Holding womanhood together
I finally read the less than trans-inclusive remarks recently made by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and actually found myself agreeing with one thing: That the issues faced by trans women are not exactly the same as the issues faced by women as a whole.
Unlike her, however, I think the same can be said for women of color, for working class women, for women born and raised outside of Anglo-America, or for literally any other sub-category of ‘woman’ you can think of.
Adichie’s mistake is not that she chooses to highlight that trans women’s experiences are specific to trans women. That, as I see it, is just a tautology. Her mistake is that she chooses to highlight it above and beyond the specificities of every other sub-category of women, as if the specificity of trans womanhood somehow sets it further apart from womanhood-in-general than say, the specificity of black womanhood. Which is unfortunate, since she writes so eloquently and insightfully about black and African feminism, and should know better about the kinds of womanhood that (white mainstream) feminism has historically left out.
This view seems to stem from a totalistic understanding of gendered oppression as emanating wholly from a unified entity called ‘male socialization’, as well as its counterpart, ‘female socialization’. On this understanding of gender, what defines a ‘woman’ is growing up socialized in specific way called ‘female’. Not only does this neglect the wealth of internal diversity in ‘male’ and ‘female’ upbringings, it also neglects a whole host of other issues that combine to affect and shape what we understand as ‘womanhood’.
Biological essentialists used to equate women with the womb, and now with XX chromosomes. Marxist feminists locate the oppression of women in the exploitation of their domestic and reproductive labor. Queer theorists, transnational feminists, and feminists of color have since pointed out that notions of womanhood, far from being universal, are often grounded in the contingencies of the dominant race and culture. In light of these competing characterizations, feminisms which insist upon a monolithic understanding of womanhood are simply untenable.
To cis feminists who would impose the criteria of “female socialization”, two questions: First, how long do trans women have to “live as women” and face the problems that women face to be considered “truly female”? Ten years? Thirty years? Eighty percent of their life span? Since they are 5 years old? Who gets to arbitrate, and why? The diversity of trans feminine experiences is so vast that it is ridiculous to assume all of us were “socialized male”. I consider that descriptor more or less true of myself, which is one reason I don’t particularly identify with womanhood, but the same cannot be said for many trans femmes.
Second, if criteria are to be imposed to test for ‘real womanhood’, why only this one? What about, say, skin color? It’s not like that criterion hasn’t been used before. Women won to right to vote in the US in 1920 — except black women in Southern states, many of whom didn’t get to vote till the 1960s.
‘Woman’, like any other term describing a large group of people, is necessarily vague and ridden with contradictions. That we attempt to use it to describe about half the world should only make this even more expected. So rather than seeking a neat, precise definition at the expense of those who are already marginalized, perhaps we can learn to hold womanhood, with all its complexity, together.
