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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6m3CzzYSOs&feature=youtu.be

Although Lily Alexandre explains it much better than I could ever summarise it, her answer to the question is that “two people can be women for entirely different and non-overlapping reasons”. She doesn’t feel fully satisfied by the idea that one is a woman because one identifies as such because it’s a circular definition and also excludes women who don’t feel strongly about their gender or have never thought about it in those terms (and I suspect the way she says this might be controversial to some, but I really encourage watching the whole video to see her point). However she also finds that any prescriptive definition of “woman” is equally meaningless and is likely to exclude people who are women. The whole point of the question is to control women, and we should be critical of anyone who asks 

0:04

Can you provide a definition for the word woman?

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Can I provide a definition? No. I can't. What are women? You’ve probably seen this  asked a lot lately. The deceptively simple  

0:19

phrase has triggered a cultural maelstrom  that’s swallowed entire countries by now. It seems like the people asking the  question the most are, ironically,  

0:27

the ones who don’t think it’s up for debate. How would you guys define a woman? Actually tell me what a woman is.

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Do you think that there are genetic or  biological characteristics that define a woman? A woman is a human being with two  X chromosomes. Ask any geneticist.

0:40

Radical trans theory is effectively  erasing the concept of womanhood. And you know our culture is broken when  saying who's a women can't be spoken.

0:49

And it feels like “defining woman”  should be a pretty trivial task.   We’re all familiar with women, we all  associate certain things with being a woman.  

0:57

Roughly half of us are women, and presumably call  ourselves that for some good reason. But somehow,  

1:03

those of us who think a lot about gender  tend to have the murkiest definitions. Progressives will often answer this question  by saying, “A woman is someone who identifies  

1:13

as a woman”, basically sidestepping the issue  at hand. This is the most tolerant approach,   because it lets people decide for themselves  whether they’re women, and I appreciate that.

1:23

But the phrase is also a really easy  target! “You can’t define woman” has  

1:28

joined the pantheon of conservative owns,  alongside “triggered” and “It’s ma’am!”,  

1:33

and I understand why - this definition  of woman is circular and unhelpful.  

1:39

It does nothing to resolve the actual question  people have, which is: what makes someone a   woman? Why do trans women call themselves  that, and why should I agree with them?

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I’ve said before that the online left puts  too much stock in identities and labels. So,  

1:54

as you can imagine, our very nebulous  definition of “woman” doesn’t really satisfy me.  

2:00

But in my research for this video,  reading dozens of alternatives,   I found that actually, none of them have!  That every straightforward definition of  

2:10

woman has failed in some way. This question is far  deeper, far more fraught than it first appears.

2:16

I know the shadow of Marsha Blackburn, Tucker  Carlson and… the entire United Kingdom will loom  

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large over this video. The anti-trans movement is  eager to find quotable figures they can prop up as  

2:30

everything that’s wrong with society these days.  And I realize by releasing this video, I’ve made   myself a likely target of that. But I’m here to  dig deeper, not implicate myself in a culture war.  

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If you think the matter is settled  and only came here to hate-watch,   you’re wasting your time. Go call your  mom, go outside, I dunno. Touch grass.

2:49

So what are women, actually? What  makes someone a woman? And finally,  

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why does my hair look like that? I’m  growing it out, okay, give me a break. TITLE: 1. WHERE GENDER CAME FROM

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If we’re going to come up with a complete answer  to this question, we first need to understand   how we got here. Despite what conservatives  might have you believe, gender isn’t a static  

3:12

thing - it varies hugely across time and across  cultures. There is no gender without people.

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I’ll start us off with some context  on how modern womanhood emerged in   my culture - I’m a white Canadian descended  from French and British colonists. We’ll get a  

3:27

different perspective in the next section, but  European views on gender are important because   colonization. Europe was a mistake! Anyway.

3:34

Asking this question now is fundamentally  different than asking it 100 years ago.  

3:40

The difference in women’s standing  is stark and widely known: most women   couldn’t vote, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t  own property. Yada yada yada, you know all this,  

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because when we talk about women’s history, this  is usually where we start, around the turn of   the 20th century. We talk about how bad things  used to be, and how much they've improved since.

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It’s easy to take this 100-year slice of history  and extrapolate that the further back you go,  

4:05

the worse things were for women. Often, we talk  about the past as if these oppressive forces, like  

4:11

sexism, racism, and homophobia must have started  off horrifically bad, and then steadily improved  

4:18

over time. But we shouldn’t assume these forces  have always been around, because they aren't   inherent to us, they're power structures. That  means at some point, sexism had to be invented.

4:30

If you go way, way back in time - say 12  000 years, before we'd really figured out   agriculture - societies were probably pretty  egalitarian. At least, as far as gender goes.

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Gender roles did exist in most societies, but  they were so different from the ones we know   today that it’s hard to identify with them at  all. Ancient women might’ve spent their time  

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foraging for food or milling grains - and  neither of those really gendered nowadays.  

4:55

There were expectations on women, there was such a  thing as “women’s work”, but it probably wouldn't  

5:01

have been devalued in the same way. There's no  reason women would've been seen as inferior. It’s tough to know for sure, since there’s  no written record from these cultures,  

5:10

but it seems like gender roles weren’t all that  oppressive. Women had all kinds of roles they  

5:15

could hold in their communities. When we talk  about womanhood as if it's always defined by  

5:20

pregnancy and motherhood, we make a mistake. Back  in these days, motherhood as we now know it didn’t  

5:27

exist! The nuclear family, with the man, the  woman, and the kids… they didn’t have that yet!

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In ancient Eurasia, the basic social unit was  a lot bigger. People had close bonds with aunts  

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and uncles, their cousins, and non-relatives  in their communities. As a result, kids weren’t  

5:44

just raised by one woman, but several - a kid  might have had three or four different people  

5:50

in their life who they called “mother”,  not just the one who gave birth to them. If any social structure is the default  for humans, it might be this. These big,  

5:59

fluid, interdependent, egalitarian communities.  Back in these times, cooperation was the norm.  

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People struggled to stay warm and feed themselves,   so there was no incentive to break  off into smaller familial groups.

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TITLE: AND THEN FARMING RUINED EVERYTHING As the years went on, we got better  at not constantly starving to death.  

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We domesticated livestock, figured  out farming, and moved away from the   hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This didn’t happen at  the exact same time in every European culture,  

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but I’m gonna talk like it did  for the sake of conciseness. People have enough food to eat now, and in fact,  some people have more than they need to survive!  

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The surplus belonged to men by  default, since they were the farmers.   Since communities all worked together to  survive, this didn’t have to be a big deal…  

6:48

but then, the question of inheritance came up:  when a man dies, who should get all his stuff?

6:55

Typically, it would’ve gone  to his mother’s family,   but the men of the day weren’t thrilled with this  arrangement. They had something else in mind.

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Somehow, probably with the threat of violence, men  took over. They replaced the matrilineal system  

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with a patrilineal one. Then, they took it  a step further, and decided that actually,  

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men wouldn’t just own the fruits of their labor,  but of women’s labor, too; the men took private  

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ownership of what was once the collective home,  including the women and children inside it.

7:28

It was the first form of the family to  be based, not on natural, but on economic   conditions – on the victory of private property  over primitive, natural communal property. The  

7:40

Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly:  the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage  

7:45

were to make the man supreme in the family, and  to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth,  

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children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage  was a burden, a duty which had to be performed,  

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whether one liked it or not, to  gods, state, and one’s ancestors.

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Men defined themselves as the owning class,   and reduced women to a position of servitude,  defined not on their own terms, but in relation  

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to men; “the second sex” that exists only to fill  in the gaps. The age of cooperation had ended.

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In an old unpublished manuscript,  written by Marx and myself in 1846,  

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I find the words: “The first division of labor is  that between man and woman for the propagation of  

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children.” And today I can add: The first  class opposition that appears in history  

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coincides with the development of the antagonism  between man and woman in monogamous marriage,  

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and the first class oppression coincides  with that of the female sex by the male.

8:48

The French feminist Monique  Wittig said that this antagonism   is still foundational to our gender binary  today. In her essay collection The Straight Mind,  

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she compares gender relations to the  relationship between a worker and their boss -  

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actually, she compares it to the relationship  between a slave and their master. White   feminists of the day loved calling themselves  slaves, especially the rich academic ones.  

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I don’t wanna do that, we’re gonna  compare it to a workplace instead. Traditionally, the woman produces the household  by birthing and raising the kids, but the man  

9:22

owns the household, the product of her labor.  Neither gender exists without this relationship:  

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you’re only a boss if you  have power over an employee,   just as some would say you're not a real  man unless you have power over a woman.

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The opposite is also true: if you don’t  work for a boss, you’re not an employee,   you’re just… some person doing stuff. If you don’t  do as a man wishes, you’re not a “real woman”.

9:48

So that’s how modern gender  first started to take form.   And again, isn’t what happened everywhere,  it’s what happened in European cultures that  

9:56

would later evolve into superpowers and  colonize the world. But even this gender   system is pretty rudimentary. It didn't have  many of the pressures of modern womanhood,  

10:06

because it predates capitalism, and industry,  and borders. You can’t be expected to shave your  

10:12

legs if razor blades don’t exist yet, you know?  So things didn’t really kick into gear until…

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TITLE: COLONIALISM MAKES THINGS EVEN WORSE SOMEHOW When Europeans colonized the world, they forced  people into the gender system we know today.  

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It’s built around a few core beliefs, among  them: women should be subservient to men,  

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gender should decide what opportunities you  have, and the nuclear family is natural and good.

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You’ve probably heard about indigenous  cultures across the world who had,   and in some cases still have, less rigid  gender systems. These weren’t universal  

10:47

before colonization, but they were pretty common.  The native author Paula Gunn Allen wrote about  

10:52

some in her book The Sacred Hoop: Recovering  the Feminine in American Indian Traditions.

10:58

In considering gender-based roles, we must  remember that while the roles themselves were  

11:04

fixed in most archaic American cultures, with  divisions of “women’s work” and “men’s work,”  

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the individuals fit into these roles on the basis  of proclivity, inclination, and temperament.

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As an example, the Kaska of Canada would designate  a daughter in a family that had only daughters  

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as a boy. When she was small, around five,  her parents would tie a pouch of dried bear  

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ovaries to her belt. She would dress in male  clothing and would function in the Kaska male  

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role for the rest of her life. The Yuma had  a tradition of gender designation based on  

11:39

dreams; a female who dreamed of weapons  became a male for all practical purposes.

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A lot of these cultures were more  egalitarian, and didn’t see women as   inferior. Allen points to the Cherokee  bands in what’s now the southeast US,  

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who governed with a series of community councils,  including highly influential women’s councils.  

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Even five or six hundred years  ago, politics weren’t a man’s game. As the British started taking over Cherokee land,  they saw a vulnerability here. They realized that  

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if they took power away from Cherokee women, they  could disrupt the balance of the entire society.

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So redefining womanhood became an essential  part of British colonial strategy.  

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According to The Sacred Hoop,  they did this in four steps: 1: Replace their female  creator figures with male ones,  

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either by gender-swapping their existing figures  or shoehorning new male ones into their stories. 

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2: Refuse to recognize tribal governments unless  they institute Western democracy. Since only men  

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could be elected in Western democracies, this  meant replacing appointed female leaders with  

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quote-unquote “democratically elected” male ones. 3: Economically devastate tribes by forcing  

12:56

them off their lands and making their  traditional ways of life impossible.   Make them depend on white institutions, that can  then demand they introduce patriarchy or perish. 

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4: Destroy the clan structure by killing off  elders with famine and disease, and forcibly  

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assimilating youth. Replace the egalitarian  clan with the male-dominated nuclear family.

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Our modern ideas about sex and gender aren’t  just a byproduct of colonialism, they’re a  

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tool of colonialism. When we talk about the gender  binary as some fundamental truth of the universe,  

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non-ideological and totally above reproach,  we erase all the countless cultures with more  

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equal systems - systems our governments  have spent centuries trying to destroy. But Europeans didn’t just impose  their existing beliefs onto the world.  

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The Argentine feminist Maria Lugones argued that  Europeans changed their own gender system too,  

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in fact pretty radically, to suit  this new goal of world domination. Before colonization, European powers might’ve  believed that a woman’s place was in the home...  

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but up to that point, the women they were  dealing with were white, European women. This  

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idea was totally incompatible with their colonial  ambitions. They absolutely did not want colonized  

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women to stay in the home, that would mean losing  half of their workforce. According to Lugones,  

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Europe basically created a whole new gender  out of thin air to sort these women into. 

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Historically, the characterization  of white european women as   fragile and sexually passive opposed  them to nonwhite, colonized women,  

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including female slaves, who were characterized  along a gamut of sexual aggression and perversion,  

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and as strong enough to do any  sort of labor. For example,   slave women performing backbreaking work in the  U.S. South were not considered fragile or weak.

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This is still true today. When the powers that be   say that women belong at home with their kids,  they aren’t actually talking about most women.  

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They think that most women belong in the  fruit field, or the garment factory, or   in prison! Not only do our economies demand  this, our gender system does. Those women’s  

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labor is used to make rich white women look  more womanly, more delicate in contrast.

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If you take one thing from this video, let it be  this: modern gender demands an underclass, whether  

15:24

that’s poor women, whose dirty hands make theirs  look cleaner, or trans women, whose medicalized  

15:29

bodies make theirs look more natural. Creating an  underclass is why it exists. That's what it’s for.

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Our gender system gives a lot of power to  men, obviously, but also to the wealthy,  

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and to the dominant culture. As a member  of that dominant culture, I should mention   that this mostly benefits me. Even as it’s been  traumatic in some ways, it’s the reason I live  

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in a rich country with cheap clothes and fresh  produce from all around the world. So as much  

15:56

as this video is gonna be about transphobia,  because that’s what I’m qualified to speak on,   let’s keep in mind that white trans people aren’t  remotely the main victims of this gender system.

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So the modern category of woman wasn’t  invented with our best interests in mind.  

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The womanhood we know today started as a tool  to erase cultures, exploit labor and steal  

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property. This has harmed all women deeply,  even the ones it was designed to privilege.

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The most basic goal of feminism  is to repair some of this harm.   To level the playing field and  create a better world for women.

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Across the wide spectrum of tendencies,  just about all feminists think they’re  

16:39

doing this. But as I’m sure you know, our actual  strategies for doing this are all over the place,  

16:46

and frequently contradict each other. Some  self-professed feminists want to criminalize  

16:52

sex work and keep teenagers off hormone therapy,  and I think that’s straight-up evil! I want  

16:57

nothing to do with that! So while all feminists  are fighting to build a better world for women...  

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that doesn’t mean we’re all  fighting for the same thing. The ambiguity of the term “feminist”  sums up the whole situation.  

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What does “feminist” mean? Feminist is formed  with the word “femme,” “woman,” and means:  

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someone who fights for women. For many of us it  means someone who fights for women as a class  

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and for the disappearance of this class.  For many others it means someone who fights  

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for woman and her defense—for the  myth, then, and its reenforcement.

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A lot of this comes down to a split  on a pretty important question.   Is the colonial gender system, with the  nuclear family and the gender binary...  

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is it reformable? Is it fundamentally  broken, or can we patch it up and move on? 

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Most feminists in the centre  and right seem to think we can.  For example, your girlboss types, who want  to reform gender a little bit - for rich  

17:58

women - while ignoring everyone else it hurts.  Your TERFy types actually want gender roles to  

18:03

be more restrictive, and for the gulf between  men and women to be even wider, because to them,  

18:09

only that can protect women. Feminists in these  two tendencies usually defend the legitimacy  

18:16

of traditional binary womanhood, because they  think our social order would crumble without it.

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And to be fair, they’re right! Without colonial  gender, our world would be unrecognizable.  

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But on the left, we tend to  think that the social order is   bad! If the left doesn’t care to “define  woman”, this is why. We’re less attached  

18:38

to gender as it currently exists, as a  restrictive box and a tool for domination.

18:44

We do still like to ask the question, though;  it’s a good jumping-off point for other,   deeper conversations. It’s provocative and  eye-catching - I mean, you probably clicked  

18:54

on this video expecting a quippy takedown of  TERFs or a satisfying answer to the question.  

19:00

And we might get there, but in the  meantime I’ve given you Gender Marxism 101.

19:05

I think that’s why some queer, feminist  definitions of woman appear to be…  

19:11

kind of nonsense? They don’t  take the question too seriously. In The Straight Mind, Monique Wittig makes  the… bold claim that lesbians aren’t women.  

19:22

And for what it’s worth, she makes a strong  case for it! She reminds us that nowadays,   women are defined in relation to men: as  marrying them and having their kids. From here,  

19:32

it follows that if a woman has no relationship  to men, then there’s nothing there to make her  

19:38

a woman. And to be clear, she thought this was  a good thing! She doesn’t want to be a woman!  

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Wittig had no interest in reforming womanhood  and offering up some new progressive definition,  

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because to her, there’s nothing to reform. To  her, gender distinctions and sex distinctions  

19:55

will always be oppressive. I don’t know  if I agree, but I’m glad I read the book. Then you’ve got something like Andrea Long Chu’s  Females, which argues… presumably something. I  

20:08

have a hard time telling what she's trying to  say. Let me just read you some of the intro: Everyone is female. The worst books are all by  females. All the great art heists of the past  

20:18

three hundred years were pulled off by a female,  working solo or with other females. There are no  

20:24

good female poets, simply because there are no  good poets. A list of things invented by females  

20:30

would include: airplanes, telephones, the smallpox  vaccine, ghosting, (censored) ink, envy, rum,  

20:38

prom, Spain, cars- she keeps going like this  for a while. I get the sense she likes the  

20:43

sound of her own voice. Lemme just skip  ahead to the end: I am female. And you,  

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dear reader, you are female, even - especially  - if you are not a woman. Welcome. Sorry.

20:57

This book is… controversial, and I don’t know  if anyone's really figured it out? The most  

21:03

charitable reading I can manage is that it’s  a sarcastic sendup of Monique Wittig’s idea,  

21:08

that womanhood is defined by repression.  But instead of offering a counterpoint,   Chu takes that idea to its logical extreme: she  points out that actually, everyone is repressed,  

21:18

so it would logically follow  that everyone is a woman. Who knows if that’s what she actually meant. But  it got people talking, and for what it’s worth,  

21:29

I definitely bought the book. So are lesbians not women? Or  is literally everyone female?  

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Maybe, but in my opinion, it hardly  matters. In both these cases, really  

21:43

extreme definitions of “woman”, or “female”, were  used as hooks to start some deeper conversations,  

21:50

and to get us all thinking  about the definitions we use. As queer people, and as women, and as feminists,  we don’t have any reason to enforce gender,  

22:00

or dictate who can call themselves what. If  genders exist to control us, maybe the only noble  

22:06

move is to just… disengage. Avoid projecting our  worldview onto other people, whenever possible.

22:14

That circular definition we hear so often - “a  woman is someone who identifies as a woman” - is  

22:20

unsatisfying, but to be fair, it achieves this  goal. Living by this definition frees us from  

22:27

the burden of gender policing, it means being  tolerant and trusting that people usually act  

22:32

in good faith. If someone says they’re a  woman, I usually have no reason to doubt them.  

22:40

That approach reflects the kind  of world I want us to build. TITLE: 3. Why define women?

22:48

In contrast, the anti-trans movement is  actually very interested in “defining woman”.  

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They argue that if we don’t have a clear-cut  definition, we’ll never be able to defend women’s   rights. This is… an interesting take, because  feminists have had competing definitions since at  

23:06

least the 1940s, and it's never stopped us before.  Historically, the push to “define woman” has  

23:12

instead been pretty anti-feminist. It’s usually  done to make gender roles seem predestined - if  

23:18

your culture defines womanhood as motherhood,  then it follows that all women must be mothers.

23:23

Women are built differently because  their bodies are designed to do   different things. Nature is real.

23:28

And from there, you can claim that  having kids isn’t a social pressure,   it’s just literally what it means to be a woman.  The whole point is to limit our possibilities. So  

23:37

if a rigid view of gender would hurt cis  women, why are TERFs so dead set on one?

23:42

Well, they seem anxious that if our definition  of woman includes trans women… something bad will  

23:49

happen. Exactly what depends who you ask: it could  be the corruption of young minds, or the shaming  

23:55

of lesbians, or the ruin of all those women’s  sports leagues we definitely cared about before.

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The idea is that by defining the  word in a way that excludes us,   they can separate us from  cis women and keep them safe.

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The definition they’re pushing hard these days,  the one they hope will sell the public on trans   exclusion, you’ve probably heard it before. It's  three words we all know: adult human female.

24:19

To be a woman, you must be one,  not a child, two, a human being,  

24:24

and three, female. I feel like I should pause here  and say that, while this sequence of words sounds  

24:30

sensible if you look at their literal meaning,  the anti-trans movement uses this definition not  

24:36

because of what's outwardly stated, but because of  what's implied: that trans women are not female,  

24:42

and therefore, are not women. Not everyone  who uses a definition like this is a bigot,  

24:48

because not everyone interprets this  as explicitly trans-exclusionary.

24:53

I’ve heard it said that this is the perfect  definition, because it doesn’t rely on any   outside variables: nothing to do with culture, or  a relationship to men, or anything else that can  

25:04

fluctuate over time. It treats womanhood not as a  cultural invention, but as an objective category:  

25:11

a woman is anyone who’s an adult, a human,  and female. This is so simple that anyone  

25:16

who disagrees with it looks ridiculous - there’s  no ideology here! Just plain and simple truth.

25:23

Except here’s the thing… this is fucking nonsense!  There is nothing simple about that definition,  

25:30

because all three of those  words are categories we made up.   “Adult human female” resolves one  semantic question by raising three more:

25:39

One: “What are adults?” The line between childhood  and adults can be drawn in a million ways,  

25:45

and our common cutoff of 18 is totally arbitrary.  If we go by biological maturity, your body keeps  

25:52

changing for your whole life, and your brain  keeps developing until at least age 25. If we  

25:57

go by reproductive maturity, a 14 year-old can be  an adult, and that’s… horrifying, no thank you.

26:04

Two: “Who is human?” This  sounds pretty straightforward   until you consider how that dehumanization has  been an integral part of colonial strategy.  

26:12

The dehumanization of Black and indigenous women  has gone hand-in-hand with a degendering - you  

26:18

can bet if the powers that be don’t see someone as  human, they won’t see them a proper woman, either.  

26:24

Our culture treats many women as animals, or  machines, or just bodies, so any moves to “protect  

26:31

women” under this definition will at best, ignore  those women, and at worst, target them as deviant.

26:38

Three: “Who is female?” This is  basically the question we started with,   and every bit as obscure. Saying “A woman is  someone who’s female” is just as circular as  

26:50

saying “A woman is someone who identifies as a  woman”. There are a million ways to define sex,  

26:55

and transphobes cycle through them endlessly,  swapping out their definition however necessary to  

27:01

call trans women “male" in a given conversation. I  have a whole video about this, about transphobes’  

27:06

shaky understanding of biological sex, so  check that out if you want to hear more. Okay, enough about adult human females.  That was fun, but owning TERFs with facts  

27:16

and logic can only get you so far. I hope  I’ve made it clear that this definition   falls apart with any amount of critical  thinking, but at the same time… yeah,  

27:25

dude. It’s a thought-terminating cliche.  Avoiding critical thinking is the whole point. A lot of anti-trans rhetoric spreads like  this, in these neat little phrases that  

27:34

feel intuitively true to most people. And  it’s no wonder they do: “adult human female”  

27:40

is the definition we’re taught by our  parents and elementary school teachers,   before we can really think critically about these  things. We have to keep in mind that TERFs are,  

27:49

at best, trying to entrench the status quo. At its core, this definition is anti-intellectual.  It’s used to say, "Whatever I’ve always believed  

27:59

is objectively true, and looking into it any  deeper would be a waste of time”. And that's   empowering! It makes people feel like their  intuition is uniquely in touch with reality,  

28:09

and that the truth is actually far  simpler than some people have been saying.   It’s short, quippy and wrong, and that  makes it excellent culture war fodder.

28:17

At this point, the trans community can retort with  a detailed correction - gender is complicated,  

28:22

here’s a 12 000 year history lesson  - but that's nowhere near as sticky.   Challenging transphobes in  the marketplace of ideas...

28:31

At this point, someone started a generator next  door, and it was so distracting that I paused   filming and forgot to finish this sentence. What  I was gonna say is: challenging transphobes in the  

28:41

marketplace of ideas will remain a losing game,  because they have the status quo on their side.  

28:48

A lot of regular, perfectly nice people  conceive of women as adult human females,  

28:53

but in a way that's compatible  with trans people existing.   They might think we're the exception  to the rule. And from this position,  

29:00

in a kind of ad-hoc limbo, convincing them that  trans people aren't an exception - that there are,  

29:06

in fact, no exceptions - is a far easier task  than convincing them gender and sex are both  

29:12

fluid and socially constructed. There's just  so much more to that idea. Okay, back to it.

29:18

I realize this video is basically a long series  of detailed corrections, and I feel okay about  

29:24

doing that, because I don't make videos  for conservatives, trying to win them over;   I make videos for people who already support  trans rights, and wanna build more rigorous  

29:32

politics around that. It’s not like every time  some troll asks you to “define woman” you’re   gonna send them this video… Although I do hope  you send them this video. Please share this video.

29:46

My point is that TERFs like traditional gender,   for the same reason conservatives do. They  think it’s a solid foundation for a society,  

29:55

and a good way to sort people. And they want to  use it in the same way it’s always been used:   as a tool of domination. As a way to  lift themselves up by forcing us down.

30:04

Selling the general public on their definition  would put a lot of power in their hands.  

30:10

Since our society is organized around the gender  binary, revoking someone’s access to womanhood  

30:15

means revoking their right to participate  in mainstream society: in sports, sure,  

30:21

but also in good careers, and healthcare,  and in socially acceptable relationships. Above anything else, that’s their goal: to revoke  our womanhood, push us out of the public eye,  

30:31

and morally mandate us out of existence. If  increased gender policing hurts other women, too,  

30:38

which it does, that’s the cost of doing business.  The anti-trans movement doesn't fight to protect  

30:43

women, the people, the individuals. Instead, they  fight to protect “women”, the idea, the category.  

30:51

They fight to protect “adult human  females”, the myth and its reinforcement. TITLE: 4. Yeah sure whatever but WHAT ARE WOMEN??

31:00

Okay, so now you know how  modern gender emerged and why,   you know why the left doesn’t rigidly  define gender, and why the right does.  

31:09

But you haven’t really heard what  I think. So how do I define woman?

31:14

Well, I think a useful definition of any word  is descriptive. It should describe how a word  

31:21

is used in real life, without necessarily  endorsing that usage. If we’re coming at   this with descriptiveness in mind, our definition  of “woman” should be based on how people already  

31:31

use the word. We should look at who calls  themself a woman, who’s treated as a woman,  

31:36

and what people mean to evoke  when they say the word “woman”. The tricky thing about “defining woman” is, at  this point in the culture war… no one wants to  

31:46

do it this way. Feminists don’t want to do  this, reactionaries don’t want to do this,   I don’t want to do this! I want the dictionary  to say I’m right, and my opponents are wrong!  

31:55

And that’s just… not what the  dictionary is for, really. That's why I doubt we’ll ever reach a consensus  on what women are. This is a really political  

32:04

question, now more than ever, and people  ask it to further their political ends.   Every simple definition I've heard offered  up is at least a little prescriptive;  

32:14

it prescribes what the speaker wants “woman”  to mean, whether or not it does right now.   It prescribes how the speaker  wants women to think of themselves.  

32:22

That means that every simple  definition leaves some women out. When TERFs say it means “adult human female”,  the implication being that trans women are male,  

32:31

they’re prescribing that trans women aren’t women,   even though we often move  through the world as women.

32:36

When progressives say it means “someone who  identifies as a woman”, we exclude women who  

32:41

don’t have strong gender feelings either  way. I’ve met tons of them, cis and trans.

32:46

It’s impossible to come up with a simple,   across-the-board definition without excluding some  women, and including some people who aren’t women.

32:56

Because… these boxes are imaginary! We  made them up, unleashed them on the world,  

33:02

and then we've spent the past century  trying to reverse-engineer them into   something more palatable. In that  process, our ideas have diverged:  

33:09

we’ve come to all sorts of different conclusions  about what it means to be a woman. As a result,  

33:14

womanhood is defined a little bit by dozens  of things, but not any one of them alone.  

33:20

In philosophy, this this kind of grouping  is called the family resemblance concept. The factors in your gender might include your  sex, your identity, your name, your pronouns,  

33:29

your politics, what you wear, where you live,  and... probably a million other things I can’t  

33:34

think of! This means that two people can be women  for entirely separate and non-overlapping reasons.

33:42

This actually reminds me of this  conversation I had at this party,   ages ago at this point. I was  16, I was dressing pretty femme,  

33:51

but I hadn't really transitioned, I was mostly  still in the closet. The party was really loud,  

33:57

and I didn’t know many people there, so I was  keeping a low profile, hanging out on the couch,  

34:02

when suddenly this girl sits herself down  next to me. Very clearly not sober. She  

34:08

leans in close and she goes, “I have  a question. Are you gay or something?”

34:13

Now, I got this question all the time, so I  was used to fielding it. Up to that point,   my go-to answer was, "I have a girlfriend!  Obviously a boy with a girlfriend isn't gay!”

34:23

That wasn’t gonna work this time for two reasons:   one, it was obvious by that point that the  “girlfriend” in question was not a girl,  

34:31

and two… we had just broken up. So my defences  were down, and I was totally on the spot.

34:37

I decided to just tell this girl the truth:  “Actually, I dress like this cause I’m trans.”  

34:42

She didn’t say anything, and I watched  the cogs turn in her head for a second.   Then she asked me something along  the lines of “How’s that work?”

34:51

So I told her, “Well, I don’t feel like  a boy, I feel like my gender is closer to   girl.” She didn’t get it. She  just asked, “What’s that mean?”

35:01

Oh, boy! Where do you even start  with that? I figure okay, buckle up,   we’re explaining gender in this very loud room on  this very sticky couch. So I lean in close and I  

35:10

ask her, “So you identify as a girl, right?  I mean, what makes you a girl?” She gave me  

35:16

a blank stare back and replied, “Well,  I’m a girl because I have a vag.”

35:22

Oh, boy. I had no idea what to say  to this. Cause yeah, fair enough,   dude! Maybe you are a girl because you have  a vag! Maybe that’s the extent of it for you!  

35:31

Who am I to tell someone they're  wrong about themself, you know? This was the moment I realized, not only  do most people not understand gender,  

35:40

I don’t understand gender. I don’t know why some  people are women and others aren’t. I might be a   woman for a completely different reason as someone  else, and that doesn’t make either of us wrong.

35:49

I love women every way I know how to love: I  admire them, I confide in them, I desire them,  

35:56

I support them. But the gender that  unites us is fucking incoherent.  

36:01

It means so many different things to so many  different people that it might as well not mean   anything at all. But I think that diversity,  that divergence of experience, is a strength.  

36:12

I don't want to be part of a movement  where everyone is the exact same. I hope what I’m about to say isn’t  unsatisfying. But you’ve sat here  

36:19

listening to me for a solid half hour,  so I think I owe you my honest opinion:   no one can tell you what a woman is. In  fact, it’s barely a useful line of inquiry.

36:29

The issue has been foregrounded  for one reason: to control women.   To limit how we view ourselves,  what we can do, and who we can be.  

36:37

The “define woman” crowd don’t wish you  well, even if you do fit their definition.

36:42

Where we go from here, I’m not too sure.  It’s up to each of us to decide whether we  

36:48

can salvage any scraps of true, untainted  gender from this sexist colonial wreckage.

36:54

Maybe, one day, we’ll decide once  and for all what exactly unites us.   Maybe womanhood will be about a connection to  something deep and primal. Maybe we’ll find  

37:04

purpose in picking mushrooms off tree trunks in  the climate wasteland. Maybe the fuckers will win,  

37:10

and women will be reduced to breeding stock.  But probably, none of these things will happen.  

37:16

Probably, we'll keep disagreeing on this question  until the end of time. I think that’s for the   best: having looked at this from all sides,  I don’t feel good about taking any hardline  

37:24

position. I don’t want to tell women who they are,  or why. That feels kind of violent to me, I don’t  

37:30

think there’s a way to go about it correctly. The  whole exercise leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

37:36

So I think I’m just gonna walk away. Maybe  call my mom, go for a walk, touch grass,  

37:42

you know? I might spend some time reflecting  on what connects me to the women in my life.   I’ve been feeling pretty isolated this year,  I think most of us have, and it’s easy to  

37:52

forget that these people we're talking about are  actual human beings, and not just abstract ideas.

37:57

Women come by after work for a drink,   they smile as I pass them on the street,  they cut in front of me at checkout,  

38:04

they lend me 50 bucks when I’m running low, they  leave anonymous comments trying to ruin my day.  

38:10

I don’t care what they have in common. All  I know is they deserve better. We all do.

38:18

It’s no secret that conversations like these can  get… heated, shall we say, especially online.  

38:25

It feels sometimes like only the loudest,  angriest voices in a conversation   get noticed. And if you don’t wanna play the  outrage game, it can be hard to be heard.

38:35

That’s why I’m proud to be a  part of the team building Nebula.   Nebula is an award-winning creator-owned  streaming service that’s home to some of the  

38:44

most thoughtful videos around. It’s got creators  like… me, obviously, but also Jessie Gender,  

38:52

FD Signifier, Jacob Geller. Basically all  the channels I watch are on there now.  

38:57

Nebula is 100% ad-free, and it’s curated instead  of relying on recommendation algorithms, which  

39:04

means the content is a lot more helpful and a lot  less knee-jerky than you might find elsewhere. You  

39:10

can bet just about anything on there will be a  good watch. I've had a membership almost 3 years  

39:15

now, way longer than I've been a "professional  YouTuber" for. It’s like the rare corner of the  

39:20

internet that's not trying to make you angry all  the time, and I'm so grateful for that right now.

39:26

We’re also building up a pretty impressive  library of exclusives, if I do say so myself.  

39:31

I just watched the Nebula Original  documentary “Making Philosophy Tube”   which was lovely, and a really cool  inside look at the creative process.

39:39

For fans of my channel, we’ve got a special offer  going. If you follow my link in the description,   you can get a year of Nebula for free  when you sign up for Curiosity Stream!  

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Curiosity Stream, of course, is the documentary  streaming service with an honestly staggering  

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amount of cool stuff. Their library has  thousands of documentaries and miniseries about…  

40:00

basically everything! You wanna learn  about astronomy, they’ve got that,   you wanna learn about chocolate, they’ve got  that too. Or do you wanna just kick back,  

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spend an hour hanging out with some cool  birds? Curiosity Stream has you covered. With my link, you can get  a year of Curiosity Stream  

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and Nebula for less than 15 bucks.  Why not give it a shot, you know? Head to curiositystream.com/lilyalexandre,  

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sign up for Curiosity Stream and get a year of  Nebula free, get ad-free access to my videos and  

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thousands of others, and support indie creators  like me while you’re at it. I’ll see ya there.

40:35

Well, folks! Thanks for sticking  it through to the end of the video.   I hope your week's going well, I hope you're  as relieved as I am that winter is ending.  

40:42

I wanna thank my patrons for helping make  this possible. Patrons get early access to   all my uploads and a bunch of exclusive  bonus videos that aren't anywhere else.  

40:51

I hear the parasocial thing works really well for  this... If you join my Patreon, we're friends!

40:57

And I especially wanna thank those at the  6 dollar and 12 dollar tier, including:

41:02

midtierart Katelyn  conna Q Lee Slothpope  Samarie Braley 

41:08

Erica Peterson Taylor Hardy  Celeste Blossom Isaac (Izzy) 

41:14

Rose Dale Circe Quake  Jasperi Wirtanen Ruby Landau-Pincus 

41:20

DetectiveMeowMeow Emma Casley  Margaux Boivin Imogen Campbell 

41:26

Dr Hayley-Isabella Cawley Ivy  Lilian Revell Cherre Mongiovi 

41:32

Fly Girl Sasha Karbachinskiy  Gwen Lofman wren 

41:38

Jane Malcolm Mattie Mamode  Kieran McMullin pokekannon 

41:43

Clara Griffin Guillaume  Emily Martins Alejandro Hernandez 

41:49

Mathilde Vivi  Pascal Hannah Leichnitz  Tracy Runanin-Telle kiki 

41:57

Mariah Luna Jade  Madeline Mausoleum Charlie H. 

42:02

Transfem Flim Flam... that one's a real mouthful.  autogynamelia Quillwerth 

42:08

catrinaisahuman TheNumeralOne  Cassie Hot Girls Read Lenin 

42:15

Gene Mary Wishart  Kate Chappell Jessie Earl  Rebecca Gail Rikka Koi 

42:22

Jesse Kempkes duck grows chilis  Linda Jewers Fox Auslander 

42:28

wimbleimble smaz ruby  TheRecognitionScene Sandy Smith 

42:34

Blueberry Hill Sam Dunscombe  Darla Butler Scott (Sometimes Lucy) 

42:40

Chloë Jane Henry Rachootin  Dan Lizotte scatterflower 

42:46

MegaHertz And finally, Yuna. Thank you all so much! Take it easy.

42:52

Is it even possible to take it easy anymore?  I'm not sure if I know how to do that.