What a Piece of Work Is a Woman The category of woman has become more nettlesome, but perhaps a new possibility too.

Where better to study our species than at the airport, with people from all over the world streaming past? Obsessed of late with gender, which returns as a fresh problem every time I think we are done, I have been railing against rigid definitions. But here, even in the blur of motion, I can sort easily: man, woman, woman, man, woman. Why am I fighting common sense? Choose whatever gender expression you prefer, but the categories themselves are age-old….

Then a security officer walks by with curly, bleached short hair, delicate features, and a squarish, flat-chested body. My sorting stops cold. I look more closely at the “women” I labeled and wonder how many are only clearly female because of their hairstyle, higher heels, smaller steps, sparkly earrings, lipstick, or draped pashmina. None of which were present in the womb.

“The woman question” should have died with the Nineteenth Amendment. Instead, a woman about to be appointed to the highest court of the land declined to say what a woman is with the excuse that she is “not a biologist,” and other feminists insist that biology has little to do with it, and still others join conservatives to say there is an essential difference between men and women, and transgender women fight to be seen as women, and nonbinary people fight to not be labeled women, and depending on what issue I am arguing—reproductive rights, equal pay, sexual harassment, transgender rights, the right to refuse to be gendered—I alter my definition of my own category like a quick-change artist.

A friend with whom I regularly, cheerfully disagree about such things urges me to talk to Carl Trueman: “You probably won’t agree with him, either, but you’ll enjoy him. And this country needs more conversations across ideological lines.”

I sigh because I agree, and now I have work to do. I read Trueman’s books. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he surprises me with his empathy. An intelligent historian, he is unusually capable of capturing the point of view of those with whom he disagrees. But he is also an Orthodox Presbyterian minister steeped in Calvinism, and in the places where his beliefs shape his conclusions, I—less empathetic—jot irate notes in the margins.

Where could we even begin this conversation? We will never agree about same-sex relationships (he finds them sinful) or gender fluidity (which I suspect he sees as self-indulgent nonsense). But he is cordial and welcoming, and we set a time.

“Let’s start with basic assumptions,” I suggest. We are on Zoom, and he has a kind face; I have begun to relax. “How do you define a woman?”

He offers a friend’s definition: “‘A human being whose body is tailored toward gestation.’ She sees the capacity for getting pregnant as being at the heart of what it means to be a woman.”

“That kind of leaves me out,” I murmur, “as I never had children.”

“The definition is normative,” he notes. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions.”

“Quite a lot of exceptions,” I say dryly. “Can you think of any way to define women that is not linked to procreation?”

He cannot.

Later, I repeat the gist of our conversation to another friend. He sees Trueman’s logic. “People are designed to fulfill a certain sexual function, yes? Whether they actually can fulfill the function of procreation or want to fulfill it is beside the point. People are designed to have arms and legs; whether some actually don’t have them or won’t use them is beside the point. Nature is excessive, and lots of mistakes get made. In the end, the mistakes don’t matter as long as the vast majority procreate.”

I know this is true. But I am tired of what feels like a disproportionate emphasis—in history, in religion, in society—on sexual reproduction. And I cannot help but wonder if, in a world already overpopulated, the primal and societal pressures might be lessening for good, breaking apart the old binary and changing how we all define ourselves.

•  •  •

What concerns Trueman is the definition the Cambridge Dictionary added just last year: “an adult who lives and identifies as a female even though they have been born as a different sex.” Or, more conversationally: “a woman is anyone who feels she is a woman.” Society is losing cohesion, he believes, because people are allowing their inner feelings to contradict or cancel their biology. For him, the body is one of the last fixed points in a swirl of change and confusion, and its holes and dangly bits have an obvious logic we ought to obey.

In any contest with body parts, I am certain my inner self would win. “Anyone who feels she is a woman” is a political definition, though, crafted to open up the membership criteria. It neatly avoids all other distinctions. What is the nature of this club to which anyone may belong? It has a particular history. For centuries, it glowed with moral obligation. A woman was the angel in the house (try not to gag), the giver of care, the arbiter of ethical, pleasant, and courteous behavior. Sociologically, a woman was vulnerable to men, the object of their desire, dependent upon them. Physiologically, she was reduced to breasts, vagina, and womb.

I want a new definition.

Whatever holds human beings together

could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,

among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure

with a person of the opposite sex,

so you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.

—from “At the River” by Louise Glück

I do live in a woman’s body, and when a man, child, or dog rests their sleepy head in my lap, I am glad my breasts are full and soft and no sharp hipbones protrude.

But Santa Claus has a nice lap, too.

My husband owns a penis, I a clitoris—which, I was startled to learn, is in essence a miniature penis, both thoughtfully lined with nerve endings. I also have a vagina, and at twelve, when I first felt that empty ache “down there”—and then its ravenous hunger to be filled—I was unnerved. Later, I came to love the wanting, the knowledge that there is space inside me that yearns and welcomes.

But that does not mean I want to be defined by emptiness.

In his memoir Of Walking in Ice, filmmaker Werner Herzog picks up scraps of paper that turn out to be shreds of porn magazines. “I try to recreate how the pictures might have looked, where an arm belongs, for instance, or where the tangled limbs go,” he writes. “One woman is blonde, the man has bad fingernails, the rest just snippets of genitalia.”

Snippets of genitalia. Body parts that can ruin or transform our lives. They drive us, shame us, delight us, link us. Yet cut off from the rest of us, they are meaningless.

What about hormones, those wee molecules that have swept me into fury, lust, or maudlin pouts? “The male ego is fragile,” Walter Ong, a renowned Jesuit thinker, once told me, “because men are always fighting to differentiate themselves, to prove that Y chromosome’s power.” He linked this innate vulnerability to machismo, sports-fan fanaticism, and patterns of contest and dominance. I had blamed testosterone for all that—but maybe that was what testosterone was: a molecule of proving?

At the time, I had no idea that testosterone also ran through women’s bodies, and estrogen through men’s bodies. Researchers forget, too: for decades, they studied testosterone only in males, estrogen only in females; aggression only in males, nurture only in females. Now we know that “male” and “female” hormones, once assumed to be attractive opposites, differ by only two atoms. “The two chemicals are not antagonists at all, but partners that often work in cahoots,” writes Dr. Randi Hutton Epstein in AROUSED, a long overdue history of hormones.

Ovaries make estrogen and testosterone. Testes make testosterone and estrogen. Women who are not pregnant have estradiol and progesterone levels more similar to men’s than to those of pregnant women. Sexual thoughts increase testosterone in women. Caring tenderly for a newborn lowers testosterone in men. Rooting for their team to win the World Cup can shoot it up again.

These molecules do many different dances, none so simple as a Virginia reel with the guys on one side and the gals on the other.

•  •  •

Georgia O’Keeffe Neck (1921) by Alfred Stieglitz. Original from The Art Institute of Chicago. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

What if we go to the root of biology, not its later elaborations? I am a woman because I have double X chromosomes, and that should be that. Except that there are multiple genes for sperm on the X chromosome—who knew? And my friend with Klinefelter syndrome is a big, burly XXY. And what of all the people with XY who know themselves as women?

Each chromosome contains hundreds to thousands of genes. I understood those genes as dictating a particular result, but the process is more slippery. Genes flash on and off like a kid playing with the lights, changing the rate of transcription. A cell’s environment influences what DNA is transcribed into RNA, and the RNA instructions can be spliced along the way, further altering the result. Whatever traits do emerge are malleable, able to be reshaped by stronger traits, by learning, by environment. And so, among the millions of us with XX chromosomes, there are a zillion variations in traits, physiology, hormone levels, orientation, and sense of self.

How much difference do those variations make? “On close inspection, absolute dimorphism disintegrates, even at the level of basic biology,” notes Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor emerita of biology and gender studies at Brown University. “A chromosomal, hormonal, and genital male (or female) may emerge with a female (or male) gender identity. Or a chromosomal female with male fetal hormones and masculinized genitalia—but with female pubertal hormones—may develop a female gender identity.”

What, again, is a woman?

•  •  •

In my twenties, I went a solid year without menstruating, then bled every day for the following year. “You have fibroids,” the doctor announced, adding that unless they shrank, they could prevent me from bearing a child.

Though I was single and hardly aspiring to motherhood, I walked out of the exam room shaken. As I entered the waiting room, a mop-headed toddler cried out with relief, “Mommy!” and ran toward me. She skidded to a halt, realizing her mistake. I burst into tears and ran out of the office.

Our bodies are designed for sexual reproduction, yes. But not entirely, or perfectly, or always. At age eleven, I had longed to bleed, even to double over in the pain women have shared for millennia. I had also longed for a boyfriend, a husband someday. I had not longed for a baby. An only child, I was awkward around babies, scared of breaking them. That milky, bland Cheerios smell was not one I wanted to draw deep into my body. Babysitting, I preferred mischievous six-year-olds.

Yet, to Trueman’s point, I wanted a body that could give birth.

What I longed for, I think now, was the unfolding of a code already written inside me. I wanted to grow up, to become the self already inscribed and waiting to emerge. But the rest of that self was bookish and absent-minded, incapable of the close attention one must pay to the concrete needs, structured routines, and simple repetitions of childhood.

My mother was made for motherhood: affectionate and all-giving, patient and always attuned. Baby-hungry, she had taken eager care of her newborn brother when she was only ten, and she had longed for children ever after, pinning a Miraculous Medal under the marriage bed. Yet she was a narrow-hipped, flat-chested tomboy, low on estrogen and incapable of producing enough milk to nurse me.

Forget biology. I would rather hand a baby to my skinny mother than my wide-hipped, bosomy self. I would rather hand a baby to a kind and gentle man, or to someone nonbinary or transgender who is capable of patient, practical love.

•  •  •

What I want to sass back to Trueman is Sojourner Truth’s question: “Ain’t I a woman?” Her fierce speech has never left me. But when I look up the text, I learn that she never uttered that phrase. “Ain’t I a woman?” was inserted by poet Frances Gage twelve years later—along with a few basic errors and a cringe-worthy representation of Black Southern dialect. Gage’s repetition of “Ain’t I a woman?” was rhetorically powerful, a Black woman’s voice stolen and gussied up by a White woman for a larger purpose.

Nonetheless, Truth had already made her point. “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man,” a reporter quoted her as saying. “I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it.” Feminine daintiness, shot down. Masculine strength, shot down. To her mind, the salient differences between the sexes were access and privilege.

But what about the psyche? My mom used to tease that I had a man’s brain because I did not weep and emote as she did. (It was just the two of us—somebody had to keep a clear head.) Years later, when I mentioned the remark to my husband, laughter nearly choked him. “Sweetheart, I can assure you, you most definitely do not have a male brain.”

Andrew thinks methodically and keeps his interactions with the world in separate compartments. It took me years to believe him when I asked what he was feeling and he said, “I’m not sure.” Me, I am never not sure. Nor am I ever methodical. I think about everything all the time, odd mundane thoughts popping up in the middle of deep philosophy, a recipe tweak during a grim newscast.

I do the cooking because I have been socialized (by which I mean shamed) into it. Also because it is the only way we would eat without a can-opener. (Did you catch that cute little binary sexist joke? The one that ignores the gender of the world’s best chefs because it is easier to write domestic issues off to sex differences?) We are not entirely predictable, though. I love power tools. Andrew does laundry with a patient precision that awes me.

Do humans need “opposite sex” categories because we do think and behave differently, overall? Or because we have structured our society on that presumption? I am hesitant to erase all differences. Surely we did not spend more than a century trying to pry women out of captivity only to dissolve the category?

Yet I have male friends who think more like I do than Andrew does, and he has female friends who think more like he does. All those men-are-from-Mars-women-from-Venus lists fall apart under scrutiny. As for proclamations that men’s brains have greater volume, the difference disappears when you adjust for body size (which should not require a large brain to deduce). If you hold two cadaver brains in your hands, reports Cat Bohannon, the only way to tell male from female is to sluice them up in a blender and check the DNA.

The consistent and significant differences are men’s (on average) greater aptitude for spatial organization and women’s (on average) greater verbal skills. There are differences in aggression that you can write off to higher testosterone levels, and there are differences in sexual attitudes—but in countries where men and women are treated more equally, most of the latter dissolve. What endures is only the attitude toward porn (most of which treats women as inflatable plastic).

There is no typical female brain or typical male brain, says neuroscientist Daphna Joel. There are traits we have branded feminine and traits we have branded masculine. The brains that are the exceptions, the rare ones, well outside the norm, are the brains with exclusively feminine or exclusively masculine traits. Most brains are a mosaic. Or, better, a kaleidoscope, because the patterns vary, rearrange, and shift over time.

We each have 170 billion brain cells, and there are 3,300 types of brain cells. We expected consistency?

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

—Simone de Beauvoir

My friends handed their little boys dolls and their little girls trucks and shrugged when it did not work. But the influence had started much earlier: name choices, pink ruffles, bows stuck to bald heads, a different sort of cooing, the wording of compliments, dads roughhousing more with the boys, teachers lining up the preschoolers to go to the little girls’ room or the little boys’ room, segregated teams and playground games. Before kids are even aware of gender, they are introduced to a binary divide they assume must matter.

It did to me. I loved the gender binary. I fit it pretty well, and the ways I did not felt daring and fun. I still slow down when I reach a heavy door, hoping for chivalry. Skirts and dresses feel far comfier than fabric pulled tight between my legs. I enjoy not being a man and being with a man; the thought of both of us being more androgynous strikes me, if I am honest, as unsexy.

Stereotyping gender can also lift the lid on a steaming kettle of marital frustration. “Men!” I mutter to my female friends, and they grin in perfect understanding. “Women!” Andrew groans to his friends. Nothing need be taken personally. We find solidarity with our own gender and return refreshed, willing to make room for one another’s otherwise inexplicable quirks.

At other times, though, what we notice is not our differences from one another but from our respective stereotypes. “And you, love?” I murmur, quoting a favorite poem by Robert Graves, “As unlike those other men/As I those other women?”

•  •  •

Georgia O’Keeffe Hand (1918) by Alfred Stieglitz. Original from The Art Institute of Chicago. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

The old definitions are risible: Freud insisting that women envy penises; Nietzsche saying we epitomize truthfulness; Hegel branding us unfit for philosophy and “the more advanced sciences.” When I ask other women for their definition, each has a slightly different take; most are vague, one is dark. Women, she says, are people who grow up afraid. One in five of us has been attacked by a rapist, and four in five have been sexually harassed. Adrienne Rich described the difference in the college experience: a woman studying late at the library has the walk home in the back of her mind, its dark threat a low, ominous drumbeat beneath Chaucer or chemistry.

There is not always fear of actual physical harm, my friend adds; the issue is subtler: “A core energy is set aside to imagine violence against ourselves so we can protect against it. A necessary preoccupation. A need to be wary or vigilant, so it’s not as easy to move in the world with one’s whole, true self.” Anyone who has been locked out of power knows how that works.

What else has it meant to be a woman? The answers are still societal. Too much angsty attention paid to my appearance. (And now, in our blurred time, men are looksmaxxing and mogging—did they not notice how silly it all is?) Reams of unnecessary agony while waiting for the right person to love, because to be without a man would suggest I was cold, ugly, or undesirable. Feeling the social confidence I mustered at my all-girls high school melt the minute I entered the real world. At 2 a.m. press checks, I had to mutter directions (“Bring up the cyan, take down the magenta”) to my male colleague so he could repeat them to the crew. He stumbled over “cyan” and “magenta” every time, but the guys running the press would only take direction from a man.

On the bright side, being a woman felt like permission to relax. I did not have to compete, fight, or prove myself. All I had to do was bleed, physically and emotionally. Our culture brands the display of emotion unmanly—unless it takes the form of a political rant, football mania, road rage, or boardroom tirade. This suggests that it is sadness and worry men are not to feel; rage, which comes off as powerful, is permitted. Which leaves women carrying the sadness and anxiety for their partners as well as themselves.

And then we are told we are too emotional.

I have watched women face, with calm practicality, situations that would reduce most men to a tantrum. The stats that suggest women suffer more from depression? Women are diagnosed more often because they recognize and admit their depression. (Also, our tear glands have more prolactin, so our easier tears make our sadness more visible.)

Research bias is real. Scientists were so convinced that female estrogen levels were linked to depression, they forgot to consider birth control pills as the real culprit. To this day, less is known about women’s bodies because they were deemed too messy and complicated for reliable clinical studies.

“Messy.” Why do I—and many others—use that term for us? Yes, we mop up blood, but spurting semen can be messy, too. Is the point that we are mysterious, complex, variable, and internal? Is it because bearing a child requires far more transformation than starting a child?

There are differences, of course there are. The problem is our need to universalize them and cast them in concrete. “I think the definition has changed tremendously,” says Epstein. “People who identify as women today can be those who have the ability to have children, or maybe they don’t; they want to have children, or maybe they don’t. We are free to pursue whatever career or lifestyle, and free to love whomever we want. I am not saying that womanhood does not exist, but I do believe that the moment we are in right now has allowed us to expand the possibilities of what womanhood can mean.”

What the new boundaries will enclose, who knows. I know I feel like a woman. I resonate with women’s experiences across centuries. Abigail Adams and I could fold a quilt together; Sappho would be fun to drink with. Do I ever feel like a man? My reflexive answer is no. Then I think of times I feel strong and swift, like one of Homer’s heroes, and I move through the world freely, without hesitation, focused and determined, pushing every obstacle aside. (How sad, that this is my definition of a man and not a woman.)

When I let all the conditioning drop away, I think of times I am alone in nature and feel like there is no pattern to me at all, just being. I am stitched into the universe without a label. And that feels even freer.

“For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.” (1 Corinthians 11:7-9)

Trueman winces at an ideology in which “the whole idea of what it is to be a woman is a social construct.” If you separate sex and gender, he writes in Strange New World, “the latter floats free of any biological determination and can be made and remade at will.” You have shattered the predictable binary categories.

“Other than procreation,” I venture, “what do we need them for?”

They have shaped society, notions of privacy and safety, ideas of good manners and decorum, modesty and public behavior, he replies. I nod, wistful in spite of myself. The world was easier to navigate when everyone was assumed to be either this or that and we were handed our scripts accordingly. But could we not relearn how to make one another safe, protect one another’s privacy, treat one another with courtesy, treat our own body with modesty and dignity?

We have paid too much attention to the parts that differentiate us. Kant (who never married) saw marriage as based on “the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.” Those who equate sex with porn might agree, but surely most of us have moved beyond a definition that crude and transactional?

I rattle off dozens of historical and cultural exceptions to the traditional male-female binary. Trueman acknowledges them—as exceptions. The majority sets the norm, and for him, that norm was divinely decreed. He believes that God wants us either to live as cisgender heterosexuals, pleasuring one another only in the biologically obvious, reproductively oriented way, or to remain celibate.

“I’m not willing to de-essentialize the difference between men and women,” he says, and I can understand his refusal. His faith is tied to those categories. But how much room can I make for his point of view without feeling that I am betraying all the people it brands as sinful?

Trueman sees the current push to recognize a long dropdown list of gender identities as an excess of individualism, negating the norms of maleness and femaleness and dissolving the binary altogether. He envisions a world disordered, ambiguous, and chaotic. This is the dystopia that awaits us if we place our individual happiness and psychological identity ahead of the community’s good and God’s will.

Today’s world is ambiguous, and the clash of opinions makes it chaotic, and you could certainly call it disorderly, though I would not say disordered. The previous “order” was imposed, not inevitable. And why individual happiness and God’s will would automatically be mutually exclusive, I am not sure. But Trueman does sum up our current societal tension concisely: “In the past, civil society was possible because, whatever the differences that existed between citizens, there was a deeper narrative, a deeper sense of identity and community, that all shared.” Now, we have elevated our separate identities, and “the terms of recognition that one group wishes to see American society adopt are often antithetical to those of others.”

Once you start questioning essences, he continues, “somebody has to make the decision as to which of these incommensurable and contradictory identities is to be given legitimacy in society and which are to be suppressed, outlawed, and banished.” That is precisely what happened before, it seems to me, to anyone pronounced deviant. But he worries that now the traditional order is endangered, with religious speech censored and religious beliefs condemned as hateful.

“What does the future look like for white, heterosexual males given the influence of expressive individualism on the modern world?” is one of his discussion questions. “In what ways do traditional gender norms create a flourishing society?” is another.

•  •  •

Flourishing? Much of history has made the definition of a woman derivative, inferior, the second sex whipped up by God from Adam’s rib as a sociable afterthought. In Judaism, the midrash (rabbinic commentary) on Genesis 1:27 is that Adam was at first androgynous and gave birth to Eve. “Woman” traces back to the Old English “wīfmann,” the wife of a man. As for everyone else, Europeans looked at indigenous nations that recognized more than two gender categories and screamed deviance. Alternate gender expressions were criminalized and pathologized, just as homosexuality was. Intersex infants were branded freaks—and to this day are swiftly, surgically altered to match one of the binary sexes.

For me, the most delightful creation stories begin with God as androgynous, not an old White man. And I cherish the gentle images of Jesus that came early, when it was acceptable to assign him feminine traits. “For in our Mother, Christ, we profit and grow, and in mercy he reforms and restores us,” wrote Julian of Norwich. “This is how our Mother mercifully acts to all his children.” In early medieval Christianity, Jesus nurtured. In Christ and Charity, painted in 1470, blood spurts like milk from his nipples. Again and again, he was shown feeding his disciples from his own body. But as the church took on politics and policy, it slammed down hard on this “feminization.”

Why did it seem so important to separate us into only two categories? To divide labor; to pair up and reproduce. But also to eliminate uncertainty and dictate behavior. Humans like to put stuff in boxes. If something does not fit, you just lop off a bit until it slides into the designated container.

Our various designs include faulty bits, missing bits, extra bits, extraordinary bits. In the past, all that diversity was ignored because procreation was paramount. Today, though, babies can be made a million ways, and there are more than enough people in the world. Earth had a population of roughly 1 billion in 1800; our last count was more than seven times that high. The babymaking imperative that shaped much of human civilization has lost its urgency.

What would life look like if we simply asked one another: Who are you? How do you love?

•  •  •

We face the same dilemma with gender that we face with race. Science has shown that neither is an essential category, just a convenient construct we imposed upon infinite variations. But because that construct allowed centuries of injustice, we have to keep using its labels in order to repair the damage they have done.

We harden the categories we are trying to erase.

At least (and to the dismay of many) we are complicating the simplistic old labels. The new proposed federal form for demographic information replaces White, Black, Asian, or Hispanic checkboxes with sixty-six ethnic possibilities plus blanks to fill in hundreds more. On social media, those long checklists for sexual identity and orientation, at first so easy to mock, now feel far more useful than “gay or straight.”

More than woke, this is a new way of thinking, nuanced and inclusive, always in flux. Can we handle that? Humans use yardsticks, categories, and norms to make the world navigable. As binary divisions of all kinds break down, people get scared and try to pour superglue on top—a last-ditch attempt to preserve status, or a certain kind of morality, or the coziness of a predictable world. As a result, the left-right political binary is not dissolving; it is hardening. And the tug-of-war is tearing the world apart.

Can we, would we, stuff ourselves back into the old compartments? I doubt it. Pronouns and power are no longer automatically male. Society is learning to make room for brains that are wired differently; for relationships that are not binary; for families of choice. If we ever stop legislating as though the entire nation were White and Christian, maybe we will also stop assuming that everyone is either wholly a man or wholly a woman, as traditionally defined. Maybe instead of using an assumed norm to label everyone outside that norm an exception or deviation, we can create more room inside our definitions.

Or maybe all definitions do is separate and blind us, until we cannot see each individual’s wild and lovely mix of traits because we are too busy measuring how tightly they conform to our private dictionary. Maybe the nature of a woman is too slippery and variable to pin down. Maybe we no longer need definitions at all.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.