A Response to Matt Walsh
Our answer is not what you expect.
By: Norah Valderrama, with contributions from Sasha Tedesco
"Now, I am Free!" Poster in Tatar encouraging young muslim women to join the Communist Party. From a collection of propaganda artwork issued in 1921 for the Turkestan A.S.S.R. (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).
Illustrious conservative political commentator Matt Walsh, confessed and self-described (albeit sarcastically) “theocratic fascist”, has recently released a documentary through the Ben Shapiro-founded news website and media company The Daily Wire. Its provocative title asks the hot-question of a generation: What is a Woman?
This question — and its often-bigoted answer — is one the American and British right (and increasingly, conservatives all around the world) continue to ask with desperate persistence Today, in the context of a nationwide trans moral panic, involving six months of anti-trans legislation across several states and calls to ban life-saving medical procedures (even for adults!), it is a question with grave political implications. After all, as the Daily Wire would have one believe, the entire left crumbles apart with the mere utterance of these four words, unable to piece together a coherent answer.
Speaking from the serious left, however, we are not afraid of this question at all! In fact, we graciously welcome the opportunity to offer such urgently needed clarification on an issue that is so clearly integral to normal human interaction. So, here it goes—the simple, uncomplicated, common-sense, one-line answer that Mr. Walsh has been hungering over: “Woman” is a social class.
Let's unpack.
Womanhood is an imposed state of being. In this historical context, gender is a social relation, not a matter of isolated identity for any individual that lives embedded in society. A “woman” is a person who possesses visibly female sex-characteristics, either primary or secondary, to the point that these are legible to the whole of society. (That is, though exceptions exist, they are overwhelmingly identified by others as female.)
In our current conditions, those legible as “female” based on these characteristics are thereby forced into a specific social category — that is, a sex-class —, which demands adherence to a set of rules and roles to embody, and which, furthermore, cages them in an exploited position beneath the dominant social sex-class — the male sex-class.
Woman does not exist in the abstract. To illustrate this point, let us picture the following: A female person is abandoned at birth on a distant planet. She is given all she needs to survive, and an automated program is to take care of educating her on basic literacy and math. However, she is completely cut off from contact with Earth, or any other intelligent life forms. In this circumstance, the social significance of having a female body is null, for there is no "whole of society" from which said significance may be built. Under patriarchy, being male is in alignment being human, whilst being female is in contradiction with it. On this desolate planet, however, she is not a woman; rather, she is a non-gendered human being. Even using female pronouns for her would make no sense in this contextless state, except as applied from our Earthly position. This condition implies nothing more than the basic, generally-universal sexually-dimorphic conditions of having a female body. She is not inherently “feminine,” she doesn't know what makeup is, nor any other “feminine” object or characteristic, and she has no ideas of what her place in society "should be." Paradoxically, in her loneliness, she is freer from oppression based on her female sex than any woman on Earth. (1)
What implication does this framework have on the sex-gender paradigm? By claiming that sex and gender are completely independent categories, liberal pop-left activists have pushed a dangerously oversimplified mischaracterization, one that nearly horseshoes back to the far-right bigotry they wish to oppose. While our human sorting of sex into either male or female is constructed, sex is categorically bimodal (that is, existing across a spectrum with two bimodal peaks), naturally occurring, and a transhistorical fact of the human condition. Every person — and most living things — on this Earth has some set of sex characteristics. In our present culture, these sex characteristics are categorized as male, female, or, in many circumstances, intersex. From this transhistorical universal, a set of specific social meanings and relations are derived and imposed — that is, gender is created.
The nature of this imposition depends on the historical era one lives in. Under capitalism, gender takes on a very specific, complex form; to explain all of its intricacies, a lengthy book series would be necessary, and much has been written. (2) However, the main takeaway is this: gender is the social significance of sex. It is alienated from sex, as it is a derivate and an imposition based upon it. It is oppressive to the resulting, created "woman" by her lesser, othered status under class society. It is, furthermore, oppressive to all, creating little, impossible boxes upon which everyone must somehow fit, yet within which nobody fully does.
This is not to claim that gender is entirely debilitating and impossible to navigate with any individual personal agency. To give a parallel example, a working class family can use financial aid to their advantage in order to pay almost nothing for college, whilst families in middle brackets are often disadvantaged in this specific situation. However, just because individual families use class with agency doesn't mean the existence of class isn't oppressive in the first place, requiring these extra exertions. It's the same here. A woman using her sex-class to gain some advantage doesn't erase that she lives under a violent patriarchal society. It is a social relation we are all embedded in. As such, to liberate women — and humanity as a whole — gender must be abolished.
It is important to note that, especially those in the most advanced of modern societies with access to active internet communities, many may find personal liberation from these rigid standards by identifying outside of the gender binary—a valid method of individual struggle that must be respected. Furthermore, many people are often “read” — that is, are “interpreted by others to be” — in contradictory, unstable ways. These readings create other sex-classes with differing social relations. Nevertheless, this often does not erase how they are treated — and oppressed! — by the whole of society — that is, according to their physical, sexed characteristics. (3) Thus, sex and gender are, in the majority of circumstances, part of the same whole, and as such, must be considered and combatted together. The feminist movement seeks to abolish gender, so as to liberate sex from these alienating social impositions—so that being born male or female no longer is intended to determine how you speak, what you wear, or the person you're supposed to be. Even further, it will free the many characteristics of personality, style, objects, adjectives, morals, and values — the world — from becoming artificially and exclusively regarded as “masculine” or “feminine.”
Nevertheless, the Walsh documentary doesn’t ask “What is a woman?” with the aim of ending gender oppression; it is, quite clearly, seeking to extend and enforce gender oppression, principally by targeting trans women. So, taking that fact into consideration, the elephant in the room must be addressed: where do trans women fit into this paradigm? (4)
Following the previous line of argumentation, if a trans woman is seen as female by the whole of society, thus being sorted into this sex-class, then she is a woman. (5) While this perception is often realized once she is physically, visibly female, it may also occur in select circumstances and social environments prior to any medical transition. Thus, whilst “actually being female” is in most cases a large part of what it takes to be "seen as female by the whole of society," the central idea here is that of living a female social-life—however one achieves that.
“Physically female?” Yes! Contrary to the common belief in eternal dominance of "sex assigned at birth," cross-sex hormones are fully capable of altering most aspects of a person's physical sex, save for their chromosomal make-up and their reproductive function. Changes range from the obvious—breast growth, softer skin, fat redistribution, dramatic changes to facial structure, decreased muscle mass, even changes to bone structure if hormone therapy is started before a certain age—all the way to small, minute details: even hemoglobin and hematocrit levels can change!
As for the aspects of sex that are still unchangeable—chromosomal make-up and reproductive function—only the latter is relevant on a social level. It must also be noted that cross-sex hormones in trans women nullify all reproductive function. It would thereby be wholly inaccurate to say that a hormonally-transitioned trans woman is “reproductively male” in any meaningful sense. As for chromosomes, their only real function is to differentiate sex in-utero, and even then, chromosomal rigidity is questionable. In 1999, for example, the International Olympic Committee ended its 30-year policy of testing female athletes for XX chromosomes. This was due to the policy's inconclusiveness, the test’s determined lack of ability to truly discern "maleness," and the discovered prevalence of intersex woman athletes with otherwise typical female anatomy.
Once again, all of this proves that sex itself is not an invariant, monolithic whole — rather, it is the broad peak of a bimodal spectrum, (6) composed of a multitude of parts. This figure has been criticized (7) for not depicting literal “variations in [the two distinct] biological sex[es] in a population,” (8) but it doesn’t aim or need to. Rather, it counters the notion of unchangeable sexed reality, regardless of all natural and expected variations within these two distinct forms of sex. As such, it offers a model of sex closer to natural reality.
Bimodal Population Variability in Sex Categorization, from Blackness et. al. (2000)
But couldn't a trans woman simply choose to not transition, and use therapy instead? This is a ridiculous question. Firstly, there is an argument to be made (9) that transsexuality itself is a condition acquired in-utero, (10) whereby a person is internally, biologically wired due to many complex factors (11)(12) to function under a certain set of hormones, having a mental body-map inherent to a specific sex. (13) (How conditions in-utero affect sexual orientation and other features has long been theorized and demonstrated!) (14) This match or mismatch between body-map and body may exist for everyone on a spectrum, and cause varying levels of discomfort. Thus, when these conditions are not met on the whole, the result is a state of extreme, unbearable, heart-wrenching distress: sex-dysphoria. (15)
This point is particularly directed at the "gender critical" crowd, who may question why somebody would choose to embody the social position—womanhood—that has caused women such suffering and oppression. The answer is sex-dysphoria! For many trans women, it's either transition, or live a miserable, painful, unlivable life—if live at all. Any embrace of the idea of transness as a personal choice, or as something wholly independent of biological factors, is a dangerous mistake on the part of liberal, pop-left activists. Abstract, incurious explanations are not fulfilling to the general public, nor to many sex-dysphoric people themselves who spend much time thinking deeply on the matter. They avoid answering a question rather than engaging with genuinely interested people. Not only this, it also gives credibility to viciously bigoted — and factually incorrect — TERF (that is, trans-exclusive so-called 'feminist') rhetoric. In many ways, this notion is a consequence of believing that sex and gender are completely different. This implicitly relegates trans women to the latter sphere, thereby conceptualizing them as "male women"—a proposition that is nonsensical and, above all, profoundly inaccurate! (16)
Secondly, there is no known "therapy" that can alleviate sex-dysphoria. In fact, it has been reported that psychological therapies seeking to convince a trans person to, in essence, stop being trans, often end up having catastrophic effects. That is not to say that all therapy needs to be blindly affirmational—far from it. Especially when it comes to children, some degree of professional, psychological examination is warranted, fair and even potentially very useful, given that it is not biased with intentions to affect conformity one way or the other. Regardless, transsexual children do without a doubt exist, and they deserve to have all the resources necessary to lead a happy, fulfilling existence. This, obviously, extrapolates to transsexual adults as well. It is now a well-established fact that if a person suffers from dysphoria, transition can be extremely beneficial. According to The Public Policy Research Portal operated by Cornell University, 93% of major studies on the subject have found significant, clear, and conclusive benefits across a multitude of crucial areas from medical and social transition in transsexual individuals, whilst only 7% have reported mixed findings.
Furthermore, rates of regret for hormone therapies and surgeries are extremely low, hovering around the 1-2% rate. Lastly, detransition rates range from 1-8%, with a majority reporting having done so due to family or societal pressures so negatively powerful that they make transition no longer worth it—not because they suddenly reject the "trans ideology." And the amount who, actually, do simply realize they are not trans? 0.4%.
To summarize: if a trans woman is physically female, is seen as such by the whole of society, and thus is sorted into the female sex-class, with all the oppressions, roles, and expectations such a state implies, then she is a woman.
Is she different from fertile cis women, on the basis that she does not experience reproductive misogyny? Yes! However, so are many infertile women. Is she different in that her upbringing was male? Perhaps, but not always! Increasingly, trans people are transitioning earlier, or simply realizing their circumstance at an earlier age. For them, male socialization was either null or personally resisted. And for those for whom it was not, whilst it matters, it is something that can be unlearned through several years of lived-experience in a female social role (and certainly will be, considering the marked difference in ‘female treatment’).
Other than factors such as these that mark some difference in how one “becomes a woman," a trans woman is essentially no different from any other woman. As per Radical Feminist philosopher Catherine MacKinnon, "To be a woman, one does have to live women’s status. Transwomen [sic] are living it, and in my experience bring a valuable perspective on it as well."
This argument is more sophisticated and theoretically advanced than the right-wing troll merely seeking a simplistic, normative way to “destroy the libs” with “facts and logic.” And, as far as our theocratic fascist friends are concerned, none of this matters, because their opposition to the existence of trans women is not based on logic or arguments; it is based on primal disgust. It is based on their wish for society to maintain rigid sex-classes. They support a system where men rule over women, where this domination is portrayed as so normal and inevitable that it becomes invisible, and where any kind of unholy sexual deviancy is banished—by force if necessary.
Let us look at Walsh specifically. In What is a Woman?, he is not seriously looking for an answer to the titular question — he is merely attempting to villainize, marginalize, and make a mockery of a real, painful medical condition. There is no good-faith involved, no matter how much lip-service is paid to dignity and integrity. This is a staple of Walsh's work. For example, in his book, “Johnny the Walrus,” he compares the consistent, unrelenting, excruciating experience of sex-dysphoria to a little boy pretending to be a walrus. The book portrays medically-necessary transition healthcare as being "forced" onto innocent children by parents and doctors — when in reality, it often is denied and strongly discouraged by both! It deliberately hides the reality that even the most minor of procedures are only attainable to young people after a long medical process involving parental approval, psychological evaluations, and letters from a myriad of professionals.
As proven by these unscientific, anti-biology, ridiculous propaganda books, Walsh's sole purpose is the shameless ridicule of one of the most marginalized populations in the world. Especially outside of, but also within the United States, trans people are often persecuted, discriminated against, and murdered. They live in the most hellish of slums in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, often working as prostitutes, having been thrown out of their homes, and lacking any kind of societal support. The majority die at a young age from diseases like tuberculosis and HIV, if not at the hands of Johns, or even their own friends and family. If you are someone with any kind of empathy, respect, or love for your fellow human being, then this is a situation that you must empathize with. This experience is far from chosen, privileged, or easy.
What Walsh and his clique are attempting to do is turn you—the average reader, the popular opinion, the “voice of decency and common sense”—against this incredibly marginal population, arguing that they are dangerous, perverted, and mentally insane. However, none of this is based on fact.
Trans people are normal people, often living normal lives, only pushed into precariousness by their circumstances. They have existed since the dawn of humanity, in every single continent, across a million nations and cultures — (17) and they will continue to exist, because transness is a naturally occurring, biologically-wired condition. Being trans is not a choice, nor a matter of social confusion, nor the result of mental illness. Neither is it a mere matter of internal identity, as many on the Pop-Left argue, arising from abstract postmodernity. It is a medical condition that a just, advanced society ought to accommodate to the best of its ability.
This article is not written either for the theocratic fascists, or for anti-biology right-wing dogmatists. It is written towards the undecided spectator, hinging on the hope that, perhaps, there is room for thorough, curious, good-faith reasoning in this world.
***
A Feminist Parting Shot
At the end of the What is a Woman? Documentary, Mr. Walsh gives his own answer: A woman is an adult human female. This definition appears satisfactory on the surface (and does not necessarily contradict this article’s answer to this question, either!). Yet the more one observes this three-word response, the more questions emerge.
Firstly, it is ahistorical—that is, it fails to contextualize that “woman” is merely a social category—a class—belonging to class societies. "Adult human females," on the other hand, have always existed, and will continue to exist in a classless, genderless future. In other words, this response is the ignorant, absolute equating of the neutral, universal-transhistorical to the alienated, oppressive, historically-dependent.
Secondly, its internal logic is inconsistent. This response sees "female" itself as a natural category, rather than one constructed and understood by human beings upon a naturally-occurring combination of sex-characteristics, grouped into the peak of a bimodal system. Mr. Walsh may argue that he speaks of "female" in an exclusively reproductive sense—meaning, the sex that produces large immobile gametes. However, this definition is also flawed and inconsistent. Is this measured in terms of fertility, or capacity? If in terms of capacity, how far is one willing to extend that consideration, given the many conditions that may render a woman infertile? Are women born without vaginas or uteruses, but with otherwise typical female anatomy, still women? What about women who develop fully typical external female anatomy, yet, unbeknownst to all, have inactive testes within their abdomen? Even if that was just one person on earth—and it is not—her mere existence would make this argument unstable. And, while Walsh may counter these points with talk of chromosomes, such territory is highly unstable and inconclusive, as explained above.
Thirdly, "adult human female" is an infamous TERF dog-whistle, deliberately crafted to exclude the supposedly "biologically male" trans women. It is not that we shouldn't recognize the differences between women who produce ova, and women who do not—especially when it comes to societal reproductive oppression. It is simply that, for human beings, generally speaking, the "female" peak in the bimodal sex-system spectrum is understood as being a collection of multiple factors, reproduction being one among many.
Thus, as if in a political vacuum, we would (entirely in good faith and without any real expectation of reciprocity on that front) offer Mr. Walsh an amendment to his definition: only in our current historical context, woman is an adult human female—that is, possessing a collection of sex-characteristics understood as female by the whole of society. May this argument speak for itself.
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Notes:
1. The logic used here is borrowed from Marx's explanation of use value in the first volume of Capital: "Use values become a reality only by use or consumption." Similarly, woman becomes a reality only through being forced into the female sex-class. Simone de Beauvoir summarizes this argument in Chapter XII of The Second Sex, “Childhood”, as such: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature… which is described as feminine.” (267)
2. For some of this writing See The Second Sex, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, The Dialectic of Sex, Marxism Mariátegui and the Feminist Movement, etc. Although many of these books contradict each other in their frameworks and findings, they all make up the large corpus of work dedicated to analyzing the condition of women from a scientific, materialist perspective.
3. Of course, none of this is absolute nor true of all cases — some people may read in contradictory, ambiguous ways, and as such, fall into sex-classes other than male or female.
4. It must be kept in mind that the true purpose of the “What Is A Woman?” documentary is not an inquisitive exploration of the institution of gender. Rather, it is the hostile continuation of a conservative moral panic that seeks to vilify and endanger trans people, lashing out against any of the questions raised and answered by reality, in the face of their idiotic, anti-biology arguments.
5. Once again, some people will always get different readings from others for a wide variety of reasons. In such cases, the specific social dynamic at hand depends on their interactions with the world, the way they present, etc. For some, they may fall into a wide array of other sex-classes. For others, they may still fall within the female sex-class. (Or the male.)
6. Blackless M, Charuvastra A, Derryck A, Fausto-Sterling A, Lauzanne K, Lee E. “How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis.” Am J Hum Biol. 2000 Mar;12(2):151-166. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6300(200003/04)12:2<151::AID-AJHB1>3.0.CO;2-F. PMID: 11534012.
7. An article from anti-trans media outlet Ministry of Truth responding to Blackless et.al. lambasts the bimodal sex spectrum for being a “zombie statistic” used out of context across the internet, also stating that “Whatever this graph is meant to represent, the one thing it categorically doesn’t depict is variations in biological sex.” It then criticizes the source article itself for lack of clarity in defining “intersex” or giving quantitative measurement. However, the flaws pointed out by the Ministry of Truth miss the point: that the human species is generally, but not absolutely, dimorphic. That is, biological sex occurs in two distinct forms, and is identified in an individual being by placing their collective set of characteristics into one extreme or the other. Yet, there is a high rate of diversity within, and similarity between, these forms. A change in characteristics in an individual can lead to a change in binary sex categorization. Humans display a low level of sexual dimorphism compared to animals on the whole, yet gender imagines a world of two complete opposites. This is the idea the bimodal continuum chart can illustrate.
8. Debunking the Bimodal “Sex Spectrum” Graph.” Ministry of Truth, 2021. https://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2021/03/23/debunking-the-bimodal-sex-spectrum-graph/. This criticisms of the bimodal spectrum model of sex rely on the hegemonic pressure of the same ideology that the model calls into question, not a materialist analysis founded in reality.
9. Trotta, Daniel.“Researchers explore the science of gender identity.” Thompson Reuters. (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-biology/born-this-way-researchers-explore-the-science-of-gender-identity-idUSKBN1AJ0F0. (Do note that much of the language — such as "gender identity" — used in many of these studies is not reflective of our usage and definitions. Nevertheless, the studies cited throughout this article all come from reputable, peer-reviewed, authoritative sources, and contain very valuable findings within them.)
10. Berenbaum SA, Beltz AM. How early hormones shape gender development. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2016;7:53–60. - PMC - PubMed
11. Sadr M, Khorashad BS, Talaei A, Fazeli N, Hönekopp J. “2D:4D Suggests a Role of Prenatal Testosterone in Gender Dysphoria.” Pub. Med. Arch Sex Behav. 2020 Feb;49(2):421-432. doi: 10.1007/s10508-020-01630-0. Epub 2020 Jan 23. PMID: 31975034; PMCID
12. Guillamon A, Junque C, Gómez-Gil E. A Review of the Status of Brain Structure Research in Transsexualism. Arch Sex Behav. 2016 Oct;45(7):1615-48. doi: 10.1007/s10508-016-0768-5. Epub 2016 Jun 2. PMID: 27255307; PMCID: PMC4987404. For a short, concise explanation of this study, see: Russo, F. (2016, January 1). Is there something unique about the transgender brain? Scientific American. Retrieved August 21, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/
13. See, for example, related "phantom limb" cases. According to a study published in the Journal of Consciousness, 60% of cissexual men experience a "phantom limb" sensation in their genital region post-penectomy. For transsexual men pre-surgery, the figure is almost the same, with around 60% experiencing this phantom sensation. On the other hand, a significantly reduced percentage — around 30% — of transsexual women report the same sensation post-surgery. According to the authors of said study, this presents a strong piece of evidence towards the argument of transsexualism as caused by innate, biologically wired factors, including a mismatch of a person's internal body-map and their external, physical body. — Ramachandran, Vilayanur & Mcgeoch, Paul. (2008). Phantom penises in transsexuals: Evidence of an innate gender-specific body image in the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 15. 5-16.
14. Hines M. “Prenatal endocrine influences on sexual orientation and on sexually differentiated childhood behavior.” Front Neuroendocrinol. 2011 Apr;32(2):170-82. doi: 10.1016/j.yfrne.2011.02.006. Epub 2011 Feb 17. PMID: 21333673; PMCID: PMC3296090.
15. Here, a distinction is being made between "sex-dysphoria" and "gender dysphoria." The latter is understood as distress over gendered expectations—in short, all which belongs to the social sphere. This may include clothes, mannerisms, social roles, etc. The former is understood as distress arising from possessing a certain physical, sexed body which is different from the sexed body a person is biologically wired to have. To engage in educated speculation, it is quite likely that gender dysphoria, in the vast majority of binary transsexuals afflicted by it, arises from a profound, existential, and painful sex-dysphoria. It is, for example, the sense that a set of people, whose bodies look like the one a trans individual biologically expects to have, are continually engaging in a whole set of specific social roles. In that case, there is a desire from the transsexual person to also participate—a desire for belonging—which can cause a feeling akin to dysphoria. In short, just as gender is the social significance of sex, gender dysphoria is the social manifestation of sex-dysphoria.
16. Given that transition changes sex in most ways that matter, and also changes societal placement into the binary.
17. Sex-dysphoria has always existed as a naturally occurring phenomenon. This article takes into consideration both essence and form. Core transhistorical reality is different from, though related to, socially dependent, historically specific expression. “Being trans” as a concept is specific to our era, for its social implications. But sex-dysphoria, and the most effective treatment to alleviate it (i.e. transition) is transhistorical, biological, and naturally fixed. Transition, like health and wellness overall, can involve but is not limited to modern biomedical components. To understand sex is to support access to transition. This is antithetical to the 'TERF' position that no one can or should transition, despite clear historical, psychological, societal evidence to the contrary.