What is a Woman™?

As is par for the course these days, deviation by even the merest scintilla from the official progressive doctrine is enough to bring forth the ravening hordes screaming for your cancellation (and worse) and for you to be labelled as a monster. Look no further than J.K. Rowling who is one of the least monster-like so-called ‘monsters’ one could imagine. Her crime was to argue with a great deal of compassion and without any hate that biology might, just might, maybe, perhaps, every so often, once in a blue moon, and possibly in a decade of Sundays, be the slightest, teensy-weensiest bit relevant to being a woman.

For this appalling crime she has been the subject of a truly absurd, truly surreal, and truly chilling level of condemnation and abuse.

We all remember the response of the recent SCOTUS nominee when asked to define the word ‘woman’. She pretended not to know and stated that she would have to ask a biologist.

Here, I’m going to try to take the approach of a physicist and see how far that gets us. I have in mind one physicist in particular; Albert Einstein.

There is only one problem with this approach. I’m not Einstein. But I hope we can collectively cobble together some greater insights and take things further in the comments than I can here¹.

Einstein deserves his position as perhaps the most famous physicist of all time. I’ve read a fair number of his papers in detail, and they are magnificent. His ability to take a few foundational insights and craft them into significant new physics and understandings was astonishing. Let’s see an example of his thinking.

Most physics students will be introduced to the theory of special relativity (SR) by various arguments involving light being bounced between two mirrors on a moving platform and some assortment of rulers and clocks - or something along these lines. Yet the opening arguments of Einstein’s first paper on SR did not involve anything like this at all.

Einstein starts with a simple observation; a fact, if you like. The fact is simple to state. A moving charge generates a magnetic field. So, if you have an electron moving down a wire you will be able to sit in the lab and measure the magnetic field it generates.

Einstein then posed the key question. If you were travelling along with the electron it would be stationary, relative to you, and so you would not measure any magnetic field, but you would be able to measure an electric field. Where did the magnetic field go?

It didn’t ‘go’ anywhere, of course. Einstein realized that whether we call something an ‘electric’ or ‘magnetic’ field depends on the state of relative motion. They aren’t really ‘different’ things but ‘parts’ of a single unified entity we call an electromagnetic field.

The principle of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same in any inertial reference frame. That’s just some fancy words that boil down to the following. Suppose you’re in an enclosed box in empty space. The box is not accelerating, but you might be travelling at 10mph or you might be travelling at 1,000mph (relative to some other object). The principle of relativity asserts that there is no experiment you can do within the box (and without being able to look outside of the box) that will tell you whether you’re doing ten or a thousand miles per hour (relative to that external object).

Even that sounds a bit abstract, but we’re all very used to this idea really. When you’re hurtling across the ocean wondering what sludge you’ve just been served on the plane, you’re not aware that you are moving at some 450mph are you? Unless you look out of the window or hit some turbulence.

What Einstein argued from thinking about electrons in wires was that not only must the principle of relativity hold true for mechanical experiments, it must also hold true for electromagnetic experiments. The principle of relativity for mechanical experiments was first proposed by Galileo, but it took Einstein to realise this was a universal precept that applied to all laws of physics.

So, in this spirit, I wondered how far we can get with this ‘style’ of thinking applied to the modern-day issue of what is a woman?

Fact 1 : there are biological differences between men and women

Here I am considering that the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ are synonymous with the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’, respectively. And we’re only going to consider application to adults, but this is an irrelevant detail anyway. We could run the same analysis but in terms of boys and girls, for example.

And so the term ‘woman’ will be reserved for someone who is a woman in the fullest, and traditional, sense of that word.

Let’s now consider the truth, or otherwise, of the following two statements which cannot both be true

• Statement 1 : transwomen are women

• Statement 2 : transwomen are not women

Statement 1 can only be true if we ignore the biological differences between men and women. In other words, they can only be true if we break the equivalence of the word ‘woman’ with the word ‘female’. There may be other reasons why the statement is not true, but if there IS a difference, whatever its origin, then we cannot have the equality transwoman = woman. Biology is one such difference. There may be others.

For statement 1 to be true we would have to write it as

• Statement 3 : transwomen are women™

where, now, we have to imply a different meaning to the word ‘women’ as indicated by the use of the ™ symbol.

This implies that the new usage of the word is different to the previous usage and, in particular, that being a woman™ is not dependent on the biological differences that exist. In other words, biology is a wholly irrelevant factor in whether or not one is a woman™.

Putting this more starkly, if statement 3 is true then there can be no relevant biological difference between a man™ and a woman™.

One immediate consequence of this, ladies, is that your experience of menstruation is not in any way determinant of, or relevant for, your status as a woman™. The discomfort, the mood swings, the mess, the inconvenience (which are, of course, nothing to be ashamed of) have nothing to do with you being a woman™.

Of course, if the gender ideologists really believed that biology was not important then what would be the point of puberty blockers? What would be the point of hormone treatments? Either the biological differences, which are the target of things like hormone treatments, are important, or they are not. Which is it to be?

We’ve seen this picture before. The person on the right identifies as a woman™ and so is allowed to play in the women’s league. The person on the left, presumably, identifies as a woman.

The gender ideologues would argue that Ms Slaphead on the right IS a woman™. But why, then, push hormonal treatments if you don’t even need them to be considered to be a woman™?

The answer is, of course, that a trans individual (MTF) wants to be a woman and not a woman™. Being a woman™ is not enough.

We thus have the situation where becoming a woman™ is easy and for which biology is of no importance whatsoever (if it were even slightly important then the statement transwomen = women™ could not be true). Yet we also have the situation where becoming a woman, if you have been born male, is not easy at all (strictly speaking, impossible) and for which biology is of critical importance.

One important criticism here would be to state that we’re talking about two different things here (yes, we are) and that statement 1 is true if we’re talking about gender, but not true if we’re talking about sex. This point of view has consequences too.

It is an implicit recognition that the concept of gender itself is wholly divorced from any biological differences - in other words, gender is entirely socially constructed.

Is this true? Are the so-called gender differences entirely dependent on social norms and nothing at all to do with biological differences?

Fact 2 : Our thoughts, behaviours, and feelings are not entirely socially constructed

We are animals. Fabulous, complex, and complicated though we are, we have a biological existence and a biological heritage. The notion that all of our thoughts and feelings and behaviours became, at some point in history, utterly divorced from that biological heritage is ludicrous. It’s laughable.

It’s an easy notion to disprove anyway. Periods are not social constructs. Many women, and men, can testify to a certain, shall we say, emotionally fragile few days that occurs every month or so. That our basic biology can have a significant effect on our moods and thoughts is not in question.

If, as it must be for statement 3 to be correct, there is no biologically relevant difference between a man™ and a woman™, then biological differences cannot have had any relevant impact on our thoughts and feelings and behaviours. All of the alleged differences between men™ and women™, therefore, have arisen from non-biological factors, if statement 3 is correct.

Now think about applying the notion of “socially constructed” to the animal kingdom. There are, often, profound differences between the behaviours of male and female animals. Would anyone suggest these differences are independent of biology or an evolutionary heritage? To suggest that sex-based behavioural differences in the animal kingdom are “socially constructed” in a way not dependent on biology would be absurd.

Those animals and animal societies? - that was us some thousands and thousands of years ago. Are we to suppose, then, that as our intellects developed and our ability to conceptualize became greater, that as our societies became ever more complex and intertwined, we were able to, miraculously, completely ‘free’ ourselves from the constraints and drivers of our biological heritage when it came to our behaviours?

So, even if we assume gender to be a ‘social construct’ based on societal norms, we have to acknowledge that those societal norms themselves have biological and evolutionary drivers, to some extent.

It is simply not possible to completely remove biology (and, therefore, evolution) out of the picture, even when it comes to our thoughts and feelings and behaviours, from which social ‘norms’ have arisen. Biology is, clearly, not the sole determinant, but neither is it a factor that can be overlooked.

Isn’t it all just semantics?

No, it really isn’t. Sex has had a profound impact on the shaping of societies and behaviours. It still does. We may want to pretend to believe we’re somehow more evolved, somehow ‘above’, all of that messy biological nonsense these days, but the truth is sex drives a huge chunk, perhaps most, of our behaviours.

Why should this be so? It’s because of a very powerful, and often not emphasized, aspect of evolution; sexual selection. It’s every bit as powerful, if not more so, than the basic evolutionary drive to physically survive in a given environment. Our environment has a component to do with food resources, warmth, predators, etc but we also exist, as animals, in a sexual environment. These two ‘environments’ are not really separate, just as electric and magnetic fields are not separate, but are elements of a unified environment that determines our survival as a species.

Our continual desire to attain ‘status’ in some nominal hierarchy is, fundamentally, driven by our desire to be seen as a suitable mate. It’s not necessarily a conscious desire. The pressure to achieve, to be better than others, to move up a notch in whatever hierarchy we’re in, may seem to be nothing to do with sex, but it almost certainly is. Our deep evolutionary non-conscious ‘lizard brain’ is trying to get us laid, to procreate.

As we’ve seen, the statement “transwomen are women™” is a call to ignore biology as being of no relevance. Yet it clearly is relevant - and not just to our ability to distinguish between sexes, but in the whole construction of our societies and consequent societal norms.

The gender ideologues seem to want to ‘free’ us all from these messy and awkward biological realities, whilst still recognizing their crucial importance when it comes to things like puberty blockers or hormones. If you want to be a woman™ you just need to feel you’re a woman™. Trying to become a woman is a very different thing indeed.

In my view, those who want, or perhaps more accurately need, to become a woman should be supported and helped to the best of our current abilities. Those who merely want to become a woman™ - not so much.

I still haven’t defined what a woman™ is, have I? I’m not going to, either. I have no idea, and neither do the gender ideologues.

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1. I’m not wholly convinced I have the ‘logic’ right with my arguments in this piece, and I’ve almost certainly missed some important consequences that can be drawn from consideration of the basic facts. Let’s what you guys can do to flesh things out and to sharpen up the logic.