On The Semantics of "Woman"
Pete Peterson
On a philosophical level it appears that transgender athletes (and, more specifically, the existence of women’s sports) exemplify a troubling complication for modern gender theory.
No subject calls our modern understanding of gender into question quite like the transgender athlete discourse. Their achievements sensationalized by media outlets as either villainous pursuits or brave endeavors, transgender athletes face immense scrutiny for their participation in (primarily women’s) sports. While the immediate question of the debate is whether trans-women should compete in women’s sports, there is also a secondary question lurking underneath that is what is gender and how is it different from sex.
Why have transgender athletes become the right’s biggest cultural target? As many left-wing advocates will tell you, it isn’t as though many transgender athletes are competing at all. One reason might be that most framings of the issue pit two traditionally marginalized groups against each other — those being women and transgender people — and thus the discourse surrounding transgender athletes is particularly incendiary and polarizing. But, on a more philosophical level, it appears to me that transgender athletes (and, more specifically, the existence of women’s sports) exemplify a troubling complication for modern gender theory.
Due to the contributions of psychologists like John Money and several waves of feminism, modern gender theory teaches us that sex and gender are two distinct but often conflated terms. While sex is assigned to an individual at birth and determined by biological factors (chromosomes, genitals, etc.), gender is an identity, socially constructed by the culture an individual operates within. Gender identity is neither static nor binary; an individual’s gender identity exists on a spectrum and fluctuates in their life, or so the modern understanding of gender theory goes. While most people’s gender identity corresponds with their sex, transgender people find that their biological sex is at odds with their gender identity.
Modern gender theory has proven valuable because it can accommodate the first-person testimonial of transgender people without providing a contradiction when we try to evoke a gendered (or sexed) category. Consider a women’s clothing store. When we say that “these clothes are for women,” we mean it in the sense of gender, not sex. While people who hold the social identification of being women and identify themselves as women might wear clothes found in a women’s clothing store, it isn’t as though women’s clothes are exclusively for people with XX chromosomes or that people with XX chromosomes have to wear these clothes. Should a biological male wish to wear a dress or a biological female wish not to, our modern distinction between gender and sex can adequately accommodate the desires of these individuals without inserting a contradiction into what we mean by “woman.”
On the other hand, consider the phrase “this birth control pill is for women.” When we say this, we are evoking women in terms of sex, rather than gender. The birth control pill only needs to be taken by those who are biologically female. Even if one is a biological male who identifies as a woman, the birth control pill will serve that individual no use as they cannot become pregnant.
So far through these examples, the modern distinction between sex and gender has allowed us to navigate categories like “man” and “woman” without invalidating the first-person testimony of a transgender individual. However, things become more complicated when we consider the subject of transgender athletes, or more specifically, women’s sports.
When we say “women’s sports,” what do we mean by woman? It appears to me that women’s sports exist for women in terms of both gender and sex. Women’s sports provide women (as a sex) a chance to compete with each other on an even playing field, barring men, while also giving women (as a gender) a shared social space and sense of sorority. When we think about women’s sports, we mean women in two relevant, but different, senses.
When we consider transgender athletes in this context, there are two ways to approach the athletics issue: either we reject transgender women from competing in women’s sports, or we don’t. Should we choose not to bar transgender women from women’s sports, we have sacrificed a critical element of women’s sports, that being the level playing field that results from same-sex competition. The argument that transgender women have an unfair advantage over cis-women in athletics is well-articulated in the public discourse and difficult to object to, so I’m not going to focus on that here.
What we’re dealing with is deeper than the notion of fairness alone, for allowing transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity would be to compromise the competitive nature of women’s sports. This is something we should be hesitant to do, for it could foster a sexist perspective where men’s sports are seen as being more competitive, while women’s sports are viewed more as a social opportunity and less as a serious athletic endeavor.
Due largely to the fairness argument, policy preventing trans women from competing in women’s sports is quite popular: the Pew Research Center reports that 66% of American adults strongly favor policies that would force athletes to compete in accordance with their sex at birth. However, I don’t believe that the adoption of such policies would somehow alleviate all of the relevant concerns on the subject of transgender athletes.
If we were to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports, we would be restricting their access to the important social elements they offer participants. Sports may exist primarily as an important outlet for competition, but they also allow men and women to foster valuable social relationships. Reducing sports to a bastion of competition fails to preserve the important role that they have in the social sphere as a source of fraternity and sorority.
Furthermore, athletic restrictions concerning transgender women impose a limitation on the trans woman’s femininity, drawing a dividing line that holds cis-women as “more womanly” than trans women. To some who hold a strictly anti-transgender ideology, this kind of dividing line is seen as welcome and good, but I, like many people, take seriously the testimony of our transgender brothers and sisters, and want modern definitions and categories that can more accurately describe and explain the phenomenon. Thus, we are faced with a conundrum: neither banning nor allowing transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity seems particularly appealing to someone who is to any degree ambivalent about the issue.
Unfortunately, the modern gender-sex distinction cannot save us from this dilemma, for gender and sex collapse into one category when we talk about women’s sports. Have our contemporary definitions of sex and gender failed us? Is an update to these theories in order? Alternatively, do we need to qualify or even completely change the nature and purpose of women’s sports to reconcile the issue of transgender participants? Can we go about doing either of these things while simultaneously respecting the first-person testimony of transgender people?
These questions float around in discourse, and my prescription for us as students at Brown University is not to hastily answer them, but rather to take the implications of our options very seriously when navigating the subject. Additionally, it’s essential to understand both sides of the debate as thoroughly as we can, because the subject is demonstrably more complicated than a simple issue of fairness or right-wing transphobia: what we are observing is a complication of our modern understanding of gender and sex, and one that may necessitate a rethinking of gender theory as it currently exists.
Image courtesy of Edwin Tan via Getty Images