What Is A Woman?
Political commentator and hair-caked skidmark Matt Walsh gets his rocks off talking about this topic, so I’d like to throw my hat in the ring.
That question—What is a woman?—has a really simple answer, actually.
A woman is a person.
That’s it. That’s the answer.
If someone requires you to expound, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they aren’t actually interested in your answer so much as they are waiting to pounce on you with their rebuttal – as though they already know; as though it’s a test, and they’re giddy at the possibility that you’re about to fail.
These are the people who want you to say “vagina”, even though the bulk of them couldn’t properly identify one on an anatomical map. They want you to say “uterus”, even though hysterectomies happen. They want you to say “breasts”, even though mastectomies abound. They want you to get all tangled up with them in anatomy. Misery loves company, after all, and god damnit, the large intestine is long and squiggly.
In all honesty, there is a tiny little pilot light ablaze in my heart that naively wants to believe that if these people really thought about it, they’d realize that their anatomy checklist isn’t the catch-all they think it is. They’d concede that a cancer-stricken woman, for example, who undergoes surgery to have her breasts or her internal reproductive organs removed, is still a woman in the post-surgical recovery room. They’d agree too, I presume, that a man who undergoes a vasectomy doesn’t thusly morph into a woman. They’d affirm and uplift that uterus-free cancer survivor when she celebrates her womanhood, and they’d high-five that man who did his wife a real solid by having his vas deferens cut and cauterized, would they not?
So since there exists no way for your run-of-the-mill transphobe to confirm the presence or absence of sperm or uteri in any given individual, surely they cannot use these things as adequate or reasonable prerequisites for assigning gender. Short of defaulting to that individual’s self-identification, all they’d have to go on is their best guess.
…Right?
And yet, as I mull over this, as I turn this argument over and look at it from every angle, as I try to get into the mind of a transphobic person, I know that I’ll never be able to have that A-HA! moment I’m looking for. He still has a dick!, they’ll say. She still has XX chromosomes!, they’ll assert, as though they’ve thumbed through her medical files. There really are no GOTCHA!s when working with folks who are this adept at mental gymnastics and wiggling through loopholes. Their arguments and logic and lines of thinking hold as much weight as little dandelion seeds drifting by in a summer breeze.
So let me just try this instead:
If you were to ask me, Who is Matt Walsh?
Well, I’d probably go full-throttle and tell you, in the words of my cherished Twitter friend Busty, that he’s a sister-fisting bag of piss-soaked mashed potatoes in a skin suit.
He’s a sentient hemorrhoid. He’s a full beard and glasses haphazardly splapped onto a festering pile of horse manure. You get the idea.
But would Matt Walsh himself say the same thing? Nah, I reckon that he and I widely disagree on exactly who and what he is. Just because I believe him to be those things doesn’t mean he actually is those things.
…See what I just did there?
As much as I’d like to be, I am actually not in charge of assigning Matt Walsh’s official identity. I do not know him better than he knows himself. I hold no jurisdiction over his identity whatsoever. So if you actually want to know who Matt Walsh is, you’d have to ask Matt Walsh himself.
Let me know if your transphobic uncle needs to read that again.
You simply cannot arbitrarily walk around asking people on the street to define a woman and then, when they give you the answer you were looking for, consider that some powerful GOTCHA! moment against every person who rejects the binary gender construct.
The simple act of saying something doesn’t just magically make it so. So Matt Walsh, all his cronies, and the gaggle of evangelical right-wingers who continuously chomp at the bit to establish some universal classification of all XX-chromosomed, luscious-locked, big-tattied, witchy bitchy monthly-bleeders and milk-makers can yell into the wind all they want, but as far as I’m concerned, all they’re ever going to really do is strain their vocal cords. Have they ever considered getting a hobby, I wonder? Touching a blade or two of grass, perhaps?
ANYWAY. I digress.
A woman defines herself.
Everything else is just conjecture.