‘Woman’ does not have a ‘social definition’

Introduction

Can transwomen be considered to fit a ‘social conception’ of women? That ‘woman’ is not a biological grouping, but a set of behaviours, conventions, etc, that we practice: and by those alone, transwomen are perfectly legitimate members – could that not be so?

No. There is no such thing as a ‘social definition’ of women. Woman is a physiological class, that is both there quite plainly in fact, and in established usage, and must so exist with that priority for any of the subsidiary social concepts to be meaningful.

The regressiveness problem

First, anyone advocating a ‘social definition’ of woman needs to face this question: what activities/clothes/traits/etc will you disallow to women? Because if there is a way of qualifying as a woman by convention, there must be another set of conventions that does not qualify – the things done by men. Otherwise there is no classification. You cannot have everyone allowed to do whatever they please, since there would be no association between those features and being male or female – and then one could not use those features to claim to be male or female.

Is there a way to get around this with complex rules? No. It is true that it need not be that every item (of behaviour/clothing/etc) is either male or female, and to be a woman, all things you do must be woman-qualifying things. Instead, it could be a sum of weighted points with a total threshold. Or, much more sophisticated, it could be like letters in a word: each letter is not in itself male or female, but by some complicated algorithm their assembly results in the scoring. But none of these alternatives gets you anywhere. Whatever system of appraisal, it is determinate: it yields a decision as to whether the person is female or male based on social features, so there will inevitably be certain things one can and cannot do as a man or woman.

Another way to ask is: should transwomen be treated differently to men? If no: then transwomen are the same as men – biologically, and socially (there is no ‘social definition’ they are separated into). If yes: then you support treating women differently when there are no biological grounds to.

A ‘social definition’ requires a restrictive set of activities/roles/etc for women and men, otherwise there is no classificatory criteria. And since unjustified by factual differences, it is thus essentially regressive. ‘Social definition’ of women seems fatally flawed if one rejects arbitrarily repressive societies.

Social is not unilateral

For those who do not care about the regressiveness problem, could we not still say that transwomen can adopt the main social conventions, and so qualify in everyday scenes?

No, this will not work, because the primary part of male/female social convention is that people with that physiology follow that behaviour. Behaving in a way non-conforming with physiological group is not following social male/female convention, it is breaking it, and in its central rule. And social convention is just that – social – it is not something one party can do unilaterally, it is something we are embedded in and do interactively with others. One person cannot choose some part, and declare they are doing everything fine – everyone else has been inculcated to follow the whole convention as it is. You cannot depend on social convention to on the one hand claim your adherence is justificatory, yet ignore or deny the correct adherence of others in seeing where you do not conform.

Convention is not category

There is a deeper reason why ‘social definition’ is not possible.

What is there in these social conventions of clothing, demeanor, roles, etc, that makes them all ‘womanly’? What do they all share? What is it in the colour pink, skirts, and a 15% salary deficit that groups them together? Searching within those things seems futile. You would immediately tend to think that they are considered female only because they are done by female people.

On the other hand, if one woman wears some item of clothing, it does not instantly become womanly, the connection is not imprinted in each case. We can recognise these conventions, and we can tell when people do not conform; for such divergence to be possible, person and convention must have some independence. And the conventions do have some observable solidity in themselves – you can begin roughly to list and describe them.

Yet, how independent are these conventions? What if all fashions/conventions/etc swapped female/male next year: would all the trans people start going to the other changing rooms etc? No. Or what if all the male/female difference in convention disappeared, would trans people have nowhere to go? No. So it is clear what is basic and what is not. There is a pattern underlying and governing the social conventions. We (usually) follow social conventions, but they are critically dependent on, anchored to, the biological classes of female/male. That is what creates and maintains the distinction of female and male socially.

So to think of ‘woman as a social concept/category’ is to confuse two things. There is the biological fact/category of male/female-ness, and the things we then do with that fact/category. The treatments applied to the category are not the category. The conventions are mandated (or at least required for any distinguishing), and selectively so – how does anyone know who to impose the female conventions on? There needs to be an authoritative reference, otherwise anyone not following convention would be seen as someone not having any reason to follow them. Conventions cannot be both mandated for people of a particular status, and by adopting them a way to change that status. Prior to the conventions must be a physical fact to attach to – the categories male/female. Gaining membership of those categories is a different thing to having or adopting the conventions associated with them.

There is an opposing argument that makes a good elucidatory example. It is that: some people, due to developmental anomolies, cannot be fitted into male or female; and so which one they live as is a personal choice; and therefore the categorisation of male/female is really/underlyingly subjective.

But this is contradictory. The premise is that the person is not male or female – by the categorisation, they do not fit either position. Given that, it cannot then be grounds for them, by whatever invocation, to be categorised as one of those! Not-A cannot by a few steps of logic then yield A.

What happened is a confusion of the category with the conventions associated with it. The example relies on the fact that someone can adopt/fit male conventions, when not being categorised as male (eg). But that possibility is exactly what shows that the conventions are not the same as the category. That you can do A without being B, proves that A does not imply B.

Conclusion

There is a physical fact out there: reproductive dimorphism. It is a salient, stable, important pattern, and we name it male/female. That is the root of all this. If you ceased to recognise it, none of the rest, such as social conventions, would mean anything – and it cannot be overridden by those things that depend upon it.

Further

For more authoritative thoughts see:

• https://kathleenstock.com
• https://hollylawford-smith.org
• https://medium.com/@s.r.allen
• https://rebeccarc.com
• https://janeclarejones.com