What does it mean to be a woman?

What does it mean to be a woman? June 2, 2015

Not this.

That is a link to the Vanity Fair article, with image, of the revealed “new” Caitlyn Jenner, in which Bruce Jenner has apparently transitioned to a 30 year old woman, both in terms of the fact the “facial feminization” surgery referred to in the article apparently included a heavy dose of reshaping Jenner’s face as a young woman, and the chosen new name, too — does anyone above the age of 30 have the name Caitlyn?

But look:  am I going to say, Jenner is a sicko, a crazy, or, put more neutrally, mentally ill?  I don’t know.  I’ve never watched the Kardashian show — I mean, really never watched it, not even the “oh, I flipped through the channels once or twice.”  And I imagine that even regular viewers can’t really say.

But this image?  It’s a caricature of a woman.  Jenner is 2 years younger than Hillary Clinton, but his (and Annie Leibowitz’s and Vanity Fair’s) image of a woman is of someone far younger than Jenner is, wearing a bustier, with an artificial, surgically-created bust that, I’m sorry, is pretty, well, busty, and a waist that, well, waist-ier than mine (though it’s said that this is the product of photoshop).  We’re told to be accepting of diversity but this isn’t a matter of acceptance.  It’s a distorted understanding of what it means to be a woman.

Let me share with you a few other bits & pieces that I accumulated over the last couple weeks that I kept meaning to blog about.

Here’s an op-ed from the Chicago Tribune, “Should you let your young son become a girl?” which addresses the issue of parents of kids who seem to be transgender, and the decision whether to permit the child to live as if he/she were the opposite sex, or not.  The article’s main point is that the newly-established conventional wisdom, that such a child truly is and should be treated as the gender they perceive themselves to be, is, in fact, not certain at all.  But what struck me was this paragraph:

It seems you have two choices. You could insist that he is a boy and try to put an end to behavior such as cross-dressing. The alternative is to let him be a girl: grow long hair, choose a new name, dress as he (or “she”) pleases, and when it is time, obtain the necessary hormones and surgeries for a female body.

So far as I can tell, there are really three choices:  allow a boy to “become” a girl, insist that the boy adopt stereotypically-boy appearance, activities, etc., or, third (and this seems to be the absent choice), allow the kid to dress how he wishes, choose the sorts of toys and activities he wishes, etc. — but yet still insist that, definitionally, the kid is a boy, and that’s OK.

Here’s something else that caught my eye: “Michigan transgender residents sue secretary of state over driver’s license policy,” the gist of which is that Michigan is unjust in requiring that, in order to change one’s sex as stated on one’s driver’s license, one must have an amended birth certificate, which can be difficult or impossible, depending on one’s state of birth; in particular,

Two other plaintiffs, born in Michigan, can only obtain an amended birth certificate under Michigan law if they undergo gender confirmation surgery, which can be medically unnecessary and cost-prohibitive. 

So:  “gender confirmation surgery”?

But — beyond that:  opponents of sexual reassignment surgery protest that this surgery consists of, quite simply, mutilation of perfectly functional body parts.  And it would seem that transgender advocates concur.

Another item:  a classic Katherine Timpf article at National Review. in which she describes a complaint lodged with British Columbia:

“Since it is impossible to tell an individual’s gender at birth it is discriminatory to issue a birth certificate with that information on it,” the complaint stated.

So what does this all boil down to?

It ought to be an easy thing:  “male” means born with male external sex characteristics and with XY chromosomes, “female” means the opposite, and intersex refers to that small number of individuals who fall in neither category, biologically.  (Yes, you can speak of “womanhood” but only as a sort of traditional extended meaning.)

And how you live your life — whether you like practical clothes or frilly pretty things, whether you choose a utilitarian hairstyle or carefully-coiffed tresses, with makeup, to boot–  that doesn’t change biology.

But everything’s upside-down.  To be a “woman” now means, to Jenner and 2.2 million followers, (a) to declare yourself one, and (b) to adopt a stereotypically- and exaggeratedly-female outward appearance.

ADDED:

Back from an overnight at a team meeting in New York (wish there had been time for just walking around the city; I should have gotten up earlier than I did, to at least take a walk before the day started).

A couple things in response to some comments:

First, what about the kids who are absolutely convinced that they “are” of the sex opposite to what their biology indicates?

You know, I have never had any personal experience with this.

But I am a mother.  To three boys.  Who, though I love them dearly, are not always the sharpest tool in the shed.  And, let’s face it, all of us have stories we can tell:  about the time when kid A found out about taxes and was outraged, crying, “but that’s stealing!”  Or the time when kid B came home from school and said, “we learned about Martin Luther King today.  And how a long time ago, there used to be Black people and White people, and the White people were mean to the Black people, and Martin Luther made them stop.”  And I know that the understanding that it’s chromosomes and reproductive bits that define boys vs. girls — they don’t get that, necessarily:  it’s “girls have long hair and boys have short hair.”  So, having raised three children past the early childhood years, I can easily believe that a boy who doesn’t fit in with other boys and likes girly things, or the reverse, could easily come to believe that their self-perception is “true.”  But I also know that children are, well, children.

Consider what happens when a child misbehaves:  does the child ‘fess up?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no — and, in the latter case, not so much because they’re willfully lying as because, when they tell that untruth, there’s a component of wanting it, trying to will it to be true.  Now, why do some girls/boys say, “I wish I were a boy/girl” and others say “I am a boy/girl” — I would suspect it’s a part of how they perceive reality and how they want reality to be.

Second thought:  a reader observed that transgender men-becoming-women perceive it to be necessary to act as “exaggerated” women in order to prove that they are worthy of the surgical operation that they seek.  Is that what’s going on with Jenner?  I don’t know; I suspect that there’s probably a degree to which his perception of woman-ness is formed by people such as Kim Kardashian and the circus surrounding the family.  But I doubt the specifics of the photo shoot came from Jenner, but instead from the photographer, and everyone at the magazine involved in putting this together.


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