What is a woman?

Am I really doing this? Here we go… The question of what is a woman has been posed a lot in the mainstream, so in honor of women's History Month, I figured it was worth unpacking.

Most dictionaries will define woman as “adult human female.” I agree with the adult and the human, but what does female mean? Because we know that sex is actually a lot more complex than the ways that it's assigned at birth. And there are a lot of women who don't fit into most people's typical definition of what “female” would look like. I'm not just talking about trans women, if the definition of female includes childbirth or egg production, that inevitably also leaves out many cis women.

Thinking about what womanhood is, there's not a finite definition that we can find that includes all of the experiences of womanhood. For a lot of women, their definition of what makes them a woman is going to look different than other women. This is true across like all different intersecting identities and is largely based on where we were raised, who raised us, and when we were raised. There's a lot of factors that go into our perceptions of gender and how they correspond with or differ from other people's perceptions.

When people ask me what it means for me to be a woman or how I knew that I was one, I talk a lot about how I related to other people. I talk about how I didn't fit in with boys growing up but I did feel more in community with girls. I also remember studying psychology in college, and I kept reading about how women interact with the world versus how men interact with the world. 9 times out of 10, I was on relating to the women's side. I was also frustrated by the lack of research and stats for queer and trans communities in what I was learning. But I was studying human psychology, reading about experiences that I was having, and being told that those were experiences of women. I also talk about watching movies and TV and never really caring about storylines that pertain to men. I would really get invested in storylines for women. I was looking to them as role models, looking to them as my future. It's ironid, because growing up in musical theater, a lot of people complain about roles for women not being as complex as roles for men. But I also grew up thinking they get all the best numbers. I wanted to play the roles for women, I wanted to have those numbers. I always connected more to stories that involved other women. I always focused most on the woman in the story.

Gender is community. At the same time, it's a unique individual experience. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that their experiences are the same as everybody else's, or that because they've had an experience it's the experience everyone has had. People talk about things that they do as if it's things that their gender does. Men act this way and women act that way and this is how relationship dynamics work, we’ve all probably heard this rhetoric. And obviously we know that not all women are in relationships with men and not all of those relationships look the same way and those generalizations aren't helping anybody. At the end of the day, everybody's relationship to gender is different.

What is a woman? Which one? Who are we talking about? What makes me a woman isn't necessarily what makes everybody else a woman. What makes me a woman is the connection I feel to other women. The bond, the similarity, the shared experience, even if there are different experiences. The sisterhood?

Woman is a word that it took me a long time to claim, because it felt like it couldn't be mine. But now, in my 30s, it feels more right to me than any other word to describe my gender. Speaking of genders as categories, what is a woman? A person who finds themselves in community with other women? I don’t love using the word in the definition of the word. A person who has shared experience?

Woman is a category. Gender is this overlapping Venn diagram where people can belong to more than one category. Woman is undefinable because it means different things to different people. Woman is belonging. Woman is community. Woman is different culturally and contextually and in different experiences and perspectives. Woman is bigger than body parts or function. Woman is stronger than finite definitions. And woman definitely doesn't only exist in opposition to man.

What is a woman? Is like asking, what is a person? How would you define a person? A human being, right? There's not much else you can say to that definition that wouldn't end up excluding some people.

Woman is descriptive of a community. It's a descriptor for people who are women. And I don't like defining words with the word, but... I don't know any other words that you can really use that would fit everyone's experience and definition of woman. And the more time we spend trying to force definition onto something so fluid and valuable as gender, the less time we're actually having the conversations that matter.

Would I like us to have a shared understanding of what it means when somebody says woman? Sure. Is it necessary? I don't actually think so. Because I know that not every woman's experience is identical. So trying to get a universal definition of woman doesn't actually do much. I'm more interested in talking about things that are impacting women, and people of other genders. Finding a universal understanding of oppression and ways to combat it.

So, no, I don't care what a woman is, and I don't care if your definition is different from mine. I'm worried about what's happening to women, and how gender is used as a tool of power.

And how questions like this are just used as a distraction from that conversation.