Political Memes

Like a dude, but a chick.

it's someone who identifies as a woman.

if you meet someone who says their name is Jack, do you ask for government issue identification? no, them telling you is enough, because that's all you need for social interaction.

same with gender. you don't need to check their genitals. if it looks like they're presenting as a woman, they're most likely a woman.

in fact this is what you do on a daily basis. if you see a woman across the street wearing something ridiculous and turn to your friend and say "look at that woman over there" it's not because you confirmed whether she has a vagina or not, but because she's presenting as a woman. social cues, not biological.

and if you make the wrong assumption when talking to or about someone and they correct you, and you say sorry and refer to them as a woman going forward. really not a problem in real life. just chodes who never have contact with actual women because they're disgusting creepy weirdos.

Asking this is like when people debate what is and isn't a sandwich. Everyone knows that a sub and a club are sandwiches right? Bread and filling, straightforward. But it's a big world with many foods. Is a hot dog a sandwich? A pizza? What about a taco? A falafel wrap? It's not exactly clear.

People spend tons of effort trying to come up with simple definitions that conclusively define sandwiches. But these inevitably lead to consequences that just intuitively don't make sense to people. Now a deep dish pizza is a quiche, pop tart is a toast, a burrito is a calzone until you take a bite at which point it becomes a quiche. Your simple definition is just not useful in the real messy world of bready foods.

At the end of the day, you have to accept that sandwich is a loose, vague term that cannot accurately categorize all food ever, and mostly it's whatever people say it is.

The point is, gender and sex are like sandwiches.

An intentionally vague term; we have known that a binary gender system is faulted at least ever since the late 1700s as that is when the term "intersex" was added to the Oxford English dictionary. The concept of intersex Highlights the vagueness of both man and woman. Like most intentionally vague terms, we like to pretend to have a clear grasp of what it is as the admission of the vague nature harms the utility of the word. In most cases, an precis Definition of, e.g. culture or woman, carries less utility than the share vague understanding of the term. In other words, trying to define the word is taking part in an effort that goes against the point of having words, being able to effectively communicate ideas.

Ofc, defining a woman within a conversation or a paper for the sake of clear communication is a good idea in some situations. Just like defining a dice to have 6 sides makes sense in the manual of a game but it doesn't make sense outside of these cases.

First you have to ask what gender is. Gender is a set of behaviors expected of people of a given sex.

Then, you have to ask what it means to belong to a given gender. You don't have to, and can't, meet all the behavioral expectations of a given gender. Those expected behaviors change over time. People of all sexes have interests that cross gendered lines because gender is not perfectly correlated to specific behaviors - instead it is a broad notion of behaviors that are considered to correlate with a given sex.

Additionally, there exist people who are not really male or female due to genetic differences. But, society typically treats them as the gender typically assigned to the sex they most resemble. So, since they do not have the "correct" sex and may not participate in the "correct" behaviors to belong to a given gender, their assigned gender is arbitrarily determined.

Those 3 things establish that gender is: not biological, not behaviorally determined, and somewhat arbitrary.

Since gender isn't biological, woman =/= female person

Since gender isn't behaviorally determined, woman =/= someone who engages in typically feminine behaviors

Since gender is at least partially arbitrary, woman =/= a factual category that can be determined by material features of a person

If women don't have to be female or engage in typically feminine activities and can't be defined by physical or genetic characteristics, then what is left? Someone who identifies as a woman - who wants to be treated as a woman by others.

"But that's circular!!!" It actually isn't. "Woman" as a category confers societal roles and expected behaviors onto a person, "woman" as a person just means someone who belongs to the category "Woman". The only determining factor is being a member of the category. It'd be like asking "what is a boy scout?", getting "a member of the boy scouts" as an answer, and then being upset that there isn't some fundamental universal law being appealed to when classifying people as boy scouts.

Like a man but wo

another clump of cells