Time March 16–23, 2020An “adult human female,” according to a seemingly common
sense slogan seen on the Tshirts and laptop stickers of those
who oppose the idea that transgender women are women. They
argue that gender itself is a false ideology masking the truth of
biological sex difference. But “woman” is complicated in ways
that have little to do with transgender issues. Only the delu
sional would deny biological differences between people, but
only the uninformed can maintain that what the body means,
and how it relates to social category, doesn’t vary between cul
tures and over time.
The Caribbean novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter opposes the “biocentric” ordering of the world that emerged from
European colonialism; the transatlantic slave trade depended,
after all, on the idea that certain biological differences meant a
person could be treated like property. The black 19th century
freedom fighter Sojourner Truth’s famous, perhaps apocryphal,
question “Ain’t I a woman?” challenged her white sisters in
the struggle for the abolition of slavery to recognize that what
counted as “woman” counted, in part, on race. A century later
in the Jim Crow South, segregated public toilet doors marked
men, Women and Colored underscored how the legal rec
ognition of a gender binary has been a privilege of whiteness.
In 1949, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asserted
that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”; in doing
so, she grasped how the raw facts of our bodies at birth are
operated on by social processes to transform each of us into
the people we become.
Who gets “womaned” by society and subjected to misogynistic discrimination as a result, and who answers yes to
the question, posed publicly or in the innermost realms of
thought, as to whether they’re a woman or not? The inter
section of those two conditions arguably marks the status of
belonging to womanhood in ways that do not depend on re
productive biology.
WHAT IS A
WOMAN?
WHO WE ARE
BY SUSAN STRYKERThe “What is a woman?” question can stretch the bounds
and bonds of womanhood in messy yet vital directions—
as in the case of Marsha P. Johnson, a feminine gender
nonconforming person who graced the streets of New York City
as a selfproclaimed “street transvestite action revolutionary”
for decades. She’s now hailed as a transgender icon, but Johnson
fits awkwardly with contemporary ideas of trans womanhood,
let alone womanhood more generally. She called herself “gay”
at a time when the word transgender was not common, and
lived as a man from time to time. She used she/her pronouns
but thought of herself as a “queen,” not as a “woman,” or even
a “transsexual.”
While some people now embrace a rainbow of possibili
ties between the familiar pink and blue, others hew even
tighter to a biological fundamentalism. Those willing to rec
ognize new forms of gender feel anxious about misgender
ing others, while those who claim superior access to the truth
are prepared to impose that truth upon those who disagree.
What’s right—even what’s real—in such circumstances is
not always selfevident. Labeling others contrary to how
they have labeled themselves is an ethically loaded act, but
“woman” remains a useful shorthand for the entanglement
of femininity and social status regardless of biology—not as
an identity, but as the name for an imagined community that
honors the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limi
tations of a sexist society.
Why can’t womanhood jettison its biocentrism to expand its
political horizons and include people like Marsha P. Johnson?
After all, it’s we the living who say collectively what “woman”
means, hopefully in ways that center the voices and experiences
of all those who live as women, across all our other differences.Stryker is a presidential fellow and visiting professor of
women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale UniversityESSAY26