The Identity of a Woman

CS-WomanWell-Pixabay

As if identity politics weren’t bad enough, it’s taken a turn for the bizarre. In New Yorker magazine, Michelle Goldberg tells us of an ongoing struggle between radical feminists and the “transgendered” — a term that includes not only pre-op and post-op transsexuals but also men and women who for their own reasons wish to identify as the other or neither sex. The problem for radical feminists is that men who claim to be women, even those who undergo “gender-reassignment surgery”, aren’t really women.

Not because the transgendered don’t have the right parts, or because the parts have been artificially implanted; oh no, that would simply be common sense, and who wants that? (“Common sense,” Stuart Chase once sniffed, “is that which tells us the earth is flat.”) No, the radical feminist objection is that the transgendered haven’t been raised with the suffering and victimization inherent in a paternalist society and that transgenderism represents a kind of male-imperialist encroachment on uniquely female territory.

To make matters worse (?), radical feminists seem to be losing the fight. The universities and PACs, which once hosted — or at least suffered — their message of male oppression, are now starting to push back wherever that message conflicts with transgender rights. Says Rachel Ivey, “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out.” Other students, she adds, would ask, “What about women who are male?”

Women who are male. In four words, the surreality of the transgender Weltanschauung is encapsulated. This is the apotheosis of strong social constructionism, which “proposes that the notions of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is ‘real’ is just a matter of social convention. … It reasons that all reality is thought, all thought is in a language, all language is a convention, and that all convention is socially acceptable[;] hence, it uses language to socially program.”

Woman Is Equal Yet Different

This is where the Catholic Church starts from: Men and women are inherently, intrinsically equal because they are both created in the image of God: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand, in perfect equality as human persons; on the other, in their respective beings as man and woman. “Being man” or “being woman” is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator. Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity “in the image of God”. In their “being-man” and “being-woman”, they reflect the Creator’s wisdom and goodness. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 369)

Equal, however, does not mean identical. Women are genetically different from men; that difference manifests both physically and to an as-yet-undetermined degree behaviorally. Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, writes, “We don’t want to revert to the 1960s view that human behaviour is purely culturally determined, since we now know that view was profoundly mistaken [bold type mine.—ASL]. No one disputes that culture is important in explaining sex differences, but it can’t be the whole story.”

Radical feminists are reluctant to admit to different mental makeups. As Pelle Billing explains, “… if there are biological differences in the brains of men and women, isn’t that then an argument to preserve stereotypes?” However, this doesn’t stop them from doing and saying things that pay implicit homage to an intrinsic difference. As an example, the founder of the “womyn-born womyn only” event Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Lisa Vogel, describes the “governing ethos” of Michfest as, “How would a town look if we [women] got to decide what was important?”

Sexual Identity Is Intrinsic

Here’s the crux of the matter: If there’s an intrinsic difference in the way women think, feel, and behave from the way of men, then that difference is rooted in our genotypes, not in our cultural models. Moreover, to the extent that it is rooted in our different biologies, then that difference makes the feminine way of thinking/feeling/behaving to some extent inaccessible to men.

People with intersex genetic disorders provide us with some validation of this impassable barrier. Consider Natalie, a person born with Swyer syndrome:

Natalie’s genotype is XY. However, her testes never developed, which meant that the process that would ordinarily have turned the Müllerian ducts into a penis and vasa deferenses instead developed into a vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes. Also, because of the undeveloped testes (“streak gonads”), she has the body of “a prepubescent girl who grew to adult size, but didn’t go through puberty”. Like many intersex people, Natalie’s condition means she will never bear or beget children.

“She’s been brought up as female,” said Zoe, another intersexed person who explained Natalie’s condition, “looks mostly female … but doesn’t ‘get’ being female any more than a 6 y[ea]r old girl ‘gets’ what she will feel like at age 16. She’s not male though[;] she doesn’t ‘get’ that either.”

Nor is sexual bifurcation merely a theoretical model, or the whim of God/Nature: we are split into male and female because that’s how we reproduce. True asexual species have no need for sexual differentiation; wherever species are split into sexes, some behavioral differences appear along with physical differences, differences which bear on the way the species bears children (and, in animals, the way children are reared).

There Really Is a Reality

At the end of the day, reality is more than a word game or a set of social conventions; we deal every day with objective realities both episodic and continual from holding babies to stepping in dog poo to dying of cancer. We may quarrel and quibble about the shape of that reality. However, there is an is, and that “is” is knowable; to maintain any faith in the intellectual disciplines, we must hold that axiom to be not only self-evidently true but foundational to all knowledge, and reject all those who seek to deny it, no matter how “good” their intentions are.

Empathy enables us to share, to a certain degree, in the feelings and desires of others, including the other sex and other animals. However, Nagel’s Bat reminds us that biology will affect our perceptions of reality in ways that other beings can’t access even through imagination. It simply isn’t enough for a man to want to be a woman, or to think of himself as a woman, or to enjoy those things that our culture attributes to femininity, in order to give him the identity of a woman.

When we tell children that “they can be anything they want to be,” we use a seemingly innocent hyperbole to fend off explaining a messy reality “until they’re old enough to understand” — i.e., until they’re old enough to figure out for themselves that it’s not really true. From the day we’re born to the day we die, combinations of our own decisions and outside forces foreclose future possibilities even as they open others.

Biology is not the most powerful of those forces, but it’s still significant. Surgery and hormones can’t always give us what we weren’t born with. By being born men, the identity of a woman is forever moved beyond our grasp … whether we like it or not.

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6 thoughts on “The Identity of a Woman”

  1. Great post.

    Some thoughts: It’s interesting that you touched on Swyer syndrome but to say “Like many intersex people, Natalie’s condition means she will never bear or beget children.” is not exactly true.

    A simple Google search of “swyer syndrome pregnancy” turns up evidence of (via IVF with donor eggs, another moral problem of itself) XY Swyer syndrome (uterus and vagina possessing from birth) “women” (using the term because they’re typically designed female at birth) pregnancy, to successful labor and delivery:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5885995/

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6764226/

    This of course, means that, chromosomally speaking XY “men” have indeed already been pregnant and become mothers.

    Now if you couple this with the uterus transplants that have occurred already it is probably not long until an XY male-to-female transgender has a uterus transplant and using sperm he banked prior and a donor egg, has an embryo that is genetically his offspring implanted and bears that child to term.

    Apparently a doctor is already planning to do a uterus transplant to an XY transgender who, unlike a Swyer case, wasn’t born with one:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/india-doctor-plans-womb-transplant-trans-woman-to-carry-children-2022-5?amp

    Another thing about saying these Swyer syndrome XY persons designated as “female” at birth remaining “prepubescent” “, it actually sometimes does not proceed that way with menstruation/breast growth occurring due to a “streak gonad” producing enough hormones to cause it:

    “46,XY pure gonadal dysgenesis (Swyer syndrome) is characterized by normal female genitalia at birth. It usually first becomes apparent in adolescence with delayed puberty and amenorrhea. Rarely, patients can present with spontaneous breast development and/or menstruation. A fifteen-year-old girl presented to our clinic with the complaint of primary amenorrhea. On physical examination, her external genitals were completely female. Breast development and pubic hair were compatible with Tanner stage V. Hormonal evaluation revealed a hypergonadotropic state despite a normal estrogen level. Chromosome analysis revealed a 46,XY karyotype. Pelvic ultrasonography showed small gonads and a normal sized uterus for age. SRY gene expression was confirmed by multiplex polymerase chain reaction. Direct sequencing on genomic DNA did not reveal a mutation in the SRY, SF1 and WT1 genes. After the diagnosis of Swyer syndrome was made, the patient started to have spontaneous menstrual cycles and therefore failed to attend her follow-up visits…”

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4563191/

    Of course being rare it doesn’t happen in the normal case, but it seems reasonable that when a Swyer “girl” is identified typically because menstruation/breast development hasn’t occurred at the normally expected age, the parents often (since they have raised said children as a daughter before becoming aware of her XY chromosomes) they would opt to give her estrogen/progesterone supplementation to approximate a normal female puberty process and secondary sexual characteristics development.

    It may indeed one day be possible to using the “streak gonad” tissue (if it has not been removed or removed and preserved) to harvest undifferentiated VSEL (very small embryonic like) stem cells from a Swyer “girl” and coax them to develop into ovarian cells from which ova could be produced, allowing again via IVF this XY “girl” to have an egg genetically of her DNA fertilized by her husband and placed in her uterus.

    I’m not saying any of this is “right” but the fact may be that very soon these XY transgender people may be indeed getting a uterus, menstruating, bearing children and giving birth, being mothers, breastfeeding etc.

    Here’s some info on VSELs which are found in ovarian and testicle tissue and in theory at least can be harvested and coaxed to develop from the undifferentiated gonadal state to either ovarian or testicular cells which opens up a whole other set of ethical problems.

    https://ovarianresearch.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13048-015-0200-0

    In the end when it comes to these intersexual persons such as Swyer XY born with a uterus/vagina but no functional ovaries, they were indeed “born that way” and it is a defect so the transgender trying to justify their desire to be the opposite gender because such defects exist is not any much different than someone wanting to cut off a limb trying to justify that because some are born with a missing limb.

    Ultimately the Church will need to address these issues and chromosomes alone, cannot be the decision point as there are likely/hage likely been XY Swyer Catholics raised from birth as women who have already been sacramentally married to XY men.

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