Who is the ideal modern feminist?

Being a woman doesn’t mean being defined by having certain physical capacities and traits, like motherhood and breastfeeding, or a certain body composition or even DNA. Nor does it mean being defined by that sociological role, as mother and nurturer. That was the goal of feminism, he/she argued, to free women from those roles and constraints.

And that is why the future of feminism belongs to the transgender and queer community, he argued, because that’s its final fulfillment and maximal expression of freedom. That is the point where feminism reaches its apex, where being a woman is no longer defined by either biological capacities or social roles. So a transgender woman is essentially the ultimate feminist woman, because she is completely freed from those stereotypes and restrictions. They inhabit the identity purely, without any tyrannical or stereotypical or gender-biased restrictive connection to traditional physical or social roles.

I suppose in theory, then, the ultimate expression of feminism would be an extremely manly biological man acting in the most stereotypically male way possible, but identifying as a woman. That would be the woman least defined by and conforming to biological and social stereotypes. So the ideal woman would be Chuck Norris, or possibly Ron Swanson or Randy Savage.

One might wonder, then, exactly what being a woman means, if the end goal of feminism is freedom from the limitations of any traditional or even biological identity. If you remove innate biological and socially negotiated markers of identity, what markers and definitions are left? Merely self-identification? But what is it, then, that you’re identifying with, if not with a biological or sociological reality? And is it possible that, in a sense, women have essentially lost what it means to be a woman to men, by defining it so loosely? Have women, in their enthusiasm to explore the boundaries beyond femininity, given so much of it away that they’ve actually lost claim to it?

As transgender women start knocking down women’s sports records and moving into other protected women’s spaces and demanding equal access, as trans people win “woman of the year” and become feminist icons, as the moral authority of intersectionalism stacks up, essentially making black transgender women the ultimate locus of value and authority (with the least amount of privilege, and most deserving of power transfer), we can see that the balance of power around female identity is, indeed, moving into a new evolution.

Which raises some primal feminist fears. Who would want to be a woman, under such circumstances? What is the advantage of being a woman? Men, apparently, are just as good or even better at everything women can do, even at being women. They’re most authentic women, more heroic, less heteronormative, less chained to past stereotypes. And thanks to a recent presidential edict, ciswomen no longer have the right to maintain any protected spaces or territory that could exclude men seeking to inhabit that identity and occupy those spaces. By making gender terms essentially equivalent and purely self-referential, a matter of self-identification, not actual difference or essential inheritance, anyone who identifies as a woman can claim that identity. And thanks to the pushback against traditional gender definitions as immoral, exclusive, and prejudiced, arguably the people least able to claim female or specifically feminist identity are those who under the previous definition were “born female”.

Which brings us back to the difficult question. What is a woman? What does it mean, if it doesn’t mean something to do with biological capacities or social roles? Can women lose what it means to be a woman to men who want to inhabit that identity? How did men (men under the old definition) or trans women (women under the new definition) accomplish this? And did they do so according to women’s own rules and in keeping with their own demands? Did they win the game fair and square according to the defined rules and terms?

One of the problems with removing or blurring the borders of any concept is that that concept becomes more and more porous and vague and is less and less useful as a definition. It becomes less and less graspable for any meaningful purpose.

For example, if we have a simple term like “swan,” but we remove from our definition the idea that it necessarily designates a large creature that has webbed feet, uses feathers to fly, and lays eggs, what are we left with? What is a swan? How would you recognize one? As much as stereotypical category behavior or reviled and inauthentic for women, maybe it’s good for creatures like swans. Maybe we could identify a swan by swanlike behavior. But how do we know what swanlike behavior is if the behavior is also how we identify swans? That’s like using a ruler to measure itself.

What other options are there for confirming if an object is a swan? Feeling like a swan? What does that mean? How do we know rocks or tadpoles don’t feel like swans? How would they know that they feel like swans, if there isn’t some stable category of biologically stable or “legit” swans to inquire of to find out what being a swan means and feels like? If I bring you an animal and say that it’s a swan, do you have a basis other than self-reporting to confirm or disconfirm it? If you happen to be particularly set against the idea about using webbed feet, feathers, and eggs as ways to distinguish swans, that adds an extra level of complexity to our discussion. If you’re particularly set against using the traditional swan definitions, there are a whole lot of swans it’s going to be very hard for me to prove to you are swans. In fact our whole ability to sort and make use of the category will be in danger. And maybe that’s fine. Is there anything truly at stake in our ability to tell swans from not-swans?

If it’s not a big deal whether or not you can tell the difference between something being part of a category or not part of a category, then losing that category as an effective concept (the sort of concept that let’s you easily figure out which objects belong to that class and which don’t), isn’t a big deal. On the other hand, if, say, enormously complex and high stakes matters depend on your ability to tell swans from not-swans, if the future of your society might depend on that ability, then it wouldn’t be such a small thing.

I guess the question is, how important and how essential is the concept “woman”? How loosely or how tightly should be grip it? How useful and important is it to human life and identity, to history and society and relationships and social structures? How clear or how vague are the borders between it and other concepts? What do you gain or lose functionally by making those delineations clearer or more open to interpretation?

I suppose this means taking time to revisit the concept of “woman” and examine the work it is (or was) doing. The benefits and freedoms and costs and responsibilities it conveys. Is it a nothing term, something vague and self-defined? How much can it be used to advocate for certain duties, virtues, benefits, or territories if it doesn’t have a clearly understood character? All designations of territory come with benefits and limitations. By codifying that a certain piece of land is my property, my home, I gain a certain amount of power and rights within it. It becomes something I can control and express myself in. But it also limits me. It means that my territory extends this far and then has an end. My territory doesn’t extend into the next property over. By staking a definite claim to something that my territory is, I’ve also defined and lost what it isn’t. If I want to perpetually keep my options open and remove all possible limits on what my territory is, I can only achieve that by never actually saying what it is.

The practical upshot of all this is that when you define your terms on a certain basis, then that also defines what you can and can’t do with them and within them. Meaning affects utility. Meaning affects efficacy. As the terms of feminism and what it means to be a woman are currently set, unless some special new premises are introduced and agreed upon, some new conditions and rules, I cannot see any internal means of refuting this man’s (woman’s) argument, which is essentially that true feminism (and possibly true femininity as a category), with all its attendent meanings and territory, belongs to the queer and transgender community now, not the ciswomen.

I cannot see a way to refute this claim from within modern feminism, as it currently stands. And attempts to do so basically end up with you getting excoriated and labeled a TERF and a transphobe false feminist. It might be possible to look for ideological solutions outside of current feminist theory, but then you would get kicked out of being a feminist. And that would be quite a loss of status and community, a great abridgement of social currency. So I don’t think there’s any good option for going back. Back, for example, to something more like first wave feminism. We’re so far at this point from first wave feminism that being one is basically about as progressive as being a caveman. It’s patriarchy-adjacent.

What the patriarchy actually is, however, is no longer entirely clear to me, if the definitions of male and female are so arbitrary and porous. Perhaps there is only one generic sort of human creature, and you can identify freely as either, and to identify as male is simply to identify as the aspect of humanity that is violent and oppressive, whereas to identify as a woman is to identify as being good and oppressed. I don’t think you could make it more specific than that. The moment you start arguing for either identity as possessing certain specific traits you exclude from that identity those who do not possess them, or exclude those traits from your chosen identity.

That’s why you can’t say things like: women are humans who give birth or breastfeed, or men are the ones with penises. The moment you sieze any such territory, you exclude someone that has to be included. So you give up the territory. Men can get pregnant, women have penises, and men can breastfeed (or, more correctly, chestfeed). The primary features of sexual physiology and behavior become inadmissible elements of sexual identity. By refusing limits to your territory you essentially become unable to point to anything actually inside it. Being inclusive means you need to set your identity markers at the absolute minimum, lest your definitions become restrictive and oppressive and sexist.

One assumes that one of the goals of feminism is to avoid sexism at all costs. Sexism at the moment seems to mean the assigning of any traits to a group (or excluding any) other than those that are essential and acceptable under current gender theory. The holy text of femininity must not be added to or subtracted from. So what is still acceptable to be included in that text? What is femininity? The only acceptable defining traits I can actually identify meet those criteria are self-identification (I am a woman) and positioning in the moral oppression matrix (and I am good and oppressed by evil).

So you can only gain or lose female identity by identification, and you can gain or lose female identity by your position in the oppression matrix. So a transgender female outranks a cisgender female in authentic femininity, and a cisgender female who embraces elements of the patriarchal power structure can lose or betray their authentic feminine identity, or display a corrupt one, and be disbarred from feminism (just as those who don’t follow certain ideological elements of black or gay identity aren’t really black or gay, because that identity is fundamentally political, a matter of orientation to a moral power structure; you end up white-adjacent).

Thus the President can argue that if you didn’t vote for him, you’re not black. Because black identity means being opposed to the white power structure. By which token our apparently white president is actually himself black, or black-adjacent, because he self-identifies as being on the side of that power structure. Those are the working premises that allow a negative argument against someone’s black identity, in defiance of their innate biological inheritances, to be seriously advanced.

Logically then, this line of thinking must be equally valid (and I think is being advanced tacitly) when phrased as a positive argument. If voting Republican is identical to white belonging and voting Democrat is identical to black belonging, and voting the wrong way can remove you from those identities, then what you’re really arguing is that black identity essentially is democratic identity. It’s not about biological race, per se; race is a power structure. Race is a team, not an inheritance. It is defined by opposition to an opposing team and competing power structure. And, to bring it back to feminism, what does it mean to be a woman? It means to not be a man. To be on the side of women; it means being a feminist.

It’s a bit like a very amusing quote I once heard Dame Judy Densch speak. “What is a cat? A cat is not a dog.” It’s a wonderfully coy and confoundingly amusing statement, and she delivers the line with commendable seriousness. In point of fact, it’s not clear what a cat is, or what a woman is, or what a black person is. But a cat isn’t a dog, and a woman isn’t a man, and a black person isn’t white. And that all comes down to those two factors, self-identification, and position in the moral power matrix.

So, really, the best feminists can be transgender, and the worst are likely to be cisgender traditionalists who are still wrapped up in and tied to oppressive and non-inclusive and sheep-like patriarchal notions of biological or sociological inheritance or territory. The best representatives of blackness can be anti-racist white folks, and the worst are definitely black Republicans, the race traitors (although I’m not sure that’s a fair term, since you couldn’t assume blackness based merely on their skin).

So white people like Robin D’Angelo get to win at being black, they become the heroes of blackness, of black political identity and opposition to white supremacy (the white power structure, because black political identity is blackness). And people like Caitlyn Jenner win at being women; they become the heroes of feminism. Just being a “traditional” woman is to be a member of a herd (or horde), a stamped clone who has blindly accepted an identity based on false and assumed premises.

Since gender is a social construction, a power dynamic, not something tied to innate physical or sociological identity, but transgender identity is innate (a very well-defended position), then the only “real” women are the transgender women, as Douglas Murray has pointed out.

In this sense, transgender identity is in direct conflict and competition with cisgender claims to female sexual identity. And one could argue that political claims of racial identity are in direct conflict and competition with physical or genetic claims upon racial identity.

There are similar tangled webs when it comes to sexual behavior. Heterosexual behaviors, traditional and typical male and female sexual behaviors, are socially constructed and arbitrary and should and can be criticized and changed. Gender roles are constructed, not innate, and therefore could be constructed and performed differently. People can be criticized and blamed for them. Men in particular can be blamed and chastised for their toxic, macho, and heteronormative behaviors.

But homosexual sexual behavior is innate, and therefore is unquestionable and not subject to choice, change, or criticism. So, really the only people whose behavior is perfectly natural and innate, the only real sexual traditionalists, are homosexuals. And everyone else is someone who has made a choice and embraced an arbitrary, socially constructed, morally questionable, malleable, and deviant sexual identity. So you can be born gay or born a transgender member of a sex, possessing those qualities innately, unquestionably, and unchangeably. And those are the only people who actually hold those qualities innately.

This raises an odd conundrum for those who like to live on the edge of acceptable behavior and push the boundaries. Since (traditional) male and female identity and male and female sexual behavior are constructed, not biologically (or otherwise) determined and therefore subject to criticism, choice, and change, one could also argue that they are the only real frontier of creativity and rebellion and self-definition. So if you really wanted to be a deviant, being a cis-hetero man or woman is really your best bet.

These are just some of the curious features of modern identity theory. If you can live with them, if they don’t seem like a big deal, then they’re not a problem. But these are some of the logical conclusions one can draw from the foundational premises, and therefore some people will draw them.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we have arrived at this point where such arguments are, in fact, being made. In a way these outcomes are perfectly sensible and perhaps even necessary, as the ideas worked themselves out and bore fruit. Maybe it’s just taken this long for people to let go of the old ways and assumptions and habits and really take their own ideas seriously. I don’t think there is anything in these conclusions that wasn’t already contained in the premises, as the tree is contained in the seed but merely needs time to grow into full expression.

And so, as I said, I have to concede, under these terms, that the man (or woman if that’s how he or she identifies) making these arguments about the future of feminism was perfectly correct, so far as it goes. Whether that is a palatable result for all parties is a matter for further discussion. Some parties, the aforementioned TERFs, are already struggling with these results and seem uncertain how to proceed without provoking negative social and moral labeling, without appearing regressive, and without betraying their identity positions and feminist credentials (as well as some of their most powerful and persuasive arguments).

It all goes to show how challenging and complex a thing it is to lay claim to and define an identity. How do you hang on to the ground you want to claim without giving up claim on some of the ground beyond it? How do you set limits to keep in your territory without also limiting yourself by keeping some things outside it? It’s not an easy problem it solve.

One might also wonder what the practical function of identity concepts are at all, if all they boil down to is identification and opposition, other than to delineate and provoke and prolong tribal conflicts. Wouldn’t it in everyone’s interest to identify as women, if such a thing were possible? Wouldn’t it even be desirable and morally commendable? But why have differing identities at all, if they don’t describe any fixed or significant biological or sociological or conceptual boundaries?

If there is no underlying objective basis for identities, why prolong or promote them, except to provoke conflict? Unless, I suppose, you believes that conflict and opposition is all there is, and therefore in some sense they are desirable. Or at least inevitable. And if you’re going to have a hero identity, then you need villain identities. Maybe competition and opposition is the only sure means to identity and to power and success. A cat is not a dog. And it’s your duty to establish your cat identity by challenging the dog identity power structures whenever you have the opportunity.

I think the final lesson to be learned from all this is that all systems have unintended, unanticipated, and unexplored consequences. Ideas define and delineate certain conceptual territories and grant you certain powers, rights, and efficacy within them, and they also come with inevitable costs, limitations, and consequences. And when you make fundamental changes to deeply significant and pervasive concepts, you will also radically alter the territory and standing of people covered by it. All such changes are bought at a price. And with any ideological exchange, you need to understand what it is exactly you are purchasing, if you wish to remain satisfied with the bargain.

On a side note, I saw this video later, on the subject of the impact of transgender athletes on girls’ sports. Something to think about. Issues that will have to be talked about and thought through some time. It isn’t possible to have identity categories (that actually have any significant meaning) without some resulting territory disputes.

https://youtu.be/navQkMFvmDc