What Makes A Woman?

I am a firm believer in diversity; it is our differences that make us unique. We all come from different cultural, race, nationalities, and gender backgrounds that makes us all different and each of us have our own way of thinking that is molded by our environment.

Watching young children play we can see the difference in genders between boys and girls, but that is only a generality. There are girls that like to play rough and tumble with the boys and we have girls that want to be princesses but that doesn’t make those that want to play with the boys any less a girl. There are boys that like to play with dolls and play house and there are boys who are into sports and are hyper masculine, but they still are boys no matter how they play.

In the New York Times opinion “What Makes a Woman?” by Elinor Burkett she writes,

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.

This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause. ESPN announced it would give Ms. Jenner an award for courage. President Obama also praised her. Not to be outdone, Chelsea Manning hopped on Ms. Jenner’s gender train on Twitter, gushing, “I am so much more aware of my emotions; much more sensitive emotionally (and physically).”
[…]
I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

The thing is there are women who like “a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup” and there are trans women who also like that, there are also trans women who also cringe at it.

In addition, look at the people that Caitlyn associates with, movie stars and the Kardashians, they make their living on their looks, and she fits right in with them.

On the website Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance, Elizabeth Wood writes in “What Makes A Woman? What Doesn’t!”

There is no single answer to the question “what makes a woman.” Women are not born women. They are born babies, and many of those babies are assigned as female then raised as girls. Some are not. Some are assigned as male and raised as boys and become women later on. Some of the babies assigned as female and raised as girls do not grow into women. Some of them grow into boys or later became men.
[…]
One of the problems is that mainstream US culture only has those two sets of categories for us to try to fit ourselves into. We have female and male, girl and boy, man and woman. Even feminism has often accepted that presumed-essential dichotomy, and then focused on breaking down the inequality and the roles that have been attached to the binary positions. Some transgender rights advocates have also accepted the dichotomy, with the caveat that a person can move from one position to the other fluidly, or can be misplaced and reassigned.

Some feminists and some trans advocates have gone beyond this dichotomy and posited other models. Some presume a continuum (which still, unfortunately, bases itself on poles called M and F). Others have proposed orthogonal models where masculinity is plotted along one access and femininity along another, allowing a person to be both very masculine and also very feminine, or not very masculine or feminine, or a lot of one and a little of the other. Still, we are stuck with traits and characteristics being commonly understood as either masculine or feminine.

There are even names for those who do not want to fit in the gender norms, genderqueer or neutrois,* the thing is that gender identity and expression are a continuum or a spectrum not just a binary. Yes, there are women and trans women (and also men and trans men) who fit the binary but there are also many more that do not fit into the binary.

Don’t hold us up to the images that the media creates for us; we are a lot more than that.

We know that the media creates a single dimensional view of us and we have a drinking game where we take a drink everything time the media shows us putting on makeup or shows a “before” picture of us. We are a multidimensional community.

Part 2 tomorrow:  What Makes A Women - The Brain

*Neutrois is a word taken to mean "non-gendered class." It is a non-binary gender identity which has many definitions, but most people consider it similar to being agender, gender neutral, genderless, or having a null gender.