasn’t born with a vagina’ is the kind of definition of gender I expect from particularly dull, vapid teenagers. We don’t claim that people who have hysterectomies (or mastectomies) are now a man. Similarly, if a man loses a testicle to cancer or testicular torsion, or is in an accident and forfeits his penis in its entirety, we still wouldn’t consider him a woman. And so, even biological sex isn’t black and white, let alone gender. You’re not even necessarily born with one genitalia or the other.

Here’s a simple fact, however, now that we’ve banished genitalia from the conversation: almost everything we think about gender is a cultural construct. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Motherhood is a cultural construct: societies without the concept of mother do exist and have existed, and what it means to be a “mother” in a patrilineal society is too different from “mother” in a matrilineal society to even be given the same word. There are entire cultures in which a child isn’t even considered related to his or her mother, since she’s not in the father’s bloodline.

Social stigmas are almost always found to be myths when studied. For example, the idea that women talk more than men has consistently come out when studied scientifically as one of two things: men and women speak about the same number of words a day, or men speak more words than women. Matthias R. Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher, and James W. Pennebaker, who analyzed data from 396 participants (210 women and 186 men) in studies conducted between 1998 and 2004 (full research findings here), for example, found no appreciable difference between the genders. Men do better at math, women at writing is a cultural construct: there’s nothing quantifiable about a woman’s brain and a man’s that means a woman is less able to calculate statistics.

In fact, so much of what we think of as “gender” is just a function of our society that to disentangle “biological” from learned beliefs and behaviors about and toward gender would be a herculean effort that no one has yet managed satisfactorily.

So you say this young woman is a man? There are two responses I have to this: the first is, if she identifies as a woman, and is willing to face the unbelievable stigma and prejudice that is part of being Trans* in our heterosexist society, she is as much a girl as me. The second is: is it affecting you?

No, really.

Is it affecting you?

I don’t particularly care about arguments that start with, “God gave him a…” since after all, you aren’t God, and you wouldn’t go up to someone with a new haircut and say, “God gave you long hair, how dare you cut it.”

So let’s get back to the crux of this: is this human being’s decision to identify with the opposite gender having any effect on your life whatsoever?

A bigot’s vocal abhorrence, that has an effect. It means that people who commit crimes like these, people who slaughter an innocent woman like Angie Zapata in cold blood and afterward refer to her as “it,” feel justified in their utterly disgusting thinking and behavior. It means that children who identify as the opposite gender will be called “faggot” before they’re old enough to spell the word. It’s the reason Trans* individuals are a demographic with one of the highest suicide rates in the country. This article, for example, citing a study conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 2010, puts Trans* individuals’ suicide rates at 41% in the US, “more than 25 times the national average.” It means nothing less than the enabling of pain, abuse and violence, and why on this green earth you feel justified to harm another person—even passively, even without drawing back your fist and striking them—who isn’t harming you, I will never know.

So the institution of Smith College says this girl’s not a girl. That’s complete and utter bollocks.

Do the right thing, Smith. Let her in.

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