What A Woman Isn’t

By Daisy Offer

Woman Sitting on Gray Rock Near Body of Water by Riccardo

Everyone keeps asking what a woman is. I suppose this is the collective human psyche asking itself daft questions because it is getting older and smarter and wants to know all the answers to everything. From gazing at the immense, boundless cosmos, to unearthing history from beneath our very feet, human civilisation has been an endless hunt for explanations. But now our eye has caught our reflection, and we demand a resolution. We are picking a fight with a mirror. How sad and vain. 

So what is a woman? My answer: a human with XX chromosomes. A reductionist, binary, emotionally-void view. Faced with the same question ten years ago, I might have rambled on about things like dresses, long hair, pretty trinkets, motherhood, sentimentalism, healing, and homemaking; the aesthetics of ‘feminine’. Now, in my 30s, in 2022, my opinion has been diminished to a thing you can only see under a microscope. 

The answer is hurtling around our bodies. It is in our blood and bones and oozes from our pores. It’s chemical. I am a woman in my DNA, my genes. Even after hundreds of years of decay, I will still be identified as a female if my remains are exhumed. Behaviours and genitals may be sex and gender in the flesh, but if we subtract those vital aspects from a human being, our sex is still evident. Genetic material extracted from my bones, remnants of hair, and anything else the worms didn’t get will radiate with chemical femininity. Whether I am buried in a dress or die childless, it makes no difference: having XX chromosomes is the only thing required to describe me as a woman. 

Adult, human, female has long been the agreed-upon dictionary definition of ‘Woman’. It is the definition Posie Parker cemented in place for contemporary consideration, that which politicians dare not repeat for fear of immediate cancellation or loss of legitimacy. For me, it is maybe too generous. 

Women are adults, yes. But when do girls become women? Are girls not women before they are adults? Does a girl become a woman when she can legally have consensual sex or sign a marriage contract? State-sanctioned womanhood.. no, that’s not it. Does a girl become a woman when she can bear children? If we cannot pinpoint when a child becomes an adult, where does that leave our definition of ‘adult, human, female’? 

‘Human’ is the only component of the definition that is unquestionably relevant when describing women. It is something we, the ‘fairer sex’, intrinsically have in common with our male counterparts. Human beings intuitively know the differences between the sexes. We live together, side by side, day in and day out. Just as we evolved together, we are products of one another. No one needs to explain such facts. We need each other to continue existing; that is our primary purpose on earth. A woman gave birth to you because a man made it so. We are here thinking, asking what a woman is, because of male/female collaboration. Men and women existing without each other is unimaginable. 

The gender debate and how we define women has become political football. A tug-of-war; more like a cat o’ nine tails actually. Does living boyishly, and thinking like a man, mean I am no longer female? Even if I promised never to exhibit any of the traditionally feminine qualities listed at the beginning of this article? No! A human being cannot change their sex to suit their self-posited gender. That is a fact many people are struggling to grasp. 

When the left and the right choose sides about something as absolute, as innocuous and ridiculous as this, disaster is the only outcome. Stupid questions produce stupid solutions. The left seemingly wishes to disregard sex altogether, preferring gender to be all important. I would accuse the right of being equally deluded. They insist on romanticising womanhood as an ethereal moving target that is enigmatic and other-worldly. It is an arrow to my heart that rational people subject themselves to such inconsequential lines of questioning. 

If asked ‘What is a woman?’, it would be preferable to assume the questioner has the common sense not to ignore the thousands of years of linguistic development that mankind has meticulously honed since consciousness began. ‘Woman’ is synonymous with ‘female’. Don’t come at me with your whataboutisms. Go away with your language gymnastics. ‘Woman’ and ‘female’ are one and the same. You may flex your vocabulary as much as you like: it makes no difference. 

Western society really isn’t at the top of its game right now. We are reaching for a cure for our existential headache, an antidote to our collective crises, a dose of the good stuff. Naturally we turn to our mothers, the healer, to give us some reassurance and an answer. But for questions like ‘what is a woman’, a swift clip around the ear instead of sympathy and understanding might be the best remedy.