What Does It Mean To Be A Woman?

I suspect this article will set some eyebrows on fire, but we have to talk about it.

Photo by Joel Muniz

As a writer, I’m accustomed to and perhaps inured, at least to a certain degree, to what I call the “peanut gallery demographics,” which go as follows: 10% of your readers will hate you. 80% of your readers will be perfectly indifferent to you. 10% will love most, but not all, of what you do.

I strongly suspect with a title like this one, 80% of you might feel a nap coming on.

But it’s not a rhetorical question. The definition of woman is becoming fuzzier and more relative with each passing year. A big part of me welcomes nonbinary definitions of gender or the idea that biological sex might one day become a social construct. I’m fine with transwomen in my bathroom. I want them on any sports team where being chromosomally male isn’t a competitive advantage. I welcome into the fold anyone and everyone who supports women’s rights and/or wants to be a woman. I will happily use preferred pronouns. We are sisters. You are loved. We expect to see you in the fight for reproductive rights and women’s equality.

This space can hold anything.

This space also needs to hold a long overdue, non-reactionary, intelligent debate on use of the word “woman,” especially with respect to pregnancy and abortion. In so doing, I realize that I am putting my neck on a very scary chopping block. I don’t ever want to be part of the problem, but not talking about the problem has now become just as damaging.

There is a growing movement afoot to replace that word with the more inclusive “people,” and hey, let me go on the record to say that I’m all for the evolution of language. Take the word congressman, for instance. Because of persistent and tightly focused activism, we now use congressperson instead. So, too, humankind instead of mankind; even nouns like the far less patronizing Ms. instead of the marital-status-defining Miss or Mrs.

Those were all steps in the right direction.

When I say the word doctor, no longer does an avuncular-looking, middle-aged white man in a lab coat with a stethoscope slung around his neck automatically come to mind. A doctor can now conjure many different sizes, genders, and nationalities. If that’s not progress, what is?

So, I think we can agree that language is important, just as we agree that a doctor can be either a man or a woman. But as of the year 2022, only someone who is chromosomally female—even if they identify as nonbinary or transgender—can become pregnant or give birth. Like it, hate it, embrace or reject it, that’s a simple fact.

There is a difference between gender identity, which I truly support, and the immutable laws of science. Although to be clear, those rules might change in the near future. The idea terrifies me for a thousand reasons, most of them bioethical ones, but a time is coming when embryos will be gestated outside the human female body and in artificial wombs. The biotechnology is called exogenesis, and if you’re getting Matrix vibes, so am I. When I read news items about this kind of “progress,” I remind myself that hubris is a uniquely human failing, and just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Just to give you an idea of what it’s like to be a woman, I asked a very smart friend of mine recently what she thought might happen to women after they were no longer necessary in order to perpetuate the species. Without hesitation, she said, “Oh, they’re going to kill us.”

You see, this too is what it is to be a woman—at least in the United States of America. And if you think it’s rough being an American white woman, imagine being an American Black woman. I don’t have words for what rampant misogyny does to Black women, except to say the last time I was the only white woman among Black friends and the issue of racial injustice was being truthfully discussed, I burst into tears. It’s so much worse than most of us could ever imagine.

So, yes, gender-neutral language is necessary and important, just as preferred pronouns are a way of honoring your own or someone else’s gender identity. But increasingly, it feels as though the word she and the entire actuality of womanhood is being coopted in a way that not all cis-women are comfortable with, even those who, like me, support trans-rights. Why is it okay to insist on specifically female pronouns and not okay to refer to “pregnant women” as opposed to “pregnant people?”

When we say that “Black Lives Matter,” we are addressing gross injustices done to Black people. To then rebut that with “All Lives Matter” invalidates the specific atrocities imposed upon communities of color. It glosses right over the cry for justice long denied. When former college instructor Rachel Dolezal identified herself as biracial, lying on an application about having an African-American father, she was rightly accused of racial appropriation and dismissed from her position.

Culture appropriator Rachel Dolezal.

Saying you’re Black doesn’t make you Black. Crimping your hair like Dolezal did doesn’t make you Black. Being Black is a lifetime journey, one embarked upon from birth until death. White people can never hope to understand it because they’re not Black. Also, you don’t get to “do a Dolezal” and jump into the middle of the story and loudly insist you belonged there all along. Doing so invalidates the struggle that all Black people go through just to exist in a deeply racist society.

Just because we had a Black president and have Black artists like Beyonce and Jay-Z who make far more money than we do doesn’t mean racism is over. If anything, the backlash to racial advancement is worse than it’s ever been. If you don’t believe me, re-watch the January 6th invasion of our nation’s Capitol.

Pregnant people has the same feeling of appropriation, dismissiveness, and patriarchal control. At a time in American history when a Supreme Court packed with religious extremists has, at the stroke of a pen, forced women back into reproductive slavery, it is more important than ever that women retain their nouns and their personhood. A year or so ago, the ACLU ignited a firestorm when it altered a quote about abortion from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, replacing references to women with gender-neutral words:

”The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person's] life, to [their] well-being and dignity... When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”

Uh, no.

It’s not people’s rights to reproductive healthcare that we’re fighting for. It’s women’s rights. And by “women,” I’m including transgender people, too. What’s happening in the United States isn’t an attack on people; it’s an attack on women.

Women are people, however, just as men are people. They are, in fact, a specific kind of people who haven’t even had the right to vote for a full century yet (Black women weren’t allowed to vote until 1968). As recently as the 1970s, women weren’t allowed to take out credit without a male cosigner, finalize a lease on an apartment without a male cosigner, or even go to certain colleges. Women still make 70 cents on a man’s dollar. They are beaten, raped, and verbally abused online and off. As recently as yesterday, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz publicly proclaimed that women “who look like a thumb” don’t need access to reproductive healthcare because no one would ever have sex with them in the first place.

To negate femalehood is to negate the female experience.

In order to fix the problem, you must first have the correct language to identify the problem. Violence against people is one thing; violence against women is another.

I would also like to say that being a woman is a journey in the same way that being Black is a journey. Going to the tanning salon doesn’t make a person Black, just as taking hormone blockers or undergoing gender reassignment surgery doesn’t make a person a woman exactly like other cis-women. The needs of the trans-community are unique, just as the needs of the cis-community are unique. And I truly look forward to a day when none of that matters. But we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere close. Until we no longer need to fight for women’s rights, I truly believe that the distinction of gender must exist—albeit a gender that can and should include transgender women.

But I still haven’t answered the question: what does it mean to be a woman?

Clearly, I can’t define this for every woman, but I can talk about my own experience, which is best summed up by the following story.

As a young woman with no health insurance who was pregnant with her first child, I was forced to receive prenatal care at woefully underfunded state clinics using woefully out-of-date ultrasound equipment. Twice I was told the child I carried was a girl. At my third ultrasound, the technician—much to everyone’s surprise—said, “Look at that! You’re having a boy!”

And my first, unadulterated, kneejerk thought was: Oh, thank God. At least he’ll have a chance.

Being a woman means being seen, almost exclusively, through a sexual lens. If you’re not “hot,” in whatever way that’s defined at the moment, you have no real value. In this way, women don’t actually exist outside the male gaze. If we’re smart, we’re boner-shrinkers. If we’re good communicators, we talk too much. If we’re emotional, we’re on our periods. If we’re not interested in hooking up with you, we’re “dykes.”

Being a woman means using your body to buy love or even a few minutes’ attention. It means being constantly alert to any sign of danger. We hear about how many women are raped, not about how many men raped women. We hear about single mothers, not absentee dads. A mother who works is neglecting her children. A mother who stays home is lazy. A woman who sleeps around is a whore. A woman who doesn’t is frigid. A woman who dates “up” is a gold digger. A woman over fifty is invisible.

Men won’t ride pink bicycles. Being able to distinguish “beige” from “ecru”—or even knowing the word ecru—is grounds for suspicion. Homophobia is 99% misogyny and 1% paranoia about having a “hole back there” that’s unguarded and therefore vulnerable. “Run like a bitch/cry like a bitch/act like a bitch” is embedded into our vernacular. The only time a woman isn’t talked over is when a guy is pretending to listen so he can get into her pants.

Madison Avenue and by extension Instagram do a bang-up job of showing us where we’re inadequate. They have us all playing defense. As women, we’re not tall enough, blonde enough, skinny enough, enough enough. Alternately, we’re too much (Black women get accused of this). The idea is that societal approval, especially male approval, is both coveted and in short supply. Better up your game, ladies. You’ve got one, maybe two more “good years” left.

When you grow up thinking that your primary worth is sexual, reproductive, and domestic, when you grow up replicating the lessons of the marketplace by becoming surgically fictionalized, a version of yourself, a lie, at some point the rats living inside your head chew completely through the wires. Comedian George Carlin once said, “Women are crazy and men are stupid. The reason women are crazy is because men are stupid.” I truly believe that.

Fortunately, not all men are misogynist. There are some truly wonderful men out there who get it as much as it is possible to get it when you’re an XY chromosome. I love these men—all of them.

And for men who were born into the wrong body, who want to join us here on the distaff side, please know that I honor your choices and will fight to the death for your rights and your inclusion, just as I hope you will see how expunging the plural noun “women” from the conversation is a disservice to all of us.

You are welcome here.

My arms are open.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

I know you will have some things to say, and I truly want you to say them. Let’s be respect to each other, but do leave your comments below.