@@lily_lxndr Hi hi - I was wondering if you ever considered founding a discord server for viewers of yours? ^^ I've found myself kinda uncomfortable in lots of lgbt spaces for a lot of reasons you've mentioned in your videos - I think that having a space for folks who generally can recognize these sorts of things can be valuable for the community. That said, I know it can be a good bit of work and commitment to starting one up, so I'd def understand if not!
. Lily Alexandre the reverse system of gender does not get rid of borders you imply that the original gender system creates borders but that is tribalism and has nothing to do with gender. Female in politics of Cherokee’s use consensus and include male and female in vote. I think you are kinda just moving the plate over to your area for no good reason. Also forgive the run on sentences.
As a cis woman, I've honestly asked myself this question many times. There was a period where I was actually flirting with the possibility of being non-binary. I had a pixie cut at the time and would sometimes get mistaken for a guy, and I didn't mind, and was even a little intrigued by it. But, one year while I was working at a summer school, this one kid kept calling me "he" even after she was corrected. I had several kids at this place tell me they weren't actually sure what my gender was until they heard me talk or learned my name, but this girl kept calling me "he" even after learning I was a "she." It kept happening, and I started getting irritated, but no matter how many times I told her I was a girl she kept misgendering me. It was at that point that I realized yes, I AM a woman. I can't explain why I'm a woman, but I am one. I came to the conclusion that I didn't mind being mistaken for a man, but I didn't like having my womanhood DENIED. My (male) partner suggested to me that the reason I had that reaction was because being a woman/girl has shaped so much of what I've experienced in life and how I've moved through society, and that not being acknowledged as a woman meant that all that baggage was also not being acknowledged. The sexism, the harassment, the expectations for how I should be. The constant need to justify myself as a woman/girl even when I didn't "act" like one and didn't like what girls were "supposed" to like. Conservatives act like having more open/fluid definitions of gender is confusing young people and making them think they're something they're not. But for me, my gender questioning was born out of confusion resulting from a rigid gender binary, and the fact that I was TRYING to just be who I was, as someone assigned female at birth and who saw themself as female, only to be treated like I wasn't doing it right and wasn't "really" a girl.
I've been IDing as non-binary for a few years now, but I'm right there with you on the whole "baggage" concept. I like to say that I "identify politically as a woman". I'll also say that I was "raised as a girl" or "socialized as female". I'm definitely a woman in that this is how I primarily interact with the world, but I also am not opposed to the term "girl". I don't find it infantilizing so much as simply... less loaded. Simpler times with fewer concerns and far less rigidity. "Ma'am" grates on my nerves, but "miss" doesn't. I'm certainly not a man, but "boy" isn't far off either. Maybe "boi" even rings truer than most other ways I could be seen. I think ideally I would like to be perceived as androgynous or at least induce some confusion or second-guessing. Though I wouldn't want my authority on speaking toward what it's like to live as a woman to be questioned. 😅
@@garyoakham9723 Sounds like both a non sequitur, a red herring, and a straw man. Your comment was three different logical fallacies in one. I didn't think that was possible. Wow.
@@keelhld94 Trust me, the youth are less confused by gender than the older generations. Has been that way for generations. I always knew I didn't identify with girls, but I realized my gender wasn't "woman" when I fist heard the term "gender fluid". I used the term non binary now, because it say only what needs to be said, and my biased reason is I got more flack identifying as gender fluid, even if it is slightly more descriptive and accurate to my representation of my gender (mostly because this was closer to early to mid 2010's, and I has less of queer community behind me). Sometimes being who you are requires you to present as a different gender than you were assigned at birth. There was no way I could feel like me being referred to as a girl or woman all the time. Always felt like *I* was ignored, and they were talking about someone else being a girl. Gender expression can be whatever a person wants it to be, that is about as progressive as it gets. Some one can relate to can love being cis gendered. Someone may see their gender fits what's traditionally thought of as the opposite sex they were born as, and transition to that socially and physically. Or maybe only socially. Some one could be agender and decide gender at all isn't right for them, that's the opposite of attaching a gender to it like you said. Then some people feel their gender is somewhere between man and woman, or just somewhere outside that binary. I personally hope for a day where gender and sex are completely detached, so that our expectations, expressions, and personality has nothing to do with your genitals. I hope one day there just isn't a male identity, or a female identity. You can literally just be you without the baggage of sex or gender. Just be you, and enjoy whatever aesthetics, activities, and expressions you want, without being labeled as one of a few things. But, even if I want that, I'm not going to disrespect people who identify with a binary gender, cis or trans. If expressing as that gender improves their well being, then there's nothing wrong with it to me. Also, you don't necessarily choose your gender. You are the gender you are, you choose how to express it. Just like you don't choose what to believe. You either are, or are not convinced, it's something that happens to you. But you can choose how you outwardly express those believes. I didn't "choose" to be non binary, I am, I just also choose to identify that way *most the time*. Sometimes I outwardly identify as female, mostly for safety. Sometimes I outwardly identify as male (or at least masculine) for fun. Most the time, I'm just, indifferent, androgynous, old me.
As a closeted trans woman I actually relate to this, because I've been called a boy/man all my life, so even if I don't want to be referred to in that way I'm used to it. I don't get all red in the face if you call me 'he' because that's how I look currently it's what I would expect you to call me since you don't know me. However, if you know I'm trans and would like to be called 'she' but, you call me he anyway. That is very disrespectful because in doing that you are invaliding my own feelings and experiences. To explain this in perhaps a more simple way, it's like asking for a soda at the deli or something, but the cashier gives you a bottle of water anyway. The cashier is ignoring what you had asked for, and showed that they don't care and decided what you wanted for you, even though only you could know what you want. Hope this makes sense :D
When I was child I used to get mistaken for a girl, and remember feeling delighted. As a young adult I got given the title of honourary woman by my women friends. Have been harassed by men, in the work place, for apparently acting like a woman. Even went to the women's breast cancer clinic, because there isn't a gender neutral option, and had the oncologist reassure me men get breast cancer too. But when asked despite the sexist attitudes of men, or connection with women. I know I'm not a women. Guess it's sometimes something you just know that you are or not. Despite how much evedence there is to the contrary.
@@ihopeicanchangethisnamelat7108 I'll give you the unfulfilling advice of "figure it out for yourself", sorry. How I came by my conclusions were for me, they aren't necessarily true for even another non-binary person.
@@flyingsky1559 So you get your free time to write dumb comments by... not reading the comments you're replying to? Boy, you're just admitting to wasting everyone's time here with your nonsense.
I swear, there is something biological about it. Even if the gender roles are all fake, it was never about them for trans people (what I mean by that is that it wasn't ALL about gender roles). If gender roles weren't a thing maybe it wouldn't be as noticeable, or perhaps it still would be. But you just know you are who you are. You know that since day one. I bet in like 100 years or 50 years or something we're gonna laugh at how little we understood about human brains just like now we laugh doctors were smoking ciggaretes in their office and everyone thought it's healthy.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm nonbinary. I usually just default to saying I'm GNC, but thinking back to when I was little, I always identified with characters like the Genie from Aladdin and the Nordic God Loki, so I guess my gender is wacky genderbending trickster God? Okay, joking aside, I do get the feeling. I'd rather be seen as a person who does things first and foremost.
As a conservative, I want to thank you Lily for making this video. It was surprisingly approachable and I was able to watch through the entire thing. For the first time, I can grasp the left side without feeling lost. I will definitely share this with my friends so that we can have a conversation.
As a trans woman who has had worried about many of these things, thank you so much for being willing to listen. I find that most people who call them conservative aren't willing to do so, which is saddening, honestly. I recommend looking into the processes of transitioning as well. As of typing, I had bottom surgery (vaginoplasty, aka male to female sex reassignment surgery) only about a week ago, and even though I've had to be extensively knowledgeable on the process and all the little details, it seriously surprised me how identical what I now have looks to what a cis woman has. It's also been one hell of a journey to get here, and transitioning is certainly not an easy process in the slightest. For hormones alone, you need to see at least two specific kinds of health professionals, answer a ton of questions, etc, and you also have to be at least 16. Surgery isn't an option until you meet a far bigger list of criteria, including being 18, having both of the aforementioned health professionals email a letter of recommendation for you, tons of paperwork and being on hormones and socially transitioned for at least a year. Even with all of that, they had me repeat my full name and date of birth a dozen times on the day of the surgery, and once every time I was given my medication, which is 4 times a day. It's an insane process, and shouldn't be as difficult as it is, honestly.
Its pretty funny how most experts Matt asked were identifyable as "man" in his film project. Not even letting women answear that question gor themselves.
My response: I’ll define woman if you first define sandwich, in a way that includes all things we agree are sandwiches and excludes all things we don’t. Whatever your definition, now challenge it with the following: -would your definition include burgers and subs (those are generally agreed to be sandwiches) -what about hotdogs (generally not considered a sandwich) -how about open-faced sandwiches, yes? Then what about pizza? Taxonomy is a non exact art, and is better approached as a fuzzy concept with room for movement at the edges. I see questions of sex and gender the same way. Even exclusively focusing on the genetic/medical aspects of femaleness contains a ton more nuance than “I stopped learning biology in the third grade” Shapiro acknowledges.
@@jeng3609 First, a system that works for “most” cases with no established procedures for the edge cases is a system that doesn’t work. The way I see it, “transwomen are women” is not a philosophical issue of redefining man/woman but a necessary case of category assignment clarification. We have already designed our culture and spaces around socially defined concepts of man and woman along with the conceit that all adult humans are one of these two things, therefore, once the majority of society becomes aware of the existence of trans and non-binary adult humans, we have to reckon with how those individuals should be slotted into the very concrete physical realities we’ve built around having just two choices. Somehow I don’t see us remodeling every non-private residential building to have (what, five?) different bathrooms. So we have to come to a consensus about how society should accommodate the now-recognized fact that human adults other than cismen and ciswomen exist while we have unfortunately designed an entire culture around the assumption that they didn’t exist. All this current discourse is society’s messy way of coming to a consensus on how to proceed from here. (For a similar example of this often offensive and dehumanizing process, see how the US dealt with the legal end of racially-based segregation-not to mention the horrible ways that segregation was attempted to be enforced prior to that.) Second, I think you underestimate just how fuzzy the biological definition of sex really is. Similar to sandwiches, I can’t think of a comprehensive biological definition of human sex that doesn’t leave a fairly large number of humans completely unaccounted for. For example, we can start with the whole XY and XX chromosomes and your external genitalia at birth idea, but we will quickly run into the reality that biology doesn’t care about our preference for mutually exclusive categories. For example, there are ciswomen who have XY chromosomes, but a gene controlling hormone expression isn’t located in the normal spot, so the DNA sends instructions for building a female body. There are people with Turner syndrome that have just a single X chromosome. There are people with varying genetics that have totally ambiguous genitalia / reproductive organs visible at birth or detected inside the body later on. Society has always had to deal with such individuals, but a big deal isn’t usually made of it because despite the protests of conservatives, we mostly operate with fuzzy logic when ”deciding” whether some person we encounter fits into one category or the other. Typically without conscious thought, we mentally evaluate a person using a whole bunch of spectrums (body shape, height, voice, mannerisms, gait, hair, makeup, clothes, accessories, name, etc.), weight those results based on context, and come up with an assumption on which category to treat them as. This is what “passing” for trans people really is. All the ugliness we are seeing now is society’s futile insistence that we can really ever define a thing precisely without edge cases. We can’t, but we reeealllly want to be able to do so.
@@TheCreativeAnimation my point isn’t to conflate one concept with the other but to use a simple inconsequential idea to demonstrate how it is virtually impossible to attempt to come up with a rigid definition for even such a frivolous concept. It only gets messier when dealing with truly important issues. Show me your always true scientific way to define man or woman.
@@TheCreativeAnimation The most accurate definition of what a woman is, is simply "A woman is someone who identifies as a woman." Is this a vague definition? yes, but purposely so, because gender labels only really have meaning to the individual, the only requirement to be ANY gender is that you feel that you are that gender, it is not based on looks, it is not based on biology, it isnt based on activities you participate in, it is based merely on feelings, how you feel about yourself, what your identity is can only ever be defined by you (and therefore your feelings), and therefore what a woman is needs no definition besides "Someone who feels and identifies as a woman".
@@gjmptw8419 hey it’s you again. Have you ever had a wish sandwich buddy? It’s a sandwich where you have two slices of bread, and you wish you had some meat a bow bow bow
I think this video is pretty good, but I have an idea of how to finally solve the problem of defining women. If someone's name starts with f or w, then she's a woman, and if the name starts with m he's a guy. Everyone else can chose between being agender or non binary.
Using the arguments from the video: Well but names are assigned to you, so being a women is something you can choose? and what is a word? or a letter? letter's are just human concepts used to define sounds we make with our mouths, so being a woman is defined by the sounds I make while refering to myself? This is why this video is so dumb. It deconstructs every concept because there's no hard lines in the concepts. But this can be applied to any cocenpt. Just because concepts don't have a hard line that defines them, doesn't mean looking at the overall picture we can't easily identify what they are and what they represent.
@@stepheniesomerset7231 Lit. Every gendered language has this in some form, even if it's faded over time. In Latin, masculine names end in -us for the most part and feminine names end in -a. Neutral names don't really exist, despite Latin having a Neuter gender (but no personal pronouns for that gender).
It's funny because linguists don't have a hard line that defines what a word is, it's just a concept that we use for convenience because it mostly works, if you don't look too hard. But no, we can't always easily identify them. Most concepts are like that. They aren't immutable truths of the universe. They're just helpful ways to understand the world around us. As long as there are definitions, there will be edge cases. But of course in our daily lives out in the world we use heuristics to make quick judgments and "easily identify" an example of a concept, like a woman. But heuristics are assumptions, not truth. They can be wrong.
I'm a cis man, but a lot of this really resonates with me. Something I've noticed looking back is that just about nobody whose opinion of me was drastically affected by my gender ended up being a positive influence on my life, and that's true not only for the ones who thought it was a strike against me but also the ones who thought it was a point in my favor. I recognize that in a patriarchal system, I'm going to run into more of the latter and less of the former than a hypothetical otherwise-identical-to-me woman would, but it's been enough to leave me a little suspicious of anybody who cares more about my gender than I do.
“Modern gender demands an underclass.” Wow, I’ve never actually thought about this before, but this makes a lot of sense. I’ve really been enjoying watching your videos/exploring opinions and ideologies I’d never thought to consider. Thanks for your content :)
Oh my god.... is it "gender" or P A T R I A R C H Y which demands an underclass? Talking about everything in gender neutral terms completely erases the fact that it is MEN who are oppressing women, MEN who define what a woman is and does, MEN who reap the benefits of our social exploitation. It is a central part of leftist theory that THE EXPLOITATION OF FEMALES IS WHAT DIRECTLY LEAD TO CAPITALISM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY-- Engels himself stated this. The exploitation of females is the FIRST form of human-on-human oppression (we can surmise this based on the fact that NEARLY EVERY CULTURE IN THE WORLD PRACTICED SOME FORM OF MISOGYNY *PRIOR* TO COLONIALISM OR IMPERIALISM-- and the fact that the FIRST EVER LAWS created by men detailed their rights to own their wives and prostitutes-- look up the code of Hammurabi). And oppressing women directly lead to men realizing they could oppress those OUTSIDE of their tribes as well. This is all stuff you can find out when you research and discuss the history of PATRIARCHY and MALE SUPREMACY instead of "gender oppression" or whatever that even means. btw, I am not trying to yell at you: i am using caps lock to emphasize certain points because people will glance over them otherwise. We have let men define what a woman is since the beginning of history, and now BELIEVING in their ideas about some innate female essence is considered progressive. I am as gender non conforming as a woman can be, I routinely get asked my pronouns and mistaken for a man-- this is because i refuse to participate in femininity, which is enforced by patriarchy, and is the uniform of submission under patriarchy (women in all cultures are forced to don a 'uniform' to represent their compliance to patriarchy). To imply that I am not a woman because I refuse to conform to MEN'S ideas about womanhood is not only ridiculous, it is offensive, oppressive, sexist, and reinforces gender roles and sex stereotypes. does any of this make sense or resonate?
I was recently asked to define woman, and it reminds me of a time when I was a kid where I was challenged by a dickhead to show them a "karate kick." I said there is no "karate" kick, there are just kicks, and there are many ways to kick. They scoffed, thinking me an idiot no doubt. But gender is basically that. There are certain recognisable styles but there are so many ways to express a gender, to demand only one specific one is, to my mind, to complete miss the point. The thing I never understood when I thought I was cis is that it's possible to feel active joy in one's gender. Most people who never have to think about their gender I think don't often learn how to have fun with it in the same way you can if you're completely ignoring the "rules."
@@sravasaksitam Yeah, like. There's so many karate schools, all with their own teachings. At best you can GUESS they probably meant either a crane kick because what they know of karate is The Karate Kid, or they mean the one that's most popular in martial arts movies (a roundhouse kick, which isn't even exclusive to east-asian martial arts, it's a staple kick).
Fr. I live in a very traditional country and these strict definition of man and women are so exhausting and harmful. I'm personally have never in my life didn't fit in the traditional definition of the "women". But bruhhhhhhh I just love have a fun, don't like cooking, offen joke and hate restrictions kinda "A girl have no right to have a fun with a man" is so foking joke I just can't. Why I can't have a fun with them? Does everything you can do with a man is only have a sex with him? This said to me my friend she's from native family and they have strict rules how women should behave yourself. It so stupid especially when every girl just see in other girl hers potential rival 😐
yeah i feel kinda similarly outside i say “yeah im non-binary” and i like the label but on the inside “im just me and the only word to truly describe me is my name, and even that doesn’t feel right sometimes” to me my gender is just what i feel in the moment, influenced by my mood and clothes and appearance and location, but there aren’t enough words to describe every single feeling i have of my true internal gender because it feels different every now and then. and im very ok with how its like right now, i am non-binary, there is no set word that fully describes me, i am outside the binary
honestly this, as interested as I am in transitioning I feel like gender just isn't important enough to take up my limited brain space that could otherwise just go into like. playing a movement shooter or stimming on the table
I really liked this video and it made me genuinely consider some things about myself. I guess I would call myself an intersex woman, but that doesn't really mean much to me. It just describes a condition I have that makes my reproductive organs more ambiguous than is typical but still look female enough for me to qualify as a woman by most doctors. My body produces more androgens than is normal for a woman as well, so my voice is somewhat deep and I grow facial hair if I stop taking my medication. When you described how some people consider define woman as adult human female, it made me wonder if I break that definition by not being having all the markers of a "biological female" or if people who use that definition would consider me some type of medically or biologically broken female that can be fixed and should want to be fixed. or if they would consider me female, why wouldn't they consider trans women female who also weren't born with typical female reproductive organs or hormones? very fascinating video, I really enjoyed it :)
Interesting how instead of changing society rules that were made hundreds years ago, they decided a human condition that they dont understand which is natural, is the one that need to be change.
As a cis male, this question resonates a LOT with me. I have many times wondered what is even considered feminine or masculine in the same vain, only being able to think of very stereotypical answers like _“big muscles punch punch punch.”_ Even for me, I feel solid in my identity as a male, but can’t give any solid reasons for it other than that’s how I’ve been called at birth and I generally look like a “boy”. But do I ACT like a “boy”? I have no clue. I’m just a person living their life, and I use the pronouns of he/him simply because it’s easiest that way and that’s what I’m used to. And honestly, this very lax view of things makes it both really easy and also really hard for me relate to transgender people. Like on one hand, I could never understand what it feels like to be a man in a woman’s body or vice versa because there’s nothing about me that feels inherently male or female. It’s nearly impossible to define the two, so how could I “feel” like a man or a woman. It’s super weird too because you’d think I’d identify as non-binary, but even my username shows that being male is a part of my identity. It just feels right? Or maybe I just follow what society told me? The question is just so odd because my brain contradicts itself. I know I am male, but why? I guess in that way I can COMPLETELY relate because you just kindof… know. Very cool question to go over, I definitely agree with the idea that it’s not really worth trying to find an answer. Like you said, people can be the same gender for completely different reasons. And I guess for me, I don’t even know the reasons.
I can't speak for all trans people, but for me, it's not so much that I "feel like a woman"; it's that I feel dysphoria being a man, and euphoria being a woman. "Feel like a woman" can be a shorthand for that, I suppose, but to me the actual feelings are dysphoria and euphoria. It's not so much that there's an actual "woman" feeling that I can feel. Also, it isn't necessary to be able to define "man" or "woman" in order to feel like one. Dysphoria and euphoria are emotions, so you don't need to be able to reason them out in order to feel them. If you don't feel dysphoria, then you are probably cis.
Yeah according to whoever use these definitions i guess must be non binary. Cause i feel i. only a woman cause i was born female. I thought that was what a woman was , a female. I really wish someone would tell me what a woman or a man is. I am more ignorant about what any of it means now than i ever was. I just wanted to learn about trans. Anyway, Im on the lbgt side over any conservative shit ever. But i cannot grasp what a woman or man is i have no effing idea
Ftm and I also don't feel internally male or female. It's more like the male identity/role is like a pair of shoes that fit while the female identity/role just doesn't. Another analogue: assuming work conditions are equal, being in a profession or job role you hate versus one that is agreeable. Are there "boilermaker souls" or "doctor souls"? Uh maybe kind of, you can spot patterns in doctors and welders, they're probably naturally drawn to what they do, but if you asked them how they know they have a doctor soul or welder soul they would look at you weird and say "well, that's my job right now and I don't mind it." Maybe they don't even particularly like it, it's just what was available to them or made sense given other goals. And yet, some people know they need to switch careers. How do they know? They feel a burning desire to do so, and eventually do. Does that mean they had a "doctor soul" while they were a welder? No, they just changed something about themselves and where they fit into society into something that fit whatever the hell kind of soul they actually have better. Or immigration. I think this one is even closer to gender because people have similar debates over what makes someone a "real [insert nationality here]" and biology comes into the discussion sometimes. Occasionally people realize they'd be better off in some way uprooting their lives and potentially being a permanent outsider in another country. Some people originating in the same place they did could never imagine making that choice and are perfectly happy and/or successful staying in the same place.
as a trans man, i don’t feel like a man either. I don’t think gender is an emotion. dysphoria isn’t like some special extra feeling that only trans people experience, it’s the same miserable combination of emotions people feel about their receding hairline or cellulite. it’s less like I sense a manliness about my soul and more like being a man is the way i prefer to move through the world. i prefer to walk as a man and do manly things, i like to look in the mirror and see a man, i think a lot of cis men feel the same way. similarly, i hated doing those things as a woman
I once took a very interesting, semester-long Jewish studies class, taught by a Jewish woman, called "Who Is A Jew?" in which the titular question was never answered. I feel similar vibes from the "define woman" conversation.
You know, every time I hear about the jewish people values I'm like "but everyone can be that". And it's exactly what I feel when people talk about the values that constitute gender. Everyone can afford vulnerability in order to nurture, not only women. Everybody can take matters on their hands and be strong, not only men.
@@alymaldonado So we're all jut living in a big movie set where majority of women like makeup and dress up and give birth or fight for abortion rights, where men mostly like sports and are much more aggressive than women, its all just an act not something we naturally are born with? Everybody is jut acting? Are women acting weaker than men where they're most likely to e overpowered by men who sexually assault them? Is acting when a women is scared to walk alone at night and she sees a man following her , while the opposite isn't true? just because one men are feminine and some women are masculine doesn't negate the fact that the majority of men and women are inherently different.
@@madamluis2537 Dude wtf, nobody is saying that. I don't even know where to start because everything you wrote is b*shit. Btw, men aren't more aggresive than women. Men are usually stronger than women, indeed. But you're talking like all men are a*holes and abusers and all women are weak, drawing conclusions nobody even thought about it.
@@madamluis2537 excuse me, english is not my first language, but what the fuck are you talking about. that person didn't say a word about "living in a big movie set", that's the thing that you just made up because you made wrong conclusions from what you read. what the fuck do you mean by referring to gender as "acting"? read again and use your brain - trust me, that organ has a purpose.
@@madamluis2537 no one said that. No one is saying that the oppression of women isn't real just because womanhood is 'a social construct.' People are oppressed because of social constructs all the time.
When you talked about your anecdote with the cis woman in the party everything clicked, what means to be a woman for me or for other women is completely valid because we all have different perspectives. I love your videos as always Lily, this Wednesday I'm having my gender changed legally and your content gives me life.
I’m a cis woman with no strong gender feelings either way, I’m so glad you brought up people like me 😭 I identify as a woman because that’s the role I was raised in and I have no particular qualms about it. But do I “feel” like a woman on the inside? I don’t know, maybe? I’ve only ever existed in my head with my own perspective, so I can only say with certainty that I feel like me. There’s nothing inside of me that screams “woman” or “man” or anything really. I’m also bisexual which might have something to do with it. But I don’t call myself non-binary because I don’t feel any need or desire to do so. I feel about identifying as a woman the way I feel about someone offering me half of their sandwich; sure, I could eat 🤷🏻♀️
I'm non binary and bisexual and I've always thought it was the same vague indifference to gender that influenced both! Super cool to see someone else like that, even if you don't necessarily use the nb label
oh same! i don't have any internal motivation to be perceived as a woman, but people do that based on my sex and presentation anyway and it doesn't bother me enough to try to change that
How do you feel about identifying as a man? It might be interesting to try out, in order to explore yourself more. I can also recommend Gender Dysphoria Bible as a resource in general, it had a lot of good info for me at least
I've noticed that a particular group tends to have very strong overlap with not just non-binary genders and apathy towards gender, but also bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality. It's led me to consider that maybe some people really don't have a natural concept of gender and neither their identity nor attraction has anything to do with gender.
Finally someone with a clear answer. Ever since my English teacher said that "woman" was socially constructed, I've been questioning my gender since. If we construct what it means to be a woman, why should we tell someone they are not one? Women of all kinds are beautiful
I wish you luck 💕 don't let anyone discourage you by making you think you're just following a trend or don't know enough about yourself to determine an identity; too many of us deny ourselves decades of joy in letting these ideas get to us
A construct is a thing. Everything is a construct, biological or social. Constructs can be strong and stable. Just like "rape is bad" is a moral construct; but it's a construct really worth saving, enforcing, and re-enforcing.
@@johnc3525 yes, I had been questioning my gender before my teacher brought up social constructs. There's nothing wrong with questioning everything. Of course at some point you become too anxious to function, but questioning "well established" concepts is the reason we know the earth is round
Recently I've been googling if trans and non-binary is valid or logical. I've always hated gender roles and stereotypes, the small things that men were allowed to do but women couldn't always bothered me more then my peers it seemed. I love the term non-binary, secretly I identify wholly with it, but being surrounded by people who are transphobic and misinformed has me thinking I really am being a "snowflake" that doesn't have logical beliefs. Quite frankly it is heartbreaking for me... Gender to me is very complicated and philosophical, I appreciate your video so much.
I think, regardless of whether one is logical, is largely irrelevant, when trying to describe one’s personal experience. It is a fact that you have felt what you’ve felt, and that your experiences help define you as a person. Being trans and/or nonbinary has to do with experiencing gender differently than others, and that’s not something that can be debated or argued against. Often, in anti trans sentiments, they much assert that transgenderism is a social contagion, that those who are in it are “seduced” or “deceived”, “groomed” into being predators or “converted” from being a “normal” gay. However, these assertions do not have any evidence or fact backing them, despite many of their claims to have it, much of it is falsified. The only “valid” claim the anti-trans movement has is their individual right to refuse to refer to someone as their gender or name or pronouns. But even so, such right to refusal in an employment or educational context is unacceptable, as it is inherently a discriminatory practice, to treat trans people with less dignity than cis people.
Non binary isn’t a real thing, it’s just a term for someone who doesn’t want to conform to the traditional norms that society has created for men and women. By identifying as non binary it gives people a sense of freedom to express themselves how they want. However this is also attainable by still identifying as your birth gender, you can break those traditional norms and stereotypes while still identifying as either a man or a woman.
I'm always a fan of logging off as an answer. After so many years of hearing the discourse over and over again I've found that I'm not really interested in defining my gender or anyone else's. Thanks for the video! They're always really thoughtful and you have a way of taking topics that are usually distressing or frustrating to me and discussing them in a way that is challenging but accessible
Yeah, genetics only provides a framework for sex to develop, but because we're a soup of chemical signals, even physical sex doesn't always match up with the genetics because of androgen insensitivity and De La Chapelle syndrome.
I'm by no means an expert but I read a really interesting article in scientific journal a few days ago and as far as I understand it biologists have been trying to figure out how chromosomes determine the development of sex characteristics for decades and they can't really figure it out. having a xy-combo more or less correlates with the presence of testes but there is no actual proof for causation, same with having a xx-combo and the presence of ovaries. not to mention all the variations of chromosomes that exist. even the same dna can lead to different expressions of sex just by the varying ways in which the mrna might save and transport the genetic information, which can be influenced by environmental factors. I mean the joke is so old at this point but the "basic biology"-crowd really should look more into that biology they're so fond of.
I remember in college I had a philosophy profesor that asked us to define furniture. And well… we couldn’t do it. At my pettiest I feel like I want to challenge the “define women” crowd to define furniture. Because a lot of the same problems come to play but unlike defining women, defining furniture isn’t politicized. Inb4: most dictionaries only give examples of things we refer to as furniture (chairs beds etc). examples are not definitions. Any definition. We came up with came with a constant never ending “but what about_____” rebutal. For example: -furniture doesn’t need electricity to run. “What about massage chairs” -furniture needs explicitly serve a functional purpose, like facilitating sleeping or sitting. “But there’s plenty of furniture that is just meant to just sit there like a chandelier. Also candle holders are furniture even when they aren’t being used” You get the idea. I feel like every attempt I make to define woman in a genuinely apolitical way just devolved into “but what about____?” And I’ve just found it easier, like most dictionaries have chosen to do with furniture, provide examples of what the women around me are like and preface it with “including but not limited to.” It’s not a definition, but it’s as far as I care to go with it
@Serenth "make it fit for living or working" So is a standing mirror furniture, if it isn't needed to make a room fit for living and your job doesn't require usage of a mirror?
I never would have considered a candle holder furniture. But that just goes to show that furniture can’t really be identified if different people think different things can and can’t be it, and could make equally valid arguments because there is no set definition to go off of and say one person is wrong or right.
As a gay man, I've often tried to define how I perceive manhood, with much the same confusion. I'd love to see someone make a video about that - it's just as confusing! To be honest, I think of gender more as an aesthetic than anything. "Femme" versus "masc" feel much more concrete to me than "female" and "male" do, if that makes sense.
yup i just simplify it to, pronouns, aesthetic and what words are used to describe them (e.g feminine words or masculine ones) so could be like "she/her, masculine, feminine nouns" or "any pronouns, feminine, masculine nouns" and any other combination and that just saves me the headache, to simply view people as that and really not anything more complex though i think more complex converations are good to be had, im just too tired to engage in them
Watched it on Nebula but came to comment - excellent breakdown. Unfortunately, I often run into many phobes (trans, xen, femme? You name it. Iowa for you) and find myself combating lots of bigotry. This gives me some great strategy for dealing with it
Generally speaking, if anyone asked me what a woman was, I'd first ask why they were asking? Were they asking because they wanted to determine whether to market to them or not? Were they asking because they wanted someone to be their surrogate mother? Were they picking teams for the Olympics? Then, I'd ask them why they needed to know the gender for such a question. Some are obvious: They want someone sexually-able to carry a baby, and they're likely asking about that. So then answer the question, "I can or cannot carry a baby to term." Some are harder, like, why do we even gender sports? Is it because we want to know who the best on Earth are? Is it because we want to know who people with the same physiology are the best? Do we want fun games? Interesting games? Again, it's just more questions. Gender is oftentimes a cover for another question that they're trying to obscure. It uses cultural bias as a way of asking more factually accurate or specific questions. *Update* Just watched a beautifully made video about how stupid (but useful!) binaries are, particularly when it comes to sex: What Is a Female? | MathsCat -- th-cam.com/video/XwVmppNWDmg/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=ScrapTakes
@@justin___ They do in fighting, and then they also split by sex. I've always wondered how a professional 135 lbs female and male fighter would fare against each other if in the same rank of competition.
God, the drunken trans conversation. I've had it many times. A lot of what we call gender is unknowable, false, created (and hence malleable), and a shared hallucination. If that. (Shared.) Maybe all of it. But i know I'm trans!! Happy 420 angels sure hope this makes ANY sense
Exactly like if gender isn't biology and it isn't your interest, hobbies, clothing style or music taste or any of that superficial bullshit then what the fuck even is gender! Yet somehow I still know I'm a trans man and living as a man makes me 1000 times happier than I ever was when I thought I had to be a "woman" Contemplating it fills me with existential dread how can something simultaneously be meaningless absolutely nothing tangible and yet so vital to the core of my being. maybe that's why some cis people violently cling on to the narrow views of gender they have because without it they have nothing I just wish they didn't have to do it at our expense. I think in the end the solution is to realize the questions like how and why don't have to have answers to make an identity valid. I might not know why I'm a man but maybe just knowing I'm a man is the exact thing that makes me one and no more justification is necessary!
It makes as much sense as any other part of being human. We are complicated interactions between a kludge of organic machinery born with an instinctual sense of self (where the brain's map of the body might just NOT match what the genitals look like) mixed together with personal preferences and aptitudes, cultural expectations and social constructions, lived experience, and minute-to-minute fluctuations in hormones that can all nudge around what we try to simplify down into "gender".
@@BeastGuardian THANK YOU for pointing out cultural expectations are part of gender social expectations! Not enough people realize that, shit, what was considered womanly in the 40s is different from the 80s is different from the naughts, and what's womanly in one ethnic culture is different in another- one especially striking one I recall is that in some arborigine tribes sharpened shark-teeth is seen as a beautiful and feminine trait! If you show up with shark teeth in Canada you'd get seen as someone from the alternative punk scene or adjacent to that, not remotely feminine.
@@AlquimistEd the short answer is that something feels off, that there is a mismatch between your instinctual sense of self, the way others around you percieve you, and your physical sexual characteristics. It can be hard as an outside observer to tell if someone is transgender or if they are just gender nonconforming, compare a trans man to a tomboy as an example. The tomboy in this case is a cisgender woman who just doesn't feel compelled to conform to cultural archetypes and stereotypes related to femininity and are comfortable pursuing interests and wearing fashion stereotyped as masculine, a tomboy still feels comfortable instinctually as a woman, and does not feel strange when others percieve her as female. One really obvious difference is when a trans man is closeted, presending as female, and is inadvertently referred to with masculine pronouns, he will likely feel a moment of relief or joy, like someone finally actually saw "me". A cisgender woman won't feel that thrill of euphoria at being called man. A trans man may have the neurological hook-ups for a certain member of the male anatomy, and studies have shown trans men experience the sensation of a phantom phallus at the same rate that cisgender men with a congenital defect or an accidental amputation do. Likewise, after puberty, sensations from non-erogenous zones of a trans man's breast tissue are processed as coming from something akin to a tumor or foreign object rather than a normal body part, so many trans men feel constant unease or discomfort just from their breasts existing. Neurobiology is quite complicated, but there does seem to be an inborn instinctual sense of gender constructed from your brain's natural anatomical map of the body and from your mirror neurons. The mirror neurons are rather fascinating as they play an important role in pre-verbal learning, they let you watch someone you recognize as being like yourself and learn from that behavior as though you were doing it yourself, so you pick up on things like "pink is for girls" or "boys like trucks" by seeing people act out or conforming to these stereotypes and begin to apply these stereotypes to yourself before you can even talk. Some people don't have a strong instinct to conform to what they might see others doing and instead prefer to go their own way or to outright subvert expectations, giving you gender nonconforming folk, but that's separate from being trans. For trans folk, you end up hard-wired to recognize yourself as a sex that doesn't match your genitals or you might have no strong innate sense of self-gender at all. As a trans person grows up and undergoes natural puberty, the sexual differentiation can be rather horrifying as your mirror neurons stop being able to recognize your own reflection as being "like me" thanks to developing secondary sex characteristics that don't match your inborn gender, thus many trans people end up feeling like a consciousness piloting an ill-fitted meat-suit, many liken it to being trapped in the wrong body. I could go on, there is nuance that I've glossed over. There is no simple test to prove you're trans. For some it's pretty hard to tell if you don't have a strong sense of gender. If you feel like you are being forced to put on a performance and that no one is actually seeing the real you, that being referred to with pronouns that don't match your genitals feels right, that sex-linked physical characteristics just don't feel right on your body, you might be on the trans spectrum. Nature rather abhors discrete binaries and the XY chromosome only effects gonad development, everything else gets nudged around by hormone fluctuation during fetal development, so humans are usually mosaics of masculinized and feminized features, leading to the wide array of body shape types people can have. I'm not just referring to intersex people here, as that just refers to just people with a few specific gonadal or genetic conditions.
Defining a woman? Let's start with something simpler: Define a chair. You'll realize it's not just about legs, a seat, and a back. It's about context, purpose, and perception. Just like a chair can be a throne, a work of art, or a simple place to rest, 'woman' is a concept far beyond biology. It's about identity, society, and personal experience. Reducing either to simplistic terms misses the vast richness of what they truly represent. The question isn't just simplistic; it's ignoring the depth of human diversity. Now, how about defining humanity? Or better yet, empathy?
Coming from the anti trans movement I don't expect that premise to make sense but it really doesn't they're the ones trying to define women based on biology we're the ones trying not to define women at all, simply letting women define themselves regardless of any parameters! Gender is such an abstracted meaningless concept none of it makes any sense so trying to rationalize or quantify it is impossible. But still for some people gender is very real (I know I'm a man though I have no clue why) so I say just let people be happy as themselves and only use the labels they want to use!
@@gjmptw8419 Okay, but do you really inspect people’s chromosomes when you meet people in the world, or do you just assume by the way someone looks and how they’re presenting themselves in terms of their hair and clothing? Also, the point is that while gender as a concept is a social construct, because we’re raised in a gendered world, gender is very important to most of us, including a lot of trans people. Because of that, it’s best for the mental health of trans people to be treated as the gender they identify as
@@gjmptw8419 You either didn't watch the video or barely understood a fraction of it, so like... why are you here? There's also another video on this channel about why TERFs are wrong about biological sex which I highly recommend, and then maybe engage a side of the argument that hasn't already been covered in those 2 videos because that's basically all your concerns here. You're just saying "if you can't come up with a snappy and easy-to-understand explanation that satisfy me and my already made up mind, then I auto-win this conversation because I can simply appeal to a traditional layman's understanding of colonial sex-based gender roles that are currently in place so I don't have to engage with this topic critically". Which, you know, cop-out city, population you. Btw you're not really worth engaging with because it's just a long-form version of the argument of "compelled speech" and "thought crime" as if you're under massive attack by engaging with a topic on the left that uses critical examination and you are just thoroughly against that critical examination because compelled speech, thought crime, "petersonian archetypal constructs of the mother and father", or whatever no one cares. So yeah anyway I have notifications turned off so go ahead and speak to my deaf ear lol.
@@gjmptw8419 lol so if you saw a man with a beard, short hair, in masculine clothes youd know theyre trans and have xx chromosomes? Like, you dont know taking testosterone makes you grow beard and gain muscle and other shit? get out, youre arrogant and dumb
@@gjmptw8419 I’m really not trying to argue in bad faith. I kinda skipped a few steps because we all know that trans people can change their hormones which affects their physical appearance (appearance is variable anyways, so the idea that there isn’t anyone that you would describe as being born male but looks like a woman or anyone that you would describe as being born female but looks like a man is kinda silly. It’s really more of a spectrum and you can’t just know for sure someone’s sex assigned at birth just by looking at someone) and that they can also change their genitalia, so people then jump to chromosomes as what distinguishes a man from a woman. But that’s just not a realistic way to determine people’s genders in your day-to-day life. Plus, it’s not as simple as XY = male and XX = female. Even sex isn’t a simple binary. There are people with XXX and XXY chromosomes and there are even some rare cases where someone with XX chromosomes is otherwise what you would describe as a male and someone with XY chromosomes is otherwise what you would describe as a female. And you might respond “Well, that’s super rare”, but the fact is that they still prove that sex isn’t a binary and that definitions of male and female aren’t all-encompassing of humanity. The reality is that there isn’t a single thing that we use for the definition of a female that every person who is assigned female at birth has. Some are born without ovaries, some are born without a uterus, some are born with something other than XX chromosomes, and hormones and appearances are highly variable. Appearance is also a very arbitrary standard. You have to look like this or else you’re not a woman? Where is the line drawn? What is the exact criteria of how a woman looks? You really can’t “just tell” all the time. We all assume, but usually if you assume that someone is a man but they correct you and say “No, I’m a woman actually”, we just say “Sorry, my mistake” and move on. This isn’t even a trans thing. Gender as a concept is socially constructed, but how people choose to identify themselves is their own individual choice based on how they feel about themselves. It’s like the label “gamer”. We all have a general idea of what a gamer is, but you’ll find that when you get into the specifics, people’s definitions vary wildly and the standards and cutoffs can be quite arbitrary. Despite the idea of someone being gamer or not being a gamer being socially constructed and arbitrary, people still feel very strongly about being a gamer. And gender as in a group of people based on certain socially identifiable characteristics. Trans people want to feel included in the group of people that they identify with more. Nations are societally constructed, but people feel very strongly about being an American, for instance. Socially constructed does not equal illogical and incoherent. Money is very understandable and important to us but that doesn’t change that it’s a social construct. And I wouldn’t call someone a bad person for having that definition if they don’t mean any harm to trans people by it. I would simply try to explain to them how it makes trans people feel to be excluded or not recognized the way that they see themselves
As a neurodivergent person, the phrase "gender is such an abstract concept [...] so trying so rationalize or quantify it is impossible" rings so many bells that it hurts my ears. I don't exactly agree with everything you said, though. Imo, gender, despite not being a concrete thing, isn't meaningless, but quite the opposite: a gender is a collection of meanings we assign to our bodies, based on the expectations we have (or were socialized to have). I believe that's why gender appears meaningless: finding a definite meaning to it is just like finding a definite meaning to our own lives, because gender's a key aspect of self-perception Biology plays a key role in self-perception, so one cannot simply change one's gender - or lack thereof - at will, but in principle, we can and should (imo) express it however we choose to: pronouns, clothing, manneirisms, etc. After all, I believe that we have a duty to ourselves, and even to society, to behave as authentically as the context allows us to, so that, whenever we need to cooperate with others, we give ourselves and them a clear idea of our beliefs, strengths and weaknesses. Learning to bottle oneself up by default can cause LOTS of psychological harm in the long run (I speak from experience) and weakens social cohesion, which in turn can cause even more harm, not only to ourselves, but to the groups we're in (I'm supposing that those groups are relatively safe to be in, which unfortunately isn't the case for many of the people who think deeply about their genders, as many of my fellow LGBTQ folks know from experience).
As a AMAB NB, it was too overwhelming to keep watching by 2:40. People insisting that AMAB people can't be women say we're not "real men" either. They knowingly enforce gender as a social construct.
@@tendayi7192 oh my god, I know exactly what you mean. It's like they know that you could never be a man, and they want to punish you for having the audacity of not being ashamed of it.
There's also people who know that males aren't women AND that self-identifying as a woman or as nb doesn't make you less of a man! If you're a male human being, you're a man, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're not a failed man, not a broken man, even if you're "feminine", you're a man because you're a human male, it doesn't mean you have to behave in a specific traditionally masculine way and anyone who says you're not a real man because you're not typically masculine is SEXIST.
@@galago95 you are conflating sex and gender. If we started using genetic engineering to change our chromosomes, you would just move the goal post. You're just proving gender is subjective.
@@galago95 the fact that your so upset at the very idea that some people rather die than have to identify as a man, is you shaming people for failing to be men. You are demanding we perform manhood.
The inability to cleanly define "woman" isn't an issue with gender, but instead an issue with definitions. I'll try to give a concise, complete, and clear definition of "woman" as soon as someone can give me a concise, complete, and clear definition of "chair"
lol like the tweet where someone says a chair has four legs, a back, and is used for sitting, and then someone tweets a picture of a horse and says 'behold, a chair!'. diogenes is proud
@@gjmptw8419 i mean that's kind of the point of the whole conversation, right? no matter what criteria i give, there will always be a woman who doesn't fit
@@gjmptw8419 have you never heard of disability rights advocacy? or accessibility? have you never watched a movie with subtitles, a disability aid for deaf people? have you never seen braille on a placard in an office? we absolutely should rework society so that people with disabilities can live with as little barriers as possible, because they're human beings who deserve to live with dignity and autonomy. is it really 'impossible' to build a world that way, or do you just not want to try? that's why i joked about you not caring about minorities. your example literally just shows that you don't care about improving the lives of others if it would have any cost to you. i can't change your mind about that, at least not in the comments of a youtube video. i'm probably not going to respond to you again because this isn't going to be a productive conversation and i don't appreciate being called infantile.
@@imevil974 not all chairs have four legs and a back---take beanbag chairs for example. they have almost none of the characteristics of chairs as you define them; they are amorphous blobs, but they are considered chairs anyway. so then you could say "a chair is a piece of furniture designed for one person to sit on." i think that suffices as a definition, but i'm sure there are some exceptions. and what is furniture, exactly? well, in the end, we invented chairs; a chair is a chair because we made it to be so, and so it ought to be. i guess? (hehe, sorry for ranting i was just trying to think it through as well)
Very insightful video! I'm a cis woman who has grappled with my gender identity a lot over the years because I don't gel well with societal expectations of women. I don't like being sexualized, I don't shave my legs or wear makeup, I didn't wear a dress for any reason until I was in high school, and I don't have any "feminine" hobbies or interests. I was actually so uncomfortable with the sexualization of breasts that I thought maybe I was trans because, when mine developed, I felt exceedingly uncomfortable for the first year or so. There are so many transfemme and trans women who are "more" woman than I am. They want it more, they perform it more, and they struggle more to be seen as one, but their existence doesn't invalidate me. Why should my existence invalidate them?
I would look into the Gender Dysphoria Bible, I'm not implying you are trans, but I think that book(?) is a good resource for anyone who is even a bit uncertain about their gender identity
Coming from a more often than not right leaning dude, this chick is based asf and logical. This is literally so refreshing from all these chronically online mfs just spitting out topics they don't understand. But I can tell that lily doesn't repeat things she heard and makes her own opinions that apply to the real world and are swag. Even if I don't align with her on all topics, she puts it in a civil intelligent way that provides insight on things people might not understand. This is awesome.
This is how I feel too. I think listening to someone who thinks differently explain their opinion in this manner helps you understand why you belive what you believe much better without the feeling your being judged. watching this prompted me to go write down my own thoughts on defining gender in relation to sex. this is the kind of discourse we need to end this stupid fucking culture war that is making us dumber and more divided every day.
"What is a woman" reminds me of "What is a human", a question posed by Plato to which he answered with "a featherless biped". Fair enough until Diogenes slammed a plucked chicken on the table shouting "behold, a man". This is funny but the conversation went on with "a featherless biped that also has flat nails" which is...non sensical, there's much more that separates us humans from a plucked chicken than simply the nails but like...this is the point, you can't really describe some concepts deonthologically, you can't give an "a priori" simple definition that works and produces the correct results in all possible situations, at least not on all topics and especially not on ever-shifting ones. The only thing you can do is allow the thing to describe itself.
@@yuridezanet7560 this is a much more resonant type of response to the question for conservatives influenced by Walsh's film. I'm looking for a video that engages the debate without preaching to the choir. Unfortunately this one is not helpful as a response to most people.
I think the best answer is to accept the default chromosomal definition. Then discuss the limit cases that invalidate that definition. Then explain how recent the discovery of chromosomes is and also how it has become outdated by newer science that further complicates the issue. If you wade too far into continental philosophy, critiques of essentialism or poststructuralist semiotic analysis, you have already lost the target audience.
You can't ask "What are Women?" without also asking "What are men?" too, and by struggling to find an answer to those questions you may eventually wonder what even is the point in making those distinctions. This is the way i felt when i was 14 years old and it's what has lead me to disassociate from those terms completly. Instead of thinking of myself as a man or a woman i say i am just "myself", the clothes that i wear, the behaviors i have, my body or my preferences or even the way i think, i can not regard them as "Femenine" or "Masculine" at all. They are just the result of the various things that have influenced who i am. Of course this isn't how the world sees things. Everywhere we go we can't help but think about the world in terms of femenine or masculine, there's such a strong division between men and women that i think only harms us by limiting our experiences. Hopefully we reach the day when we stop defining people by such shallow categories.
If you want, you could start being a pedant and learn a gendered romance language and start liberally gendering objects according to that language's grammar rules. I know I've thrown people off guard when I starting insistently gendering objects according to French rules (my first language). Or when I started asking what the feminine form of verbs were and inventing them when there aren't. (French genders verbs, too).
@@neoqwerty Not exactly sure what you mean to acomplish with that. As a Spanish speaker it's really hard to get other spanish speakers to use gender neutral language, even in the cases when a person can't and/or doesn't want to be called a man or a woman, because we are so used to calling people and things either female or male, we are so used to it people look at you like a weirdo if you try to speak using gender neural words. I honestly don't even bother, people can call me a guy or a girl. The point is that there's nothing about my way of being that's defined by being either of them, i just am who i am, it's that simple. I would just like other people to understand that.
It boggles my mind that binary people can say with certainty that they know their gender. It's such a nebulous concept to me and I want to ask "how???"
@@The_Jovian it's possible that a lot of them are actually trans but have internalized transphobia so bad that they think that don't want to be hated in society so they cant be trans, and their dysphoria isn't that bad that they'll just stay being viewed as cis
Came from Jessie Gender's WIAW video. Really honest, direct and interesting perspective. Life is complex and our words are just trying to describe it. Add history, and it's even more complicated. Thanks!
Womanhood and manhood are so complicated, that I ditched binary gender all together lol. But seriously though, this is a really good history lesson and helps me to ask more questions about my gender and gender all together, and I liked all of the takes you have had.
I like this way of thinking too, it's really helped me define myself better, since I can just pick and choose the things I like instead of feeling forced into a box that by definition precludes things I would like to have. Am I a man despite having boobs? idk, doesn't matter, I have boobs cause I want them.
@@MrCmon113 When did I reference "I don't like having precise language?" AFAIC what I said makes my statement more precise, to my own understanding of myself. "I am a man" is too imprecise, I have breasts, and many peoples perception of "man" precludes "men" from having breasts.
@@Draco19970125 you asked me, I gave you an answer to your problem: watch the video. Also, you have to be dumb as hell to think an hour long video about one subject is going to just give you the definition in the first three minutes, fam.
Asking "what is a woman" is like asking "what is a father". This isn't to say that parenthood is the same as gender, but it's like this: We could start on the biological definition of "the person who provides the sperm that becomes a person", but of course many such people have no contact with their children and may not even know they exist. People who are strangers to their offspring are widely considered to not be their rightful parents. We could attempt a behavioral definition "a man who is a child's primary caregiver", which would resolve the previous problem and include adoptive fathers, but also includes many people we can widely accept aren't fathers, such as grandafthers or stepfathers who are raising children, but do not consider themselves "fathers" to those children. It further raises the question of where "primary caregiver" begins and ends. A father who only has custody on alternating weekends is a father, but why isn't an uncle who is heavily involved? All this is to say parenthood is defined nebulously and in large part by self-identification. We rarely think about it, but this is a model we accept for many social roles. There is no reason we couldn't treat gender this way.
Not to mention that the word 'father' can also mean 'childless member of the clergy' or even 'God' in other circumstances. Words mean all sorts of things and people aren't freaking out about calling Father Mulcahy Father because he technically has no children.
@@flyingsky1559 we can use the term dad if you like, but not all primary male caregivers of children are dads either, and some dads are not or only barely caregivers. My girlfriend exclusively calls her step-father who raised her since she was 2 by his first name and has only ever seen the person who is "dad" to her a week or so out of every year. Defining this stepfather as her "dad" when it seems none of the parties involved would be comfortable with that would not be very productive, would it?
@@flyingsky1559 Yes an adoptive father is still a father just like a trans woman is still a woman. Are you discovering adjectives as you are trying to form some semblance of coherence? This is the comparison being made here. If I wasn't aware that you were a bad faith actor I'd assume from what you're writing that you were caught up to the conversation finally. Sadly, that's not the case.
@@StockyDude If I had been raised by a stepdad and met his friend in the street and that guy went 'How's your father doing?' I wouldn't assume he was asking about my biological father. It all depends on context.
As a Boomer Trans Woman I've known for at least 60 years and been trying to explain how I know I'm a woman. TY Lily even though this was a bit much to try and explain. Had someone ask me because I went into a stall in 4th grade to pee and they said why don't u use the urinal I replied because it's cleaner. Trying to explain to people who don't understand they just don't get it.
Before I've seen the video I'd define a woman as a cluster of traits typically correlated with eachother including identity, genetic, social, anatomical, etc, but in practice I'd use the tolerant approach of someone who identifies as such because what good does it do me or them to call them a liar.
The idea of a cluster of traits (or a "family resemblance concept" as Lily says in the video) is definitely something I wish more people would familiarize themselves with. Making any one of these traits or factors required for one's definition of "woman" basically always seems to cause problems, and to exclude even more people than intended (e.g. when transphobes inadvertently use definitions that exclude some cis women as well).
The repetition of confusion between gender roles and actual gender is quite frustrating and intrinsically anti-trans. I really wish people would stop saying this stuff about gender being a role or performance, as though trans people just feel like wearing a different kind of hat than what society initially expected. My gender isn't social, it's an intrinsic property of my being as surely as the colour of my skin.
@@Eking-su3tr No. Race isn't a real thing, and you cannot be a different age than you are. This is dumb scaremongering, even if those things were real why do you care?
A fascinating summary of an issue that could take years to fully discuss. I’m AFAB and not entirely comfortable identifying as “woman”, but my feelings aren’t strong enough to be called disphoria. I would really like a simple checklist so I can figure out where I am comfortable identifying…but I’m not going to find one, am I?
Hi, an AFAB nonbinary person here- your comment resonated with me and my past experience, so I wanted to comment! While there's not a checklist per se, I've found it helpful in learning about myself to hear others describe their experiences with gender and compare/contrast with that. My friends and I have gotten a lot out of resources like the Gender Dysphoria Bible too, either finding out we related to some gendered experiences more than we thought or finding out we didn't relate to them at all. I wanted to share in case it may bring you comfort or reassurance, however your understanding of yourself evolves. Best wishes!
@@gjmptw8419 It’s not easy to put into words. I dress in what most would think of as masculine clothes. I never wanted children-the thought makes me feel ill , though I’m fine with other people’s kids. Those are the two things I’m certain of but it’s more than that. It’s a cognitive dissonance, like the way you feel when you know someone is lying to you. I use the name Morgan online because it’s gender- neutral and I wanted to get a doctorate so I wouldn’t have to be “miss” - those things feel right to me. And I’m not a kid following a trend (not that I think any trans kid is that) - I will be 50 this year and this is something I’ve felt since I was about 10. But I always thought Trans meant sex-change and I don’t want to be a man. I just don’t feel like a woman.
@@loiscassels8966 It's an acronym: Assigned Female At Birth (with AMAB, Assigned Male At Birth). It talks about one's sex determined at birth and I think it's terminology that's specifically meant to be inclusive of intersex people (specifically people with ambiguous genitals who are arbitrarily assigned a sex and gender at birth and often surgically altered to conform "better" to the gender the doctors assigned them when they couldn't even start consenting).
@@neoqwerty Thank you. I’m having a hard time keeping up with all the acronyms and “classifications”. I’m assuming AFAB is different from a cis-gendered woman? ❤️🇨🇦
Yesterday I discovered myself which felt lost for the longest time thanks to you I no longer feel ashamed of who I am and I really can't thank you enough I finally said to myself that I'm a woman and it felt like truth to me and it felt like an immense weight was lifted from my chest, there is no greater feeling in the world to be finally able to identify myself and be okay with it after years of hating myself I'm crying tears of joy thanks to you.
Whenever someone says “what is a woman” I can’t help but think “what is a fish?” Categories are hard to define and stumbling over this is hardly the dunk some people think it is.
I've started going with "Adult person of any sex whose identity is expressed with feminine grammatical gender." Broad enough to include everyone, specific enough to exclude people who aren't women, easily transmutable into definitions for man or nb. It's not perfect by any means, but in the moment it usually unsettles them and puts the onus on them to define woman.
That's actually a pretty serviceable definition, and it gives room for sub-categorization (femme, butch, tomboy, etc.), I think the only hiccup might be with drag queen pronoun etiquette but that's probably something that requires Internet Persona Protocol: ask what pronouns they use for when.
@@neoqwerty and I feel like most drag queens would be pretty good about speaking up if they use other pronouns, and it also allows for a persona to be fluid between in drag and out of drag.
I feel like that's a better version of what I was thinking about going with "someone who fulfills, through choice or willing circumstance, the socialized role of women".
@@neoqwerty is a drag queens identity expressed through “she” or is it her expression/performance when in drag? I think the latter, but I’m not a drag Queen.
My parents are very conservative and I’m still at the age where I’m figuring out what all these political stances are fighting for and why. This video has me questioning a lot of what they’ve taught me, and you explained your opinion and some other opinions out there very well. Thank you!
This is the first of your content I have seen. I have to let you know how much I appreciate your recognition of Indigenous American cultural views on gender, prior to European colonial influence. Thank you so much for this! I think it is important to point out how "Western Culture" (basically Judeo-Christian values) has many flaws, and shouldn't be viewed as the supreme societal goal. Thank you again for helping point this out.
I think it might be worth considering that the idea of a definition is deeply connected to the enlightenment and the way that the scientific enlightenment is tied to colonialism. This drive to define and then record the world is rooted in a need to manage the population as a tool of western expansion and to take inventory of that expansion. All that to say, what about gender as a kind of familial clan that inherently isn't defined rather than something we just haven't been able to define (yet).
@@TheCreativeAnimation here's the thing, I don't think the OP was calling off defining things completely, but I think what they're saying is that the idea of a perfect definition, a sort of diestic worldview where things all adhere to rigid rules, is fundamentally flawed. The concept of "I know it when I see it" where there is not strict definition is a far better sense of defining things. For what you said regarding survival, for example, it wasn't useful to specifically define what makes an animal a predator or not, but rather being able to recognize that you are in danger from an animal, without a specific and concrete definition. This idea of a weak definition without specific parameters is in fact commonplace and has been forever. For example, many laws are not even that specific, an action can be illigal but it may be difficult or impossible to define exactly what that action is, which is why we have a complex legal system in the first place. If it were possible to actually accurately define things for utility, we would do so. Yet, we can't, which is why there are people whose whole job it is to argue whether or not someone is guilty, and what they're guilty of. For example, the idea of "premeditated murder"- what counts as premeditation? There's not an *exact* timeframe where something stops being "in the moment" and one where it was planned out. Of course, many cases it's obvious, following the "I know it when I see it" rule.
@@TheCreativeAnimation That's not what the person said though. At no point did they say definitions are no good or evil or to throw it all away. They literally just said that the idea of a perfect definition is flawed and that it is important to acknowledge since we can generally feel the effects of the shortcomings of definitions as seen in the examples they gave. However, you're still reasonable in stating that definitions are important and serve a purpose. Which both OP and the person you're responding to seem to agree with.
@@TheCreativeAnimation If definition is deeply connected to utility and should be accurate, please tell people to unify the botanical and culinary definitions of fruits and also the scientific and laymen's definitions of theory vs hypothesis. ESPECIALLY the theory one. PLEASE.
I want to push back against the idea that this is fundamentally connected to colonialism. The various cultural developments in the 17th and 18th centuries we call the enlightenment also took root in places like Austria, Germany, Italy and Belgium not directly involved with colonisation. Internal European developments were just as important. On top of this it's important to note that individuals in places like India and Japan also the North American native nations also took part in the enlightenment, which we are increasingly recognising. That is not to say that colonialism had nothing to do with the enlightenment mind you. But the idea that it is central is incredibly anglocentric.
I almost want to say this video is upsettingly good but it's actually really calming haha. Also your face when the generator came on was priceless. It's funny you saying this video was a series of corrections because up to when you said that I was just thinking how well this video stands up as a piece of independent thought and in its own way a kind of from-the-ground-up synthesis. Not a defense, or an offense but obviously with a clear stance. It stands apart from the TERF biology video while also building on it. I said this on the first video I found of yours, but one of the things that I love about your videos is that they're for us (I say this as a trans woman but this "us" can be inclusive of whoever). They dare to put out thought with minimal consideration for those who seek to do us harm, and instead focus on what is important for us. As you said, fighting the status quo directly is an uphill battle. Something I've just thought about in writing this is that queer people make our own status quos, particularly in places where we get to consolidate in person. We take this strength from our own status quo and we bring it into the cishet mainstream and we make them contend with us. This obviously scares them and obviously often puts us in a defensive position on both macro and micro scales. But sometimes us existing and doing our thing has its own power. I wonder if a way to break a status quo is to ignore it and let that ignorance be its own bespoke critique; an invitation to create something new and greater.
i think we can all agree that in 99,9 % of day to day cases, when we refer to a "woman" - we aren't talking about genetics or inner organs. so a strict "definition" based on sex makes no sense. We have other words to refer to biological phenotype, etc. it reminds me of how you have to label a product "oat drink" here - even though everyone calls it "oat milk" ... well knowing that it isn't "a nutrient-rich liquid food produced by the mammary glands of a mammal" ... 🙄
"Gender demands an underclass" is a string of words I've been searching for for over a year now and hearing it voiced I was just, "YES! YES!! THANK YOU!! THIS EXACTLY!" all over my phone screen. Gender largely exists to enforce an individual's specific actions and to establish an arbitrary hierarchy to then fit that individual into. As a gender-fluid person I really struggle with this.
Why do you struggle ? This is exactly why sometimes I feel like the gender spectrum shouldn't even exist, keep the words wo/man for sex and adress related issues with the body in mind rather than the gender (sports, prison, medical research..) and just precise if ever some older opinionated person asks if you fit the cliché gender roles of the trad wife who loved pink/providing patriarch with cars and football or are out of this old ridiculous stereotype. Why say you are genderfluid if it has no use but to oppose yourself to people with stereotypical sets of actions that fit the idea behind the word wo/man a part of the population beleives but is just one (very limited and oppressing) personnality type among the population of said gender?
Every time you say that traditional gender roles are a European idea you forget about essentially the entire Muslim world which fits the description and objectively goes even further in the direction of patriarchy. Note that almost a quarter of earths population is Muslim.
Agreed. It goes beyond even that I think, though the colonialist point of Europeans imposing their gender structures on much of the rest of the world is valid. It does come across as "Europe bad, everyone else was fine until Europe screwed everything up" though. Asian cultures, broadly speaking, have their own similar if not quite the same traditional gender roles. As, I believe did some Native American and African groups -- though some there stand out as exceptions at least on a surface level.
They are a European idea, they are also a Muslim idea and many others, but I think the thing is the gender roles pushed by European colonialism which effected nearly the whole world in some way were mainly the European idea which was kind of the focus of the video. This video is very Eurocentric but it was kind of stated that it was Eurocentric at the beginning
Interestingly relation to religion, which gave us the 'father' figure in charge of it all. Christianity obviously comes from the middle east originally, but it didn't take over as a world religion until the Europeans (Rome) converted. It was also used as a tool for power, and used as a method for colonization as well. Islam came after Christianity. Read the bible, then read the Quran. The Quran is a lot of bible muddled up, it's why Islam is the only other religion that recognizes Jesus as a prophet.
Really, while critics try to suggest that “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman” is a useless definition because it is circular - it may in fact be the least-problematic definition we can have (at least the least-problematic _concise_ definition). And as for criticism of it because of it being circular -- what if we _did_ accept the “A woman is someone with two X chromosomes” definition. Would that not just raise the question “What is an X chromosome?”? That said - your video _has_ convinced me (finally) that gender is _indeed_ a social construct - but in the sense that _language_ is a social construct. It is our human instinct to have a such thing as language - but the details of _what_ that language is varies from one culture to another. Likewise - gender as it exists in mainstream Western culture is a construct specific to the society that is part of. But other societies had gender too - even if very _different_ concepts of gender. For example - the Native American examples you gave early in your video _also_ had a concept of gender - even if it was a far less _oppressive_ concept of gender because it (a) did not devalue the work done by one of the genders and (b) allowed individuals whose temperament and proclivity didn’t fit their birth-assigned gender a pathway to reassignment to a gender that _did_ fit them. Anyway -- I still believe that it is collectively instinctive among humans to _have_ a concept of gender - even if the specifics of the concept are culturally specific. If modern society’s concept of gender is abolished (as opposed to merely reformed) then it is inevitable that it be replaced by a _different_ concept of gender. So the question of whether to abolish or reform gender should _really_ be based on one question - that being, which is a better pathway to a society whose concept of gender is non-oppressive? Is it by making _enough_ reforms to take the concept of gender from where it currently is to where it ought to be? Or is it by just chucking the whole concept that Western society has and starting from a clean slate? Which of those two paths is the better path to a non-oppressive system? I do not know - and it _may_ actually depend on which _version_ of the modern gender concept is your _starting_ point (as let us face it - society is _not_ a monolith in that regards). I should add - all forms of trans activism (and I am a trans-woman saying this) seek either to reform or abolish the mainstream concept of gender. At very least, even if nothing else, trans activists seek to add to the gender-concept a pathway of reassignment for those who do not fit their birth-assigned gender role. Even transgender folk and allies who seek no other change to the societal gender concept seek _that_ reform. However, there are other trans activists who seek much _greater_ reforms to gender than just that -- and there are some who _do_ seek a wholesale _replacement_ of the gender system. EDIT: And then, thirty minutes into your video, it suddenly becomes clear to me how, in hind-sight, I should not have been in the _least_ bit surprised that the author who came up with the idea of a Sorting Hat turned out in the end to be a TERF.
The definition of "a woman is someone with two X chromosomes" also has the obvious hiccups: congratulation, all Turner syndrome women with a missing X (rather than partially missing) are suddenly not women, same with Swyer syndrome XY women. And depending on if ONLY XX is accepted or XX isn't an exact case match, XXY, XXXY, etc, Klinefelter syndrome men are suddenly women now! (I've spent too long in sex determination systems and I have seen too much of XY *and* ZW for the rest of this month.)
I love this comment because it recognises that the are some trans activisms that want to abolish gender as we know it and not just find a way to fit into the oppressive system we already have! Where can I learn more about that? I've seen the gender critical argument that binary trans people only enforce gender roles through performativity too many times already! I wanna show them that's not necessarily always true instead of just trying to excuse them ('cause even though it's fair, it still doesn't disprove their argument). Thank you!
@@Artechiza - Well - such exaggerated gender performance by binary trans-women _does_ happen -- but it is not because it is the inherent _nature_ of binary trans-women to do so. Rather, it is because we get the signal _very_ clearly from society that even where we _are_ accepted as women at _all_ - it is often on a probational basis. Slight deviations from expected behavior of the gender can often be used as an _excuse_ for invalidating a trans-woman's gender identity. Sometimes trans-women _do_ respond to this pressure with an exaggerated performance of gender. And I would _assume_ that the same would likely go for trans-men as well. Then there is _also_ the fact that those who transition despite the extreme societal pressures _not_ to tend to be those who are _least_ compatible with their birth-assigned gender. Someone whose incompatibility with their birth-assigned gender is mild is more likely to stick to that birth-assigned gender anyway rather than risk such rejection by society. So - these are two factors that would contribute to binary trans-people having an exaggerated gender performance. In both case - the cause of these factors are not binary trans-folk -- but transphobia.
Really glad to see you address colonialism and indigenous gender systems. So many white people like to ignore that, or treat it as an irrelevant footnote at best.
I am 44 years old and was brought up to this point in time as a cis bisexual male. I am neurodivergent and got diagnosed with autism as a mid 30s adult. So my whole life and most of this timespan, I didn‘t really fit into this society and didn‘t know how. The diagnosis autism made it a bit better, but still there was a strange divide. Then, during the past month, I got taught a new vocabulary, new definitions and suddenly I realized, that I always had an issue with my own definition of my sex. I always felt deeply attracted to people, that were in between feminine and masculine features and this seems to be, because I am in between. Not visually - I have a beard around my mouth (don‘t know the english word for that) and am visually identified as male, but I do not align myself with this. For all that is male in my person, there is an equal amount of female aspects on my inside. If I still was younger, I maybe would have expressed this feeling visually, would have been more outgoing with this identity, but I am quite Ok with how I appear but finally can define myself more clearly. I am non binary. I personally do not need my surroundings to see me as such - but to be honest I usually don‘t give a fuck on how people see me anyways. But it has become an important realization for me myself. I don‘t need to convince Nazis like Tucker Carlson and this Matt Walsh weirdo, that gender is just a construct, because it it pointless to fill that void between their ears, but definitions and the education on this matter is important to define myself within this world. To find my place - to see me for who I am. And I am so thankful for people like you, who share their experiences and knowledge on the internet and fight for a better understanding.
Personally I'm not really interested in trying to come up with a rigid, one-size-fits-all definition for "woman", nor am I interested in trying to appease the sort of people who try to wield the question as a gotcha. "A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is obviously not a useful definition but all the same, if someone tells me they're a woman I'm not gonna argue with them. That would be a gross thing to do.
The fact that the question is always "What is a woman" and not "What is a man" is also a reflection of misogyny. People do not feel the need to question or justify the existence of a man as much as they do for women.
Maybe they don't as much, or maybe it's more innate than it is explicitly stated. I've had so many "male" things foisted upon me that I didn't take part in and as such felt a target on my back. I'm definitely not trying to say it's more important than the issues at hand with defining women, but I am saying it is also a big problem.
That's because men as a group aren't oppressed. They aren't the subject of legal and political frameworks designed to protect and uplift them. Therefore, their interests are rarely discussed and the need to define that political category is rare.
That's sweet, thank you! Once it's out, I'm curious whether you think it is. In my mind, it's definitely built on the foundation of my biological sex & "binary trans women" videos
@@lily_lxndr while waiting for this video to release i rewatched your videos on the concept of gender ideology, politics of gender conformity, and the video on biological sex. having seen this new video now, i definitely see how it builds upon the previous ones. and even though this video reads to me quite nicely as a continuation of a larger basis of work, because it ties these concepts together, i think it stands just as well on its own. the video on so-called gender ideology sets a sort of basis for the conversation, outlining the ways in which trans people's living conditions are impacted by their gender. the video on the binary vs nonbinary microculture war goes into how these distinctions of identity are very fragile and often don't have a major impact on the material realities of trans people in of themselves. and then the video on biological sex goes out to show that sex is just as constructed and mutable as gender. this new video then ties it all together with the idea that trans womanhood and cis womanhood are both products of human social artifice, and cannot be clearly defined. i'm reminded of the susan stryker quote you brought up in the "binary trans women" video - we are all equally constructed; the same anarchic womb has birthed us all. in light of this video, i find myself thinking back on the concept of gender abolition as it relates to trans identities, which you touched upon in the "binary trans women" video. it's difficult to picture how trans people would navigate a world that suddenly became devoid only of the concept of gender. in an ideal scenario, if it would then be possible for all people to freely access whatever affirming procedures they desire, and have their lived experiences formally recognised where needed without difficulty, perhaps we could wave gender goodbye. but lacking this, the concept of gender, nebulous as it may be, can be as much of a tool to carve out some comfort in this late capitalist hellscape as it is a prison that maintains the position of trans people as a gender underclass. that said, i do hope that the trans community can move beyond the microculture wars of binary vs nonbinary, "truetrans vs trender". perhaps the concept of gender cannot be safely abandoned quite yet - and some might not ever want to abandon theirs - but everyone can benefit from calling their mom and touching some grass instead of desperately trying to salvage some sort of definitions for what true transness, womanhood, manhood, or a lack of adherence to the sociocultural norms of any of these might be. anyway, these are just some of the thoughts i've had over these subjects and your videos. all in all, thank you for another great video. looking forward to the next.
Though my goal wasn’t necessarily to try and get a definition of the word “woman”, I recently did an interview project on gender to basically describe gender diversity and it was interesting to see the distinct differences between how each person translates the idea of gender for themselves and other people. My interviews ended up ranging from 15 minutes to over an hour and perhaps some of the most fascinating things to me were that the way one of my friends and I broke down cis versus trans, by the end of that question he wasn’t sure where he fell; my mom’s job works with clothing and her definitions were often linked to the way certain clothes are supposed to fit; and another friend spent a while talking about how their understanding of gender is uniquely linked to their experience as a trans person, talking about how creepy experiences can change how you approach a situation especially if you are unsure how you are being read in terms of gender. (I hope this isn’t too rambley, I sometimes feel like my minor in gender studies makes me a little too eager to share how fun and messy gender can be)
Yes I think its because the questions not being asked in good faith. I would say it's kinda similar to a dogwhistle( in the sense that it creates a response without directly saying the words) . the question is only asked to weaponize misogyny. People who ask this question usually proceed to invoke a sense that womens rights are being taken away. They use people's dislike of misogyny to create a false threat (Trans people especially Trans women) and basically walk people right into transphobia because they feel so strongly about misogyny that they don't see the intersections. Their whole game is "oh we need to define what a woman is because your oppressor could claim they are a woman, and gain access to you"(ex: the Trans bathroom scenario is almost always painted with women as the victim). But this idea that Trans women take away from women's rights in any way lacks any nuance or real world basis.
@@debbydee6633 yes and those resorting to such tactics are often the true oppressors of women, using trans people as scapegoats to divert attention from their misdeeds (including abortion bans, child marriage, and spousal abuse to name but a few)
@Serenth actually a lot of sexual health educators frequently say people with penises when discussing health with that organ. It is not an act of erasure, it's simply a fact that not all men have penises, and not everyone with a penis is a guy. Sure most men have penises, that's true but when discussing health you have to adress the specific population concerned.Some ppl with penises are intersex,not men and some cis men do not have penises for some reason or another. Why would that erase you?
@Serenth plenty of people do refer to 'people with prostates' etc. but that kind of impersonal medical language doesn't 'erase' anything, it's just more precise. if a cis man has had his prostate removed or was born without one for some reason, whatever is being referred to clearly doesn't concern him, but that phrasing doesn't make him feel emasculated as a result. if a trans woman has a prostate, it includes her without misgendering her. it has no bearing on the existence of the categories of 'man' and 'woman', just reflects that one doesn't have to have a certain body part to qualify.
It's a very extraordinary claim that colonist Europeans created this binary system! I mean it's like you've never heard of Arabs, Akkadians, Egyptians, Chinese, Mongols... All these cultures had almost entirely male leaders and warriors and other traditional gender roles. All abrahamic religions for example (which are absolutely not European) have gender roles resembling to some extent what we have today. Marx and Engels are political ideologs and not scientists or historians, both paint history in a way that fits their presupposed political view of the world, taking their ideas seriously leads to very disturbing results, as we all should have noticed by now.
I think ur simplifying alot of stuff. Egypt had many genders not just 2.wat ur talking abt is how Egypt dealt with certain ideas in their time, which is just as complex as gender is today. The Chinese also is quite complex with it's gendering, it's not as straight forward as ur trying to make it out to be, but yes china has a view of gender within ideas that r similar to Christian Europeans, with quite a difference do to the nature of yin n yang ☯️. Arabs had many different genders actually, but I guess ur trying to make things simple for urself by concluding that modern day ideas of the Arab ppl r the same as they were thro history. The Jewish community has had at least 6 genders and each r actually mentioned within the tanakh itself, but r ignored for the sake of modern ideas. Christianity never had a set group of genders infact it varied by culture that would later be stomped out by claiming different cultural ideas were heretical. The mongols were quite diverse and it wasn't until Genghis Khan that we have the firm gender ideas ur trying to express. Akkadians did have quite complex gender ideas, and this is found in many cities of worship specifically. Wat ur mainly trying to say is that cis men have always had power in large nation systems, but that doesn't negate the reality that these cultures ur trying to paint with a broad brush to lie abt how these cultures viewed gender had complex and different ideas of gender and definitely more than just 2. On ur last part abt Marxism, I think u don't understand that Marxism isn't just Marx and Engels, but it is collective of multiple ppl that continued the work of Marx and Engels. Most of Marxism we have today isn't from Marx himself, tho the works today we have derive from Marx and follow his line of work. Leninism is different, bc it's a branch off from Marxism and creates its own line of work, along with Maoism. I think ur ignoring history and following propaganda to make ur opinion for u. Overall the USSR was a nation that did great things, and operated much better than the US, and did some similar things as the US did during the same time period. I'd be happy to discuss Marxism further along with communism/socialism if ud like, but over all u seem to be ignoring that Marxism as a theoretical system for how socialism and communism will come abt, and the reason for it's appearance.
Damn, what a good video! As a trans woman myself, sometimes I question why I even feel the way I do, why I more closely associate to one abstract label than another if it is ultimately meaningless. But the truth is, it's not about concrete definitions, it's about comfort, that's what gender is about. Like you said, being a woman can mean so many different things to a person, and I'm not even sure what womanhood means to me at all, but I take comfort in it for whatever unknowable reason. It makes me feel whole and alive, and I think that's all that matters. Woman has no clear definition because no gender has real definition, it's whatever you make of it, and I think that's what's so beautiful about gender expression.
Another thank you for this comment! I have no strong gender feelings at all, so someone wanting to associate with a different abstract label has always somewhat confused me. You have to buy into those socially constructed ideals in the first place. Your comment helps me sort that out a bit. I long for a world where everyone just gets to express themselves without the abstract label attached, but obviously we're a LONG way off that type of civilization.
This is an amazing video, thank you so so much! Looking for 'what is a woman' videos online for a discussion group is painful atm, and this is a diamond in the rough.
You can do this exact thought experiment with men, asking what they are. The problem is that you can’t really define them anymore. Manly, girly, mansculine, feminine, they aren’t really apt descriptions anymore since you can’t really define an action or trait to a gender. If you get into the semantics of a term like this you end up going nowhere. So that’s why I personally think that the simple description of “an adult human who identifies as a woman” is probably the best description we can get. I think having gender and these terms is fine, because I think that we should have some ways of identifying ourselves besides just calling us humans (I think that’s just too broad and would make things way confusing), but anything more than that is reductive and circular
I quite enjoy this video and your conclusion. I'm nonbinary and an anthropologist, and I've become increasingly uninterested in trying to actually define "woman," for many of the reasons you gave. At this point I absolutely think it's true that women may have very different feelings on and experiences and reasons they have for why they are women and what that means for them, and restricting that is hardly helpful.
I can't believe you dropped out of school (even though I did too, twice). You seem like a natural teacher and your voice is so nice to listen to. Well, anyways, I guess you are teaching. I'm 2 videos in, and learning for sure. 🙏🏾
"fucking incoherent" is a fantastic way to just describe all of gender honestly. definitely how id describe myself the world's a messy place and everyone experiences everything differently and maybe that's okay and we don't even need to come up with universal definitions half the time incredible video. its given me even more to think about in regards to this topic and opened my eyes to some factors id never even heard of before
The "I love women in every way possible" was unbelievably relatable. I identify as a lesbian, and I'm most attracted to the concepts and ideas of feminity, as well as the technical "female" anatomy (I'll happily take girl dick any day though, I love trans queens
One of the questions I sometimes hear is whether or not my parents are gay. I have two biological dads, one of them was my mother and is a trans man. I understand that people would think they are a gay couple, but to me they are just two people who love each other. You can argue that they are bi or pan or even straight if you're a terf, but I don't understand how the way you describe a relationship can be any bit more important than the fact they love each other. I also have the same approach to gender. People can describe others the any way they want, but to me that's not of use. The only thing that maters is the person and not what gender they identify as.
yeah it seems way easier to not force labels on people and not try to fit everyone into one single description but many fail to do it and end up doing more harm thinking they are doing good :/
Just try to imagine this: there was definitely a time when our ancestors didn't even know for sure what the real cause of a pregnancy was. Ever since we knew for sure how reproduction worked, in some triibes those who could give birth (those we call "women") held all the power, and in others the opposite became a rule. Since then, it's been a random and arbitrary battle of superstitions and beliefs based on "protecting the pregnancy". The concept of "sex" is not natural; it's something we've attributed to humans since we knew how to reproduce. It's kind of exciting we live in these times.
if the word woman has no definition then it has no meaning. if it has no meaning then why do people care if they are referred to with that title? i'm not trying to say what a woman is or isn't. i just don't get why people are so upset because people won't give them the title woman when they admit it has no meaning. can someone explain this please?
You wont get an explanation from these folk. They are so delusional that they fail to see the blatant inconsistencies in their ideology. There really is on hope for these people, so I suggest not taking them too seriously.
I'm not trans and am in the middle with this issue. But I think what's being said is that people give things meaning. Sometimes they also have a hard time differentiating between when they're giving something meaning and when something has objective meaning. For some, they believe that "woman" has meaning because people are giving it meaning but that the meaning they're giving it is not objective. Also, if you're attached to a certain meaning of a category and it benefits you, it may be hard based on bias to not see that you're giving a category meaning and that the meaning you're giving it, isn't objective. But if you're like, "but it is objective!" and are motivated by fear to keep seeing it that way, it can be hard to convince you because you don't want to be convinced.
We need to be less afraid to say “I’m not going to answer that question because I don’t believe you are asking it in good faith.” Especially those in the public eye being mined for sound bytes to export to the Rage Factories or news networks.
I find it most interesting that, while it is very common to ask "What is a Woman?" to rage against transpeople, none of the bigots seem to want to ask "What is a Man?"
I came here from Nebula just to say that this was an amazing and informative video. I am really trying to educate myself on this topic. Also, i'm a big fan of your calm and serene demeanor and you just seem so well versed and educated. I'm a fan. Keep it up
I have just started watching but it just reminded me of this: the aspect of communal family structure can even be evident in a culture’s recent or distance past just in looking at certain kinship systems. Like how the Iroquois system has all of your mother’s sisters and father’s brothers using the same word as mother and father respectively. I know this can also relate to cross cousin intermarriage, as with the Sudanese system, but I just find it fascinating how much you can infer about a given culture’s history simply by the system they use and which family members have what kinship terms.
As a biologist, the attempt to justify transphobia or definitions of womanhood via "basic biology" are SO frustrating! 1. At BEST we can tell you authoritatively about sex, not gender (For that, I refer you to the anthropology department. That's a culture thing, as we can tell from the fact that there are varying numbers of gender categories across cultures) 2. Sex does NOT boil down neatly to XY vs. XX chromosomes or even one set of reproductive equipment vs. another. Even discounting all the species that have different modes of sex determination, that have individuals that can change sex, that only have females, or that are both at once, and JUST focusing on humans... A) there's more than two sex chromosome combinations possible, and you more often than not can't tell without a karyotype test, B) genes not on the sex chromosomes and in-utero hormone exposure can also affect the develoment of sex-related characteristics, and C) intersex people exist, and have always existed. 3. You absolutely cannot make broad statements about male vs. female behavior in nature! Even looking just at our closest primate cousins, chimps have a more male-dominated society are tend to be more aggressive (hunting, having violent conflicts w/ neighboring groups), while the equally-related-to-us bonobos have a more female-dominated society where conflict is often solved with sex. Among marmosets, while females nurse the babies it is the males who carry them around all day. And so on. If we look at humans, it seems pretty clear that behavioral flexibility is one of the keys to our success - figuring out different ways to do things that suit the situation is one reason we are able to live everywhere from the African savanna to the Amazon rainforest to the steppes of Russia. So why should we assume that there is some standard template that gender roles and relations have to follow?
Due to YT BS, I just found this video today, notification are on and subscription has been there for a while now. It's a really good essay and well presented, thank you for this.
Thank you so much for this video lily! As always it is so thoughtful and insightful. As a nonbinary lesbian i always find it an interesting dilemma of what lesbianism means to me and what womanhood means to me. I have no answer except lesbianism feels like home and womanhood does not, yet I am somewhat both and neither depending on how you would choose to define me. I’ve recently been reading a collection of essays called Black Queer Studies, which feels extremely relevant to the discussion. The general thesis seems to be that the idea of assimilation into the white heteropatriarchal society is antithetical to emancipation from homophobia/transphobia, as we will always leave out queers of colour, poor queers, trans people etc. So i think having loose or no definitions of what our identities mean as a whole, but rather what they can mean to the individual, is something that needs to be embraced!
ohhh i LOVE the way you phrased it, "lesbianism feels like home and womanhood doesn't", that's some poetic stuff right here! lately I've been questioning my identity and I've noticed that I sort of feel the same way about gayness, but towards men, despite being an AFAB person who's been identifying as non binary for some time now and using feminine forms in my language (I'm Polish, so "gender" of the spesker affects more thean just pronouns, making things harder). We'll see how it turns out, it's quite a new revelation for me, so many things may change, but there's something beautiful I defining ourselves by what makes us feel warm and comfortable instead of what doesn't. Searching for the things that just... feel right instead of running away from things that don't, giving ourself space to explore without beingto hard on ourselves. Thank you for this perspective, it really touched me. :)
@@vauchomarx6733 THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR NAMEDROPPING SOMEONE THIS AWESOME! All I can do is return the favor if you haven't heard of her yet: Madame Maupin, who would casually dress as a man and who set a dead nun's corpse (and the room of th abbey) on fire to get her lesbian lover out of a convent.
It always bothered me that the conversation was so often about defining women in particular. Rather than trying to clarify what it meant to be a woman, it always felt more like there was a specific thing they wanted women to be. Having the historical context for that makes this make a lot more sense.
I was in complete opposition to basically everything in this video a couple years ago. Now I get it lol. Weird. Great video! Thank you. Edit: And I'm someone who hates change lol fml.
Save on Curiosity Stream & Nebula with my link! curiositystream.com/lilyalexandre
@CSI TS i’m a trans woman lol
@@lily_lxndr Hi hi - I was wondering if you ever considered founding a discord server for viewers of yours? ^^
I've found myself kinda uncomfortable in lots of lgbt spaces for a lot of reasons you've mentioned in your videos - I think that having a space for folks who generally can recognize these sorts of things can be valuable for the community. That said, I know it can be a good bit of work and commitment to starting one up, so I'd def understand if not!
. Lily Alexandre the reverse system of gender does not get rid of borders you imply that the original gender system creates borders but that is tribalism and has nothing to do with gender. Female in politics of Cherokee’s use consensus and include male and female in vote. I think you are kinda just moving the plate over to your area for no good reason. Also forgive the run on sentences.
Hi, are you saying it's impossible for you to say what YOUR definition of a woman is?
In Genetics, there's the word 'phenocopy.' Have you heard or known about it?
As a cis woman, I've honestly asked myself this question many times. There was a period where I was actually flirting with the possibility of being non-binary. I had a pixie cut at the time and would sometimes get mistaken for a guy, and I didn't mind, and was even a little intrigued by it. But, one year while I was working at a summer school, this one kid kept calling me "he" even after she was corrected. I had several kids at this place tell me they weren't actually sure what my gender was until they heard me talk or learned my name, but this girl kept calling me "he" even after learning I was a "she." It kept happening, and I started getting irritated, but no matter how many times I told her I was a girl she kept misgendering me. It was at that point that I realized yes, I AM a woman. I can't explain why I'm a woman, but I am one. I came to the conclusion that I didn't mind being mistaken for a man, but I didn't like having my womanhood DENIED.
My (male) partner suggested to me that the reason I had that reaction was because being a woman/girl has shaped so much of what I've experienced in life and how I've moved through society, and that not being acknowledged as a woman meant that all that baggage was also not being acknowledged. The sexism, the harassment, the expectations for how I should be. The constant need to justify myself as a woman/girl even when I didn't "act" like one and didn't like what girls were "supposed" to like.
Conservatives act like having more open/fluid definitions of gender is confusing young people and making them think they're something they're not. But for me, my gender questioning was born out of confusion resulting from a rigid gender binary, and the fact that I was TRYING to just be who I was, as someone assigned female at birth and who saw themself as female, only to be treated like I wasn't doing it right and wasn't "really" a girl.
I've been IDing as non-binary for a few years now, but I'm right there with you on the whole "baggage" concept. I like to say that I "identify politically as a woman". I'll also say that I was "raised as a girl" or "socialized as female". I'm definitely a woman in that this is how I primarily interact with the world, but I also am not opposed to the term "girl". I don't find it infantilizing so much as simply... less loaded. Simpler times with fewer concerns and far less rigidity. "Ma'am" grates on my nerves, but "miss" doesn't. I'm certainly not a man, but "boy" isn't far off either. Maybe "boi" even rings truer than most other ways I could be seen.
I think ideally I would like to be perceived as androgynous or at least induce some confusion or second-guessing. Though I wouldn't want my authority on speaking toward what it's like to live as a woman to be questioned. 😅
In other words you want a weak man who you will trample over and when you find chad you will submit. You’re a modern women get over it
@@garyoakham9723 Sounds like both a non sequitur, a red herring, and a straw man. Your comment was three different logical fallacies in one. I didn't think that was possible. Wow.
@@keelhld94 Trust me, the youth are less confused by gender than the older generations. Has been that way for generations. I always knew I didn't identify with girls, but I realized my gender wasn't "woman" when I fist heard the term "gender fluid". I used the term non binary now, because it say only what needs to be said, and my biased reason is I got more flack identifying as gender fluid, even if it is slightly more descriptive and accurate to my representation of my gender (mostly because this was closer to early to mid 2010's, and I has less of queer community behind me). Sometimes being who you are requires you to present as a different gender than you were assigned at birth. There was no way I could feel like me being referred to as a girl or woman all the time. Always felt like *I* was ignored, and they were talking about someone else being a girl.
Gender expression can be whatever a person wants it to be, that is about as progressive as it gets. Some one can relate to can love being cis gendered. Someone may see their gender fits what's traditionally thought of as the opposite sex they were born as, and transition to that socially and physically. Or maybe only socially. Some one could be agender and decide gender at all isn't right for them, that's the opposite of attaching a gender to it like you said. Then some people feel their gender is somewhere between man and woman, or just somewhere outside that binary.
I personally hope for a day where gender and sex are completely detached, so that our expectations, expressions, and personality has nothing to do with your genitals. I hope one day there just isn't a male identity, or a female identity. You can literally just be you without the baggage of sex or gender. Just be you, and enjoy whatever aesthetics, activities, and expressions you want, without being labeled as one of a few things. But, even if I want that, I'm not going to disrespect people who identify with a binary gender, cis or trans. If expressing as that gender improves their well being, then there's nothing wrong with it to me.
Also, you don't necessarily choose your gender. You are the gender you are, you choose how to express it. Just like you don't choose what to believe. You either are, or are not convinced, it's something that happens to you. But you can choose how you outwardly express those believes. I didn't "choose" to be non binary, I am, I just also choose to identify that way *most the time*. Sometimes I outwardly identify as female, mostly for safety. Sometimes I outwardly identify as male (or at least masculine) for fun. Most the time, I'm just, indifferent, androgynous, old me.
As a closeted trans woman I actually relate to this, because I've been called a boy/man all my life, so even if I don't want to be referred to in that way I'm used to it. I don't get all red in the face if you call me 'he' because that's how I look currently it's what I would expect you to call me since you don't know me. However, if you know I'm trans and would like to be called 'she' but, you call me he anyway. That is very disrespectful because in doing that you are invaliding my own feelings and experiences. To explain this in perhaps a more simple way, it's like asking for a soda at the deli or something, but the cashier gives you a bottle of water anyway. The cashier is ignoring what you had asked for, and showed that they don't care and decided what you wanted for you, even though only you could know what you want. Hope this makes sense :D
When I was child I used to get mistaken for a girl, and remember feeling delighted. As a young adult I got given the title of honourary woman by my women friends. Have been harassed by men, in the work place, for apparently acting like a woman. Even went to the women's breast cancer clinic, because there isn't a gender neutral option, and had the oncologist reassure me men get breast cancer too.
But when asked despite the sexist attitudes of men, or connection with women. I know I'm not a women. Guess it's sometimes something you just know that you are or not. Despite how much evedence there is to the contrary.
@@flyingsky1559 you seem to be responding to a lot of comments without reading them. where do you get the free time?
Where’s the something you just know? How do I find it?
@@ihopeicanchangethisnamelat7108 I'll give you the unfulfilling advice of "figure it out for yourself", sorry. How I came by my conclusions were for me, they aren't necessarily true for even another non-binary person.
@@flyingsky1559 So you get your free time to write dumb comments by... not reading the comments you're replying to? Boy, you're just admitting to wasting everyone's time here with your nonsense.
I swear, there is something biological about it. Even if the gender roles are all fake, it was never about them for trans people (what I mean by that is that it wasn't ALL about gender roles). If gender roles weren't a thing maybe it wouldn't be as noticeable, or perhaps it still would be. But you just know you are who you are. You know that since day one. I bet in like 100 years or 50 years or something we're gonna laugh at how little we understood about human brains just like now we laugh doctors were smoking ciggaretes in their office and everyone thought it's healthy.
as a non-binary individual I've gotta say that "just some person doin' stuff" is honestly a pretty compelling gender label
“just some person doing stuff” has gotta be one of my favorite genders
As an agender person, I sure am “just some person doin’ stuff”
@@Edward-bm7vw *best Sauron voice* "I SEE YOU"
Sometimes I wonder if I'm nonbinary. I usually just default to saying I'm GNC, but thinking back to when I was little, I always identified with characters like the Genie from Aladdin and the Nordic God Loki, so I guess my gender is wacky genderbending trickster God?
Okay, joking aside, I do get the feeling. I'd rather be seen as a person who does things first and foremost.
@@Edward-bm7vw Better than trying to assert your fantasy until it becomes everyone's reality whether they want it or not.
As a conservative, I want to thank you Lily for making this video. It was surprisingly approachable and I was able to watch through the entire thing. For the first time, I can grasp the left side without feeling lost. I will definitely share this with my friends so that we can have a conversation.
As a trans woman who has had worried about many of these things, thank you so much for being willing to listen. I find that most people who call them conservative aren't willing to do so, which is saddening, honestly. I recommend looking into the processes of transitioning as well. As of typing, I had bottom surgery (vaginoplasty, aka male to female sex reassignment surgery) only about a week ago, and even though I've had to be extensively knowledgeable on the process and all the little details, it seriously surprised me how identical what I now have looks to what a cis woman has. It's also been one hell of a journey to get here, and transitioning is certainly not an easy process in the slightest. For hormones alone, you need to see at least two specific kinds of health professionals, answer a ton of questions, etc, and you also have to be at least 16. Surgery isn't an option until you meet a far bigger list of criteria, including being 18, having both of the aforementioned health professionals email a letter of recommendation for you, tons of paperwork and being on hormones and socially transitioned for at least a year. Even with all of that, they had me repeat my full name and date of birth a dozen times on the day of the surgery, and once every time I was given my medication, which is 4 times a day. It's an insane process, and shouldn't be as difficult as it is, honestly.
Everyone asks "what is a woman" but nobody ever asks "how are women" 😔
Its pretty funny how most experts Matt asked were identifyable as "man" in his film project.
Not even letting women answear that question gor themselves.
why are women
Real💚😭
i love this meme - why haven't i thought of this before!!!
Just wanted to ask that myself 😂
i'm a visual learner btw
LMAO
@@BitchChill Ah, beat me to it, was about to say "my guy, it's a video, it's all visual"
@Fopenplop same
No one asked
666 likes wink
My response: I’ll define woman if you first define sandwich, in a way that includes all things we agree are sandwiches and excludes all things we don’t. Whatever your definition, now challenge it with the following:
-would your definition include burgers and subs (those are generally agreed to be sandwiches)
-what about hotdogs (generally not considered a sandwich)
-how about open-faced sandwiches, yes? Then what about pizza?
Taxonomy is a non exact art, and is better approached as a fuzzy concept with room for movement at the edges. I see questions of sex and gender the same way. Even exclusively focusing on the genetic/medical aspects of femaleness contains a ton more nuance than “I stopped learning biology in the third grade” Shapiro acknowledges.
As a lexicographer I couldn't agree more
@@jeng3609 First, a system that works for “most” cases with no established procedures for the edge cases is a system that doesn’t work.
The way I see it, “transwomen are women” is not a philosophical issue of redefining man/woman but a necessary case of category assignment clarification. We have already designed our culture and spaces around socially defined concepts of man and woman along with the conceit that all adult humans are one of these two things, therefore, once the majority of society becomes aware of the existence of trans and non-binary adult humans, we have to reckon with how those individuals should be slotted into the very concrete physical realities we’ve built around having just two choices. Somehow I don’t see us remodeling every non-private residential building to have (what, five?) different bathrooms. So we have to come to a consensus about how society should accommodate the now-recognized fact that human adults other than cismen and ciswomen exist while we have unfortunately designed an entire culture around the assumption that they didn’t exist. All this current discourse is society’s messy way of coming to a consensus on how to proceed from here. (For a similar example of this often offensive and dehumanizing process, see how the US dealt with the legal end of racially-based segregation-not to mention the horrible ways that segregation was attempted to be enforced prior to that.)
Second, I think you underestimate just how fuzzy the biological definition of sex really is. Similar to sandwiches, I can’t think of a comprehensive biological definition of human sex that doesn’t leave a fairly large number of humans completely unaccounted for. For example, we can start with the whole XY and XX chromosomes and your external genitalia at birth idea, but we will quickly run into the reality that biology doesn’t care about our preference for mutually exclusive categories. For example, there are ciswomen who have XY chromosomes, but a gene controlling hormone expression isn’t located in the normal spot, so the DNA sends instructions for building a female body. There are people with Turner syndrome that have just a single X chromosome. There are people with varying genetics that have totally ambiguous genitalia / reproductive organs visible at birth or detected inside the body later on.
Society has always had to deal with such individuals, but a big deal isn’t usually made of it because despite the protests of conservatives, we mostly operate with fuzzy logic when ”deciding” whether some person we encounter fits into one category or the other. Typically without conscious thought, we mentally evaluate a person using a whole bunch of spectrums (body shape, height, voice, mannerisms, gait, hair, makeup, clothes, accessories, name, etc.), weight those results based on context, and come up with an assumption on which category to treat them as. This is what “passing” for trans people really is.
All the ugliness we are seeing now is society’s futile insistence that we can really ever define a thing precisely without edge cases. We can’t, but we reeealllly want to be able to do so.
@@TheCreativeAnimation my point isn’t to conflate one concept with the other but to use a simple inconsequential idea to demonstrate how it is virtually impossible to attempt to come up with a rigid definition for even such a frivolous concept. It only gets messier when dealing with truly important issues. Show me your always true scientific way to define man or woman.
@@TheCreativeAnimation The most accurate definition of what a woman is, is simply "A woman is someone who identifies as a woman."
Is this a vague definition? yes, but purposely so, because gender labels only really have meaning to the individual, the only requirement to be ANY gender is that you feel that you are that gender, it is not based on looks, it is not based on biology, it isnt based on activities you participate in, it is based merely on feelings, how you feel about yourself, what your identity is can only ever be defined by you (and therefore your feelings), and therefore what a woman is needs no definition besides "Someone who feels and identifies as a woman".
@@gjmptw8419 hey it’s you again. Have you ever had a wish sandwich buddy? It’s a sandwich where you have two slices of bread, and you wish you had some meat a bow bow bow
I think this video is pretty good, but I have an idea of how to finally solve the problem of defining women. If someone's name starts with f or w, then she's a woman, and if the name starts with m he's a guy. Everyone else can chose between being agender or non binary.
i'm living for the idea of he/him Madonna
finally a sensible conclusion. margaret thatcher was a man and winston churchill was a woman. no more disagreements
Using the arguments from the video:
Well but names are assigned to you, so being a women is something you can choose? and what is a word? or a letter? letter's are just human concepts used to define sounds we make with our mouths, so being a woman is defined by the sounds I make while refering to myself? This is why this video is so dumb. It deconstructs every concept because there's no hard lines in the concepts. But this can be applied to any cocenpt. Just because concepts don't have a hard line that defines them, doesn't mean looking at the overall picture we can't easily identify what they are and what they represent.
@@stepheniesomerset7231 Lit. Every gendered language has this in some form, even if it's faded over time. In Latin, masculine names end in -us for the most part and feminine names end in -a. Neutral names don't really exist, despite Latin having a Neuter gender (but no personal pronouns for that gender).
It's funny because linguists don't have a hard line that defines what a word is, it's just a concept that we use for convenience because it mostly works, if you don't look too hard. But no, we can't always easily identify them. Most concepts are like that. They aren't immutable truths of the universe. They're just helpful ways to understand the world around us. As long as there are definitions, there will be edge cases. But of course in our daily lives out in the world we use heuristics to make quick judgments and "easily identify" an example of a concept, like a woman. But heuristics are assumptions, not truth. They can be wrong.
I'm a cis man, but a lot of this really resonates with me. Something I've noticed looking back is that just about nobody whose opinion of me was drastically affected by my gender ended up being a positive influence on my life, and that's true not only for the ones who thought it was a strike against me but also the ones who thought it was a point in my favor. I recognize that in a patriarchal system, I'm going to run into more of the latter and less of the former than a hypothetical otherwise-identical-to-me woman would, but it's been enough to leave me a little suspicious of anybody who cares more about my gender than I do.
“Modern gender demands an underclass.”
Wow, I’ve never actually thought about this before, but this makes a lot of sense. I’ve really been enjoying watching your videos/exploring opinions and ideologies I’d never thought to consider. Thanks for your content :)
Oh my god.... is it "gender" or P A T R I A R C H Y which demands an underclass? Talking about everything in gender neutral terms completely erases the fact that it is MEN who are oppressing women, MEN who define what a woman is and does, MEN who reap the benefits of our social exploitation. It is a central part of leftist theory that THE EXPLOITATION OF FEMALES IS WHAT DIRECTLY LEAD TO CAPITALISM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY-- Engels himself stated this. The exploitation of females is the FIRST form of human-on-human oppression (we can surmise this based on the fact that NEARLY EVERY CULTURE IN THE WORLD PRACTICED SOME FORM OF MISOGYNY *PRIOR* TO COLONIALISM OR IMPERIALISM-- and the fact that the FIRST EVER LAWS created by men detailed their rights to own their wives and prostitutes-- look up the code of Hammurabi). And oppressing women directly lead to men realizing they could oppress those OUTSIDE of their tribes as well. This is all stuff you can find out when you research and discuss the history of PATRIARCHY and MALE SUPREMACY instead of "gender oppression" or whatever that even means. btw, I am not trying to yell at you: i am using caps lock to emphasize certain points because people will glance over them otherwise.
We have let men define what a woman is since the beginning of history, and now BELIEVING in their ideas about some innate female essence is considered progressive. I am as gender non conforming as a woman can be, I routinely get asked my pronouns and mistaken for a man-- this is because i refuse to participate in femininity, which is enforced by patriarchy, and is the uniform of submission under patriarchy (women in all cultures are forced to don a 'uniform' to represent their compliance to patriarchy). To imply that I am not a woman because I refuse to conform to MEN'S ideas about womanhood is not only ridiculous, it is offensive, oppressive, sexist, and reinforces gender roles and sex stereotypes. does any of this make sense or resonate?
I was recently asked to define woman, and it reminds me of a time when I was a kid where I was challenged by a dickhead to show them a "karate kick." I said there is no "karate" kick, there are just kicks, and there are many ways to kick. They scoffed, thinking me an idiot no doubt. But gender is basically that. There are certain recognisable styles but there are so many ways to express a gender, to demand only one specific one is, to my mind, to complete miss the point. The thing I never understood when I thought I was cis is that it's possible to feel active joy in one's gender. Most people who never have to think about their gender I think don't often learn how to have fun with it in the same way you can if you're completely ignoring the "rules."
'I'm a black belt in gender'
@@tinnagigja3723 but of what school? I'm maybe a shodan in transgender neurobio-do
How silly
@@sravasaksitam Yeah, like. There's so many karate schools, all with their own teachings. At best you can GUESS they probably meant either a crane kick because what they know of karate is The Karate Kid, or they mean the one that's most popular in martial arts movies (a roundhouse kick, which isn't even exclusive to east-asian martial arts, it's a staple kick).
Fr. I live in a very traditional country and these strict definition of man and women are so exhausting and harmful. I'm personally have never in my life didn't fit in the traditional definition of the "women". But bruhhhhhhh I just love have a fun, don't like cooking, offen joke and hate restrictions kinda "A girl have no right to have a fun with a man" is so foking joke I just can't. Why I can't have a fun with them? Does everything you can do with a man is only have a sex with him? This said to me my friend she's from native family and they have strict rules how women should behave yourself. It so stupid especially when every girl just see in other girl hers potential rival 😐
Externally, I use the label "trans woman", internally I use the label "who fucking cares?"
yeah i feel kinda similarly
outside i say “yeah im non-binary” and i like the label
but on the inside “im just me and the only word to truly describe me is my name, and even that doesn’t feel right sometimes”
to me my gender is just what i feel in the moment, influenced by my mood and clothes and appearance and location, but there aren’t enough words to describe every single feeling i have of my true internal gender because it feels different every now and then.
and im very ok with how its like right now, i am non-binary, there is no set word that fully describes me, i am outside the binary
honestly this, as interested as I am in transitioning I feel like gender just isn't important enough to take up my limited brain space that could otherwise just go into like. playing a movement shooter or stimming on the table
I really liked this video and it made me genuinely consider some things about myself. I guess I would call myself an intersex woman, but that doesn't really mean much to me. It just describes a condition I have that makes my reproductive organs more ambiguous than is typical but still look female enough for me to qualify as a woman by most doctors. My body produces more androgens than is normal for a woman as well, so my voice is somewhat deep and I grow facial hair if I stop taking my medication. When you described how some people consider define woman as adult human female, it made me wonder if I break that definition by not being having all the markers of a "biological female" or if people who use that definition would consider me some type of medically or biologically broken female that can be fixed and should want to be fixed. or if they would consider me female, why wouldn't they consider trans women female who also weren't born with typical female reproductive organs or hormones?
very fascinating video, I really enjoyed it :)
So true Bertram!
I don't think they even consider the fact that intersex folks exist.
BerTRAM?!?
Interesting how instead of changing society rules that were made hundreds years ago, they decided a human condition that they dont understand which is natural, is the one that need to be change.
You are a mistake of nature ....sorry not sorry
As a cis male, this question resonates a LOT with me. I have many times wondered what is even considered feminine or masculine in the same vain, only being able to think of very stereotypical answers like _“big muscles punch punch punch.”_ Even for me, I feel solid in my identity as a male, but can’t give any solid reasons for it other than that’s how I’ve been called at birth and I generally look like a “boy”. But do I ACT like a “boy”? I have no clue. I’m just a person living their life, and I use the pronouns of he/him simply because it’s easiest that way and that’s what I’m used to.
And honestly, this very lax view of things makes it both really easy and also really hard for me relate to transgender people. Like on one hand, I could never understand what it feels like to be a man in a woman’s body or vice versa because there’s nothing about me that feels inherently male or female. It’s nearly impossible to define the two, so how could I “feel” like a man or a woman. It’s super weird too because you’d think I’d identify as non-binary, but even my username shows that being male is a part of my identity. It just feels right? Or maybe I just follow what society told me? The question is just so odd because my brain contradicts itself. I know I am male, but why? I guess in that way I can COMPLETELY relate because you just kindof… know.
Very cool question to go over, I definitely agree with the idea that it’s not really worth trying to find an answer. Like you said, people can be the same gender for completely different reasons. And I guess for me, I don’t even know the reasons.
I can't speak for all trans people, but for me, it's not so much that I "feel like a woman"; it's that I feel dysphoria being a man, and euphoria being a woman. "Feel like a woman" can be a shorthand for that, I suppose, but to me the actual feelings are dysphoria and euphoria. It's not so much that there's an actual "woman" feeling that I can feel.
Also, it isn't necessary to be able to define "man" or "woman" in order to feel like one. Dysphoria and euphoria are emotions, so you don't need to be able to reason them out in order to feel them.
If you don't feel dysphoria, then you are probably cis.
Yeah according to whoever use these definitions i guess must be non binary. Cause i feel i. only a woman cause i was born female. I thought that was what a woman was , a female. I really wish someone would tell me what a woman or a man is. I am more ignorant about what any of it means now than i ever was. I just wanted to learn about trans. Anyway, Im on the lbgt side over any conservative shit ever. But i cannot grasp what a woman or man is i have no effing idea
Ftm and I also don't feel internally male or female. It's more like the male identity/role is like a pair of shoes that fit while the female identity/role just doesn't. Another analogue: assuming work conditions are equal, being in a profession or job role you hate versus one that is agreeable. Are there "boilermaker souls" or "doctor souls"? Uh maybe kind of, you can spot patterns in doctors and welders, they're probably naturally drawn to what they do, but if you asked them how they know they have a doctor soul or welder soul they would look at you weird and say "well, that's my job right now and I don't mind it." Maybe they don't even particularly like it, it's just what was available to them or made sense given other goals. And yet, some people know they need to switch careers. How do they know? They feel a burning desire to do so, and eventually do. Does that mean they had a "doctor soul" while they were a welder? No, they just changed something about themselves and where they fit into society into something that fit whatever the hell kind of soul they actually have better.
Or immigration. I think this one is even closer to gender because people have similar debates over what makes someone a "real [insert nationality here]" and biology comes into the discussion sometimes. Occasionally people realize they'd be better off in some way uprooting their lives and potentially being a permanent outsider in another country. Some people originating in the same place they did could never imagine making that choice and are perfectly happy and/or successful staying in the same place.
as a trans man, i don’t feel like a man either. I don’t think gender is an emotion. dysphoria isn’t like some special extra feeling that only trans people experience, it’s the same miserable combination of emotions people feel about their receding hairline or cellulite. it’s less like I sense a manliness about my soul and more like being a man is the way i prefer to move through the world. i prefer to walk as a man and do manly things, i like to look in the mirror and see a man, i think a lot of cis men feel the same way. similarly, i hated doing those things as a woman
I once took a very interesting, semester-long Jewish studies class, taught by a Jewish woman, called "Who Is A Jew?" in which the titular question was never answered. I feel similar vibes from the "define woman" conversation.
You know, every time I hear about the jewish people values I'm like "but everyone can be that". And it's exactly what I feel when people talk about the values that constitute gender. Everyone can afford vulnerability in order to nurture, not only women. Everybody can take matters on their hands and be strong, not only men.
@@alymaldonado So we're all jut living in a big movie set where majority of women like makeup and dress up and give birth or fight for abortion rights, where men mostly like sports and are much more aggressive than women, its all just an act not something we naturally are born with? Everybody is jut acting? Are women acting weaker than men where they're most likely to e overpowered by men who sexually assault them? Is acting when a women is scared to walk alone at night and she sees a man following her , while the opposite isn't true? just because one men are feminine and some women are masculine doesn't negate the fact that the majority of men and women are inherently different.
@@madamluis2537 Dude wtf, nobody is saying that. I don't even know where to start because everything you wrote is b*shit.
Btw, men aren't more aggresive than women. Men are usually stronger than women, indeed. But you're talking like all men are a*holes and abusers and all women are weak, drawing conclusions nobody even thought about it.
@@madamluis2537 excuse me, english is not my first language, but what the fuck are you talking about. that person didn't say a word about "living in a big movie set", that's the thing that you just made up because you made wrong conclusions from what you read. what the fuck do you mean by referring to gender as "acting"? read again and use your brain - trust me, that organ has a purpose.
@@madamluis2537 no one said that. No one is saying that the oppression of women isn't real just because womanhood is 'a social construct.' People are oppressed because of social constructs all the time.
When you talked about your anecdote with the cis woman in the party everything clicked, what means to be a woman for me or for other women is completely valid because we all have different perspectives.
I love your videos as always Lily, this Wednesday I'm having my gender changed legally and your content gives me life.
Thank you! And congrats 🎉
I’m a cis woman with no strong gender feelings either way, I’m so glad you brought up people like me 😭 I identify as a woman because that’s the role I was raised in and I have no particular qualms about it. But do I “feel” like a woman on the inside? I don’t know, maybe? I’ve only ever existed in my head with my own perspective, so I can only say with certainty that I feel like me. There’s nothing inside of me that screams “woman” or “man” or anything really. I’m also bisexual which might have something to do with it. But I don’t call myself non-binary because I don’t feel any need or desire to do so. I feel about identifying as a woman the way I feel about someone offering me half of their sandwich; sure, I could eat 🤷🏻♀️
@@albertcastro3500 then what is a woman to you?
I'm non binary and bisexual and I've always thought it was the same vague indifference to gender that influenced both! Super cool to see someone else like that, even if you don't necessarily use the nb label
oh same! i don't have any internal motivation to be perceived as a woman, but people do that based on my sex and presentation anyway and it doesn't bother me enough to try to change that
How do you feel about identifying as a man? It might be interesting to try out, in order to explore yourself more. I can also recommend Gender Dysphoria Bible as a resource in general, it had a lot of good info for me at least
I've noticed that a particular group tends to have very strong overlap with not just non-binary genders and apathy towards gender, but also bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality. It's led me to consider that maybe some people really don't have a natural concept of gender and neither their identity nor attraction has anything to do with gender.
Finally someone with a clear answer. Ever since my English teacher said that "woman" was socially constructed, I've been questioning my gender since. If we construct what it means to be a woman, why should we tell someone they are not one? Women of all kinds are beautiful
I wish you luck 💕 don't let anyone discourage you by making you think you're just following a trend or don't know enough about yourself to determine an identity; too many of us deny ourselves decades of joy in letting these ideas get to us
A construct is a thing. Everything is a construct, biological or social. Constructs can be strong and stable. Just like "rape is bad" is a moral construct; but it's a construct really worth saving, enforcing, and re-enforcing.
@@johnc3525 yes, I had been questioning my gender before my teacher brought up social constructs. There's nothing wrong with questioning everything. Of course at some point you become too anxious to function, but questioning "well established" concepts is the reason we know the earth is round
@Telleva oh man I'm so glad you showed up to tell LGBTQ+ people what LGBTQ+ think, what would we do without you?
'woman' isn't a construct. are you kidding me? gender is a construct. biological sex isn't.
Recently I've been googling if trans and non-binary is valid or logical. I've always hated gender roles and stereotypes, the small things that men were allowed to do but women couldn't always bothered me more then my peers it seemed.
I love the term non-binary, secretly I identify wholly with it, but being surrounded by people who are transphobic and misinformed has me thinking I really am being a "snowflake" that doesn't have logical beliefs. Quite frankly it is heartbreaking for me...
Gender to me is very complicated and philosophical, I appreciate your video so much.
U are valid
You are valid and loved
I think, regardless of whether one is logical, is largely irrelevant, when trying to describe one’s personal experience. It is a fact that you have felt what you’ve felt, and that your experiences help define you as a person. Being trans and/or nonbinary has to do with experiencing gender differently than others, and that’s not something that can be debated or argued against.
Often, in anti trans sentiments, they much assert that transgenderism is a social contagion, that those who are in it are “seduced” or “deceived”, “groomed” into being predators or “converted” from being a “normal” gay. However, these assertions do not have any evidence or fact backing them, despite many of their claims to have it, much of it is falsified. The only “valid” claim the anti-trans movement has is their individual right to refuse to refer to someone as their gender or name or pronouns. But even so, such right to refusal in an employment or educational context is unacceptable, as it is inherently a discriminatory practice, to treat trans people with less dignity than cis people.
@@AlquimistEd alright buddy haha
Non binary isn’t a real thing, it’s just a term for someone who doesn’t want to conform to the traditional norms that society has created for men and women. By identifying as non binary it gives people a sense of freedom to express themselves how they want. However this is also attainable by still identifying as your birth gender, you can break those traditional norms and stereotypes while still identifying as either a man or a woman.
"For every complicated question, there is a simple easy to understand wrong answer."
and a way to not give a answer
"For every simple question, there a million ways to needlessly overcomplicate it."
I'm always a fan of logging off as an answer. After so many years of hearing the discourse over and over again I've found that I'm not really interested in defining my gender or anyone else's.
Thanks for the video! They're always really thoughtful and you have a way of taking topics that are usually distressing or frustrating to me and discussing them in a way that is challenging but accessible
For real it gets exhausting being asked the same, basic questions by people who don’t even want to learn, they just want to vilify you and “win”.
"Ask any geneticist."
Every geneticist: "Sex determination is more complex than chromosomes."
Conservative : Every geneticist are infected by the (insert insult to left leaning people here) intelligicia
That will be their usual answer.
Yeah, genetics only provides a framework for sex to develop, but because we're a soup of chemical signals, even physical sex doesn't always match up with the genetics because of androgen insensitivity and De La Chapelle syndrome.
Did you know that if you were born male, you have all the genes necessary to make a female?
I'm by no means an expert but I read a really interesting article in scientific journal a few days ago and as far as I understand it biologists have been trying to figure out how chromosomes determine the development of sex characteristics for decades and they can't really figure it out. having a xy-combo more or less correlates with the presence of testes but there is no actual proof for causation, same with having a xx-combo and the presence of ovaries. not to mention all the variations of chromosomes that exist. even the same dna can lead to different expressions of sex just by the varying ways in which the mrna might save and transport the genetic information, which can be influenced by environmental factors. I mean the joke is so old at this point but the "basic biology"-crowd really should look more into that biology they're so fond of.
No it really isn't complex.
I remember in college I had a philosophy profesor that asked us to define furniture. And well… we couldn’t do it. At my pettiest I feel like I want to challenge the “define women” crowd to define furniture. Because a lot of the same problems come to play but unlike defining women, defining furniture isn’t politicized.
Inb4: most dictionaries only give examples of things we refer to as furniture (chairs beds etc). examples are not definitions. Any definition. We came up with came with a constant never ending “but what about_____” rebutal. For example:
-furniture doesn’t need electricity to run. “What about massage chairs”
-furniture needs explicitly serve a functional purpose, like facilitating sleeping or sitting. “But there’s plenty of furniture that is just meant to just sit there like a chandelier. Also candle holders are furniture even when they aren’t being used”
You get the idea.
I feel like every attempt I make to define woman in a genuinely apolitical way just devolved into “but what about____?” And I’ve just found it easier, like most dictionaries have chosen to do with furniture, provide examples of what the women around me are like and preface it with “including but not limited to.” It’s not a definition, but it’s as far as I care to go with it
Second that can't say what it is exactly, but seem to know it when I see it.
@Serenth "make it fit for living or working" So is a standing mirror furniture, if it isn't needed to make a room fit for living and your job doesn't require usage of a mirror?
@Serenth by this definition, stationery and food are furniture, but a table ceases to be furniture if it's bolted to the floor
@Serenth WOOOOSH.
I never would have considered a candle holder furniture. But that just goes to show that furniture can’t really be identified if different people think different things can and can’t be it, and could make equally valid arguments because there is no set definition to go off of and say one person is wrong or right.
As a gay man, I've often tried to define how I perceive manhood, with much the same confusion. I'd love to see someone make a video about that - it's just as confusing! To be honest, I think of gender more as an aesthetic than anything. "Femme" versus "masc" feel much more concrete to me than "female" and "male" do, if that makes sense.
yup i just simplify it to, pronouns, aesthetic and what words are used to describe them (e.g feminine words or masculine ones)
so could be like
"she/her, masculine, feminine nouns"
or
"any pronouns, feminine, masculine nouns" and any other combination and that just saves me the headache, to simply view people as that and really not anything more complex
though i think more complex converations are good to be had, im just too tired to engage in them
Watched it on Nebula but came to comment - excellent breakdown. Unfortunately, I often run into many phobes (trans, xen, femme? You name it. Iowa for you) and find myself combating lots of bigotry. This gives me some great strategy for dealing with it
seeing you in every comment section makes me smile.
Thank you so much for listening to trans people 😌
hi king!!
Foreign man in a hateful land. Sadly...
You live in Iowa???
Generally speaking, if anyone asked me what a woman was, I'd first ask why they were asking? Were they asking because they wanted to determine whether to market to them or not? Were they asking because they wanted someone to be their surrogate mother? Were they picking teams for the Olympics? Then, I'd ask them why they needed to know the gender for such a question. Some are obvious: They want someone sexually-able to carry a baby, and they're likely asking about that. So then answer the question, "I can or cannot carry a baby to term." Some are harder, like, why do we even gender sports? Is it because we want to know who the best on Earth are? Is it because we want to know who people with the same physiology are the best? Do we want fun games? Interesting games? Again, it's just more questions. Gender is oftentimes a cover for another question that they're trying to obscure. It uses cultural bias as a way of asking more factually accurate or specific questions.
*Update* Just watched a beautifully made video about how stupid (but useful!) binaries are, particularly when it comes to sex: What Is a Female? | MathsCat -- th-cam.com/video/XwVmppNWDmg/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=ScrapTakes
@@flyingsky1559 wait what? If it's biological then it's sex, not gender
@@flyingsky1559 Shouldn't we then (also) split by other biological differences like height?
@@flyingsky1559 Why not split it by height? Or weight? Or hip width? Or arm length? Or testosterone level? Or nationality? Or... Or...
@@justin___ They do in fighting, and then they also split by sex.
I've always wondered how a professional 135 lbs female and male fighter would fare against each other if in the same rank of competition.
@@flyingsky1559 Performance isn't something that can be objectively measured biologically, though. How do you measure "performance"?
God, the drunken trans conversation. I've had it many times. A lot of what we call gender is unknowable, false, created (and hence malleable), and a shared hallucination. If that. (Shared.) Maybe all of it. But i know I'm trans!! Happy 420 angels sure hope this makes ANY sense
Exactly like if gender isn't biology and it isn't your interest, hobbies, clothing style or music taste or any of that superficial bullshit then what the fuck even is gender! Yet somehow I still know I'm a trans man and living as a man makes me 1000 times happier than I ever was when I thought I had to be a "woman" Contemplating it fills me with existential dread how can something simultaneously be meaningless absolutely nothing tangible and yet so vital to the core of my being. maybe that's why some cis people violently cling on to the narrow views of gender they have because without it they have nothing I just wish they didn't have to do it at our expense. I think in the end the solution is to realize the questions like how and why don't have to have answers to make an identity valid. I might not know why I'm a man but maybe just knowing I'm a man is the exact thing that makes me one and no more justification is necessary!
It makes as much sense as any other part of being human. We are complicated interactions between a kludge of organic machinery born with an instinctual sense of self (where the brain's map of the body might just NOT match what the genitals look like) mixed together with personal preferences and aptitudes, cultural expectations and social constructions, lived experience, and minute-to-minute fluctuations in hormones that can all nudge around what we try to simplify down into "gender".
@@BeastGuardian THANK YOU for pointing out cultural expectations are part of gender social expectations! Not enough people realize that, shit, what was considered womanly in the 40s is different from the 80s is different from the naughts, and what's womanly in one ethnic culture is different in another- one especially striking one I recall is that in some arborigine tribes sharpened shark-teeth is seen as a beautiful and feminine trait! If you show up with shark teeth in Canada you'd get seen as someone from the alternative punk scene or adjacent to that, not remotely feminine.
I can give you a silly answer or a genuine answer. Or both. Why do you ask? (Genuinely)
@@AlquimistEd the short answer is that something feels off, that there is a mismatch between your instinctual sense of self, the way others around you percieve you, and your physical sexual characteristics. It can be hard as an outside observer to tell if someone is transgender or if they are just gender nonconforming, compare a trans man to a tomboy as an example. The tomboy in this case is a cisgender woman who just doesn't feel compelled to conform to cultural archetypes and stereotypes related to femininity and are comfortable pursuing interests and wearing fashion stereotyped as masculine, a tomboy still feels comfortable instinctually as a woman, and does not feel strange when others percieve her as female. One really obvious difference is when a trans man is closeted, presending as female, and is inadvertently referred to with masculine pronouns, he will likely feel a moment of relief or joy, like someone finally actually saw "me". A cisgender woman won't feel that thrill of euphoria at being called man. A trans man may have the neurological hook-ups for a certain member of the male anatomy, and studies have shown trans men experience the sensation of a phantom phallus at the same rate that cisgender men with a congenital defect or an accidental amputation do. Likewise, after puberty, sensations from non-erogenous zones of a trans man's breast tissue are processed as coming from something akin to a tumor or foreign object rather than a normal body part, so many trans men feel constant unease or discomfort just from their breasts existing.
Neurobiology is quite complicated, but there does seem to be an inborn instinctual sense of gender constructed from your brain's natural anatomical map of the body and from your mirror neurons. The mirror neurons are rather fascinating as they play an important role in pre-verbal learning, they let you watch someone you recognize as being like yourself and learn from that behavior as though you were doing it yourself, so you pick up on things like "pink is for girls" or "boys like trucks" by seeing people act out or conforming to these stereotypes and begin to apply these stereotypes to yourself before you can even talk. Some people don't have a strong instinct to conform to what they might see others doing and instead prefer to go their own way or to outright subvert expectations, giving you gender nonconforming folk, but that's separate from being trans. For trans folk, you end up hard-wired to recognize yourself as a sex that doesn't match your genitals or you might have no strong innate sense of self-gender at all. As a trans person grows up and undergoes natural puberty, the sexual differentiation can be rather horrifying as your mirror neurons stop being able to recognize your own reflection as being "like me" thanks to developing secondary sex characteristics that don't match your inborn gender, thus many trans people end up feeling like a consciousness piloting an ill-fitted meat-suit, many liken it to being trapped in the wrong body.
I could go on, there is nuance that I've glossed over. There is no simple test to prove you're trans. For some it's pretty hard to tell if you don't have a strong sense of gender. If you feel like you are being forced to put on a performance and that no one is actually seeing the real you, that being referred to with pronouns that don't match your genitals feels right, that sex-linked physical characteristics just don't feel right on your body, you might be on the trans spectrum. Nature rather abhors discrete binaries and the XY chromosome only effects gonad development, everything else gets nudged around by hormone fluctuation during fetal development, so humans are usually mosaics of masculinized and feminized features, leading to the wide array of body shape types people can have. I'm not just referring to intersex people here, as that just refers to just people with a few specific gonadal or genetic conditions.
Defining a woman? Let's start with something simpler: Define a chair. You'll realize it's not just about legs, a seat, and a back. It's about context, purpose, and perception. Just like a chair can be a throne, a work of art, or a simple place to rest, 'woman' is a concept far beyond biology. It's about identity, society, and personal experience. Reducing either to simplistic terms misses the vast richness of what they truly represent. The question isn't just simplistic; it's ignoring the depth of human diversity. Now, how about defining humanity? Or better yet, empathy?
Asking "what is a woman?" is question very similar to "what is the self?"
Coming from the anti trans movement I don't expect that premise to make sense but it really doesn't they're the ones trying to define women based on biology we're the ones trying not to define women at all, simply letting women define themselves regardless of any parameters! Gender is such an abstracted meaningless concept none of it makes any sense so trying to rationalize or quantify it is impossible. But still for some people gender is very real (I know I'm a man though I have no clue why) so I say just let people be happy as themselves and only use the labels they want to use!
@@gjmptw8419 Okay, but do you really inspect people’s chromosomes when you meet people in the world, or do you just assume by the way someone looks and how they’re presenting themselves in terms of their hair and clothing? Also, the point is that while gender as a concept is a social construct, because we’re raised in a gendered world, gender is very important to most of us, including a lot of trans people. Because of that, it’s best for the mental health of trans people to be treated as the gender they identify as
@@gjmptw8419 You either didn't watch the video or barely understood a fraction of it, so like... why are you here? There's also another video on this channel about why TERFs are wrong about biological sex which I highly recommend, and then maybe engage a side of the argument that hasn't already been covered in those 2 videos because that's basically all your concerns here. You're just saying "if you can't come up with a snappy and easy-to-understand explanation that satisfy me and my already made up mind, then I auto-win this conversation because I can simply appeal to a traditional layman's understanding of colonial sex-based gender roles that are currently in place so I don't have to engage with this topic critically". Which, you know, cop-out city, population you.
Btw you're not really worth engaging with because it's just a long-form version of the argument of "compelled speech" and "thought crime" as if you're under massive attack by engaging with a topic on the left that uses critical examination and you are just thoroughly against that critical examination because compelled speech, thought crime, "petersonian archetypal constructs of the mother and father", or whatever no one cares. So yeah anyway I have notifications turned off so go ahead and speak to my deaf ear lol.
@@gjmptw8419 lol so if you saw a man with a beard, short hair, in masculine clothes youd know theyre trans and have xx chromosomes? Like, you dont know taking testosterone makes you grow beard and gain muscle and other shit? get out, youre arrogant and dumb
@@gjmptw8419 I’m really not trying to argue in bad faith. I kinda skipped a few steps because we all know that trans people can change their hormones which affects their physical appearance (appearance is variable anyways, so the idea that there isn’t anyone that you would describe as being born male but looks like a woman or anyone that you would describe as being born female but looks like a man is kinda silly. It’s really more of a spectrum and you can’t just know for sure someone’s sex assigned at birth just by looking at someone) and that they can also change their genitalia, so people then jump to chromosomes as what distinguishes a man from a woman. But that’s just not a realistic way to determine people’s genders in your day-to-day life. Plus, it’s not as simple as XY = male and XX = female. Even sex isn’t a simple binary. There are people with XXX and XXY chromosomes and there are even some rare cases where someone with XX chromosomes is otherwise what you would describe as a male and someone with XY chromosomes is otherwise what you would describe as a female. And you might respond “Well, that’s super rare”, but the fact is that they still prove that sex isn’t a binary and that definitions of male and female aren’t all-encompassing of humanity. The reality is that there isn’t a single thing that we use for the definition of a female that every person who is assigned female at birth has. Some are born without ovaries, some are born without a uterus, some are born with something other than XX chromosomes, and hormones and appearances are highly variable. Appearance is also a very arbitrary standard. You have to look like this or else you’re not a woman? Where is the line drawn? What is the exact criteria of how a woman looks? You really can’t “just tell” all the time. We all assume, but usually if you assume that someone is a man but they correct you and say “No, I’m a woman actually”, we just say “Sorry, my mistake” and move on. This isn’t even a trans thing. Gender as a concept is socially constructed, but how people choose to identify themselves is their own individual choice based on how they feel about themselves. It’s like the label “gamer”. We all have a general idea of what a gamer is, but you’ll find that when you get into the specifics, people’s definitions vary wildly and the standards and cutoffs can be quite arbitrary. Despite the idea of someone being gamer or not being a gamer being socially constructed and arbitrary, people still feel very strongly about being a gamer. And gender as in a group of people based on certain socially identifiable characteristics. Trans people want to feel included in the group of people that they identify with more. Nations are societally constructed, but people feel very strongly about being an American, for instance. Socially constructed does not equal illogical and incoherent. Money is very understandable and important to us but that doesn’t change that it’s a social construct. And I wouldn’t call someone a bad person for having that definition if they don’t mean any harm to trans people by it. I would simply try to explain to them how it makes trans people feel to be excluded or not recognized the way that they see themselves
As a neurodivergent person, the phrase "gender is such an abstract concept [...] so trying so rationalize or quantify it is impossible" rings so many bells that it hurts my ears. I don't exactly agree with everything you said, though.
Imo, gender, despite not being a concrete thing, isn't meaningless, but quite the opposite: a gender is a collection of meanings we assign to our bodies, based on the expectations we have (or were socialized to have). I believe that's why gender appears meaningless: finding a definite meaning to it is just like finding a definite meaning to our own lives, because gender's a key aspect of self-perception
Biology plays a key role in self-perception, so one cannot simply change one's gender - or lack thereof - at will, but in principle, we can and should (imo) express it however we choose to: pronouns, clothing, manneirisms, etc. After all, I believe that we have a duty to ourselves, and even to society, to behave as authentically as the context allows us to, so that, whenever we need to cooperate with others, we give ourselves and them a clear idea of our beliefs, strengths and weaknesses.
Learning to bottle oneself up by default can cause LOTS of psychological harm in the long run (I speak from experience) and weakens social cohesion, which in turn can cause even more harm, not only to ourselves, but to the groups we're in (I'm supposing that those groups are relatively safe to be in, which unfortunately isn't the case for many of the people who think deeply about their genders, as many of my fellow LGBTQ folks know from experience).
As a AMAB NB, it was too overwhelming to keep watching by 2:40. People insisting that AMAB people can't be women say we're not "real men" either. They knowingly enforce gender as a social construct.
@@tendayi7192 oh my god, I know exactly what you mean. It's like they know that you could never be a man, and they want to punish you for having the audacity of not being ashamed of it.
There's also people who know that males aren't women AND that self-identifying as a woman or as nb doesn't make you less of a man! If you're a male human being, you're a man, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're not a failed man, not a broken man, even if you're "feminine", you're a man because you're a human male, it doesn't mean you have to behave in a specific traditionally masculine way and anyone who says you're not a real man because you're not typically masculine is SEXIST.
@@galago95 that's not how that works at all
@@galago95 you are conflating sex and gender. If we started using genetic engineering to change our chromosomes, you would just move the goal post. You're just proving gender is subjective.
@@galago95 the fact that your so upset at the very idea that some people rather die than have to identify as a man, is you shaming people for failing to be men. You are demanding we perform manhood.
The inability to cleanly define "woman" isn't an issue with gender, but instead an issue with definitions. I'll try to give a concise, complete, and clear definition of "woman" as soon as someone can give me a concise, complete, and clear definition of "chair"
lol like the tweet where someone says a chair has four legs, a back, and is used for sitting, and then someone tweets a picture of a horse and says 'behold, a chair!'. diogenes is proud
@@gjmptw8419 i mean that's kind of the point of the whole conversation, right? no matter what criteria i give, there will always be a woman who doesn't fit
@@gjmptw8419 wow, i've never seen someone just admit that they don't care about minorities and think they're spouting brilliant rhetoric before
@@gjmptw8419 have you never heard of disability rights advocacy? or accessibility? have you never watched a movie with subtitles, a disability aid for deaf people? have you never seen braille on a placard in an office? we absolutely should rework society so that people with disabilities can live with as little barriers as possible, because they're human beings who deserve to live with dignity and autonomy. is it really 'impossible' to build a world that way, or do you just not want to try?
that's why i joked about you not caring about minorities. your example literally just shows that you don't care about improving the lives of others if it would have any cost to you. i can't change your mind about that, at least not in the comments of a youtube video. i'm probably not going to respond to you again because this isn't going to be a productive conversation and i don't appreciate being called infantile.
@@imevil974 not all chairs have four legs and a back---take beanbag chairs for example. they have almost none of the characteristics of chairs as you define them; they are amorphous blobs, but they are considered chairs anyway. so then you could say "a chair is a piece of furniture designed for one person to sit on." i think that suffices as a definition, but i'm sure there are some exceptions. and what is furniture, exactly? well, in the end, we invented chairs; a chair is a chair because we made it to be so, and so it ought to be. i guess? (hehe, sorry for ranting i was just trying to think it through as well)
Very insightful video! I'm a cis woman who has grappled with my gender identity a lot over the years because I don't gel well with societal expectations of women. I don't like being sexualized, I don't shave my legs or wear makeup, I didn't wear a dress for any reason until I was in high school, and I don't have any "feminine" hobbies or interests. I was actually so uncomfortable with the sexualization of breasts that I thought maybe I was trans because, when mine developed, I felt exceedingly uncomfortable for the first year or so. There are so many transfemme and trans women who are "more" woman than I am. They want it more, they perform it more, and they struggle more to be seen as one, but their existence doesn't invalidate me. Why should my existence invalidate them?
I would look into the Gender Dysphoria Bible, I'm not implying you are trans, but I think that book(?) is a good resource for anyone who is even a bit uncertain about their gender identity
@@weakamna Thanks for the recommendation!
@@weakamna They didn't say that they were uncertain abt their gender.
Coming from a more often than not right leaning dude, this chick is based asf and logical. This is literally so refreshing from all these chronically online mfs just spitting out topics they don't understand. But I can tell that lily doesn't repeat things she heard and makes her own opinions that apply to the real world and are swag. Even if I don't align with her on all topics, she puts it in a civil intelligent way that provides insight on things people might not understand. This is awesome.
This is how I feel too. I think listening to someone who thinks differently explain their opinion in this manner helps you understand why you belive what you believe much better without the feeling your being judged. watching this prompted me to go write down my own thoughts on defining gender in relation to sex. this is the kind of discourse we need to end this stupid fucking culture war that is making us dumber and more divided every day.
@@arigaberman8319 real
"What is a woman" reminds me of "What is a human", a question posed by Plato to which he answered with "a featherless biped". Fair enough until Diogenes slammed a plucked chicken on the table shouting "behold, a man". This is funny but the conversation went on with "a featherless biped that also has flat nails" which is...non sensical, there's much more that separates us humans from a plucked chicken than simply the nails but like...this is the point, you can't really describe some concepts deonthologically, you can't give an "a priori" simple definition that works and produces the correct results in all possible situations, at least not on all topics and especially not on ever-shifting ones. The only thing you can do is allow the thing to describe itself.
@@yuridezanet7560 this is a much more resonant type of response to the question for conservatives influenced by Walsh's film. I'm looking for a video that engages the debate without preaching to the choir. Unfortunately this one is not helpful as a response to most people.
I think the best answer is to accept the default chromosomal definition. Then discuss the limit cases that invalidate that definition. Then explain how recent the discovery of chromosomes is and also how it has become outdated by newer science that further complicates the issue. If you wade too far into continental philosophy, critiques of essentialism or poststructuralist semiotic analysis, you have already lost the target audience.
You can't ask "What are Women?" without also asking "What are men?" too, and by struggling to find an answer to those questions you may eventually wonder what even is the point in making those distinctions. This is the way i felt when i was 14 years old and it's what has lead me to disassociate from those terms completly. Instead of thinking of myself as a man or a woman i say i am just "myself", the clothes that i wear, the behaviors i have, my body or my preferences or even the way i think, i can not regard them as "Femenine" or "Masculine" at all. They are just the result of the various things that have influenced who i am.
Of course this isn't how the world sees things. Everywhere we go we can't help but think about the world in terms of femenine or masculine, there's such a strong division between men and women that i think only harms us by limiting our experiences. Hopefully we reach the day when we stop defining people by such shallow categories.
If you want, you could start being a pedant and learn a gendered romance language and start liberally gendering objects according to that language's grammar rules.
I know I've thrown people off guard when I starting insistently gendering objects according to French rules (my first language). Or when I started asking what the feminine form of verbs were and inventing them when there aren't. (French genders verbs, too).
@@neoqwerty Not exactly sure what you mean to acomplish with that.
As a Spanish speaker it's really hard to get other spanish speakers to use gender neutral language, even in the cases when a person can't and/or doesn't want to be called a man or a woman, because we are so used to calling people and things either female or male, we are so used to it people look at you like a weirdo if you try to speak using gender neural words.
I honestly don't even bother, people can call me a guy or a girl. The point is that there's nothing about my way of being that's defined by being either of them, i just am who i am, it's that simple. I would just like other people to understand that.
It boggles my mind that binary people can say with certainty that they know their gender. It's such a nebulous concept to me and I want to ask "how???"
@@The_Jovian it's possible that a lot of them are actually trans but have internalized transphobia so bad that they think that don't want to be hated in society so they cant be trans, and their dysphoria isn't that bad that they'll just stay being viewed as cis
@@The_Jovian because they don’t have disphoria
what are chickens?
Came from Jessie Gender's WIAW video.
Really honest, direct and interesting perspective.
Life is complex and our words are just trying to describe it. Add history, and it's even more complicated.
Thanks!
Thank you!
@@ryanthomas9306 Take a hint, I’m going to keep deleting your comments
Womanhood and manhood are so complicated, that I ditched binary gender all together lol. But seriously though, this is a really good history lesson and helps me to ask more questions about my gender and gender all together, and I liked all of the takes you have had.
I like this way of thinking too, it's really helped me define myself better, since I can just pick and choose the things I like instead of feeling forced into a box that by definition precludes things I would like to have. Am I a man despite having boobs? idk, doesn't matter, I have boobs cause I want them.
@@MrCmon113 When did I reference "I don't like having precise language?" AFAIC what I said makes my statement more precise, to my own understanding of myself. "I am a man" is too imprecise, I have breasts, and many peoples perception of "man" precludes "men" from having breasts.
@@Draco19970125 wouldn't you like to know lol
@@Draco19970125 you asked me, I gave you an answer to your problem: watch the video. Also, you have to be dumb as hell to think an hour long video about one subject is going to just give you the definition in the first three minutes, fam.
@@Draco19970125 answer the question, dave!
Asking "what is a woman" is like asking "what is a father". This isn't to say that parenthood is the same as gender, but it's like this:
We could start on the biological definition of "the person who provides the sperm that becomes a person", but of course many such people have no contact with their children and may not even know they exist. People who are strangers to their offspring are widely considered to not be their rightful parents. We could attempt a behavioral definition "a man who is a child's primary caregiver", which would resolve the previous problem and include adoptive fathers, but also includes many people we can widely accept aren't fathers, such as grandafthers or stepfathers who are raising children, but do not consider themselves "fathers" to those children. It further raises the question of where "primary caregiver" begins and ends. A father who only has custody on alternating weekends is a father, but why isn't an uncle who is heavily involved?
All this is to say parenthood is defined nebulously and in large part by self-identification. We rarely think about it, but this is a model we accept for many social roles. There is no reason we couldn't treat gender this way.
@@flyingsky1559 but no one adheres to those definitions that strictly nor do they always entail those things
Not to mention that the word 'father' can also mean 'childless member of the clergy' or even 'God' in other circumstances. Words mean all sorts of things and people aren't freaking out about calling Father Mulcahy Father because he technically has no children.
@@flyingsky1559 we can use the term dad if you like, but not all primary male caregivers of children are dads either, and some dads are not or only barely caregivers. My girlfriend exclusively calls her step-father who raised her since she was 2 by his first name and has only ever seen the person who is "dad" to her a week or so out of every year. Defining this stepfather as her "dad" when it seems none of the parties involved would be comfortable with that would not be very productive, would it?
@@flyingsky1559 Yes an adoptive father is still a father just like a trans woman is still a woman. Are you discovering adjectives as you are trying to form some semblance of coherence? This is the comparison being made here. If I wasn't aware that you were a bad faith actor I'd assume from what you're writing that you were caught up to the conversation finally. Sadly, that's not the case.
@@StockyDude If I had been raised by a stepdad and met his friend in the street and that guy went 'How's your father doing?' I wouldn't assume he was asking about my biological father. It all depends on context.
As a Boomer Trans Woman I've known for at least 60 years and been trying to explain how I know I'm a woman. TY Lily even though this was a bit much to try and explain. Had someone ask me because I went into a stall in 4th grade to pee and they said why don't u use the urinal I replied because it's cleaner. Trying to explain to people who don't understand they just don't get it.
Nowadays its because "so I can get a easy 15 minute break at work"
Lily, thank you for what you did here, you're awesome.
Thank you so much!
Before I've seen the video I'd define a woman as a cluster of traits typically correlated with eachother including identity, genetic, social, anatomical, etc, but in practice I'd use the tolerant approach of someone who identifies as such because what good does it do me or them to call them a liar.
The idea of a cluster of traits (or a "family resemblance concept" as Lily says in the video) is definitely something I wish more people would familiarize themselves with. Making any one of these traits or factors required for one's definition of "woman" basically always seems to cause problems, and to exclude even more people than intended (e.g. when transphobes inadvertently use definitions that exclude some cis women as well).
The repetition of confusion between gender roles and actual gender is quite frustrating and intrinsically anti-trans. I really wish people would stop saying this stuff about gender being a role or performance, as though trans people just feel like wearing a different kind of hat than what society initially expected. My gender isn't social, it's an intrinsic property of my being as surely as the colour of my skin.
@@Eking-su3tr No. Race isn't a real thing, and you cannot be a different age than you are. This is dumb scaremongering, even if those things were real why do you care?
A fascinating summary of an issue that could take years to fully discuss. I’m AFAB and not entirely comfortable identifying as “woman”, but my feelings aren’t strong enough to be called disphoria. I would really like a simple checklist so I can figure out where I am comfortable identifying…but I’m not going to find one, am I?
Hi, an AFAB nonbinary person here- your comment resonated with me and my past experience, so I wanted to comment! While there's not a checklist per se, I've found it helpful in learning about myself to hear others describe their experiences with gender and compare/contrast with that. My friends and I have gotten a lot out of resources like the Gender Dysphoria Bible too, either finding out we related to some gendered experiences more than we thought or finding out we didn't relate to them at all. I wanted to share in case it may bring you comfort or reassurance, however your understanding of yourself evolves. Best wishes!
@@gjmptw8419 It’s not easy to put into words. I dress in what most would think of as masculine clothes. I never wanted children-the thought makes me feel ill , though I’m fine with other people’s kids. Those are the two things I’m certain of but it’s more than that. It’s a cognitive dissonance, like the way you feel when you know someone is lying to you. I use the name Morgan online because it’s gender- neutral and I wanted to get a doctorate so I wouldn’t have to be “miss” - those things feel right to me. And I’m not a kid following a trend (not that I think any trans kid is that) - I will be 50 this year and this is something I’ve felt since I was about 10. But I always thought Trans meant sex-change and I don’t want to be a man. I just don’t feel like a woman.
What is AFAB? Thanks ❤️🇨🇦
@@loiscassels8966 It's an acronym: Assigned Female At Birth (with AMAB, Assigned Male At Birth). It talks about one's sex determined at birth and I think it's terminology that's specifically meant to be inclusive of intersex people (specifically people with ambiguous genitals who are arbitrarily assigned a sex and gender at birth and often surgically altered to conform "better" to the gender the doctors assigned them when they couldn't even start consenting).
@@neoqwerty Thank you. I’m having a hard time keeping up with all the acronyms and “classifications”. I’m assuming AFAB is different from a cis-gendered woman? ❤️🇨🇦
Yesterday I discovered myself which felt lost for the longest time thanks to you I no longer feel ashamed of who I am and I really can't thank you enough I finally said to myself that I'm a woman and it felt like truth to me and it felt like an immense weight was lifted from my chest, there is no greater feeling in the world to be finally able to identify myself and be okay with it after years of hating myself I'm crying tears of joy thanks to you.
i'm so glad to hear it, congratulations & thank you
Whenever someone says “what is a woman” I can’t help but think “what is a fish?”
Categories are hard to define and stumbling over this is hardly the dunk some people think it is.
This really was super fascinating. Thank you so much for making and sharing!
This is most enlightening. I have a B.A. degree in Anthropology and I've never heard any this information. Thank you for this information.
omg ur voice is so nice…. quite contradictory to feel so relaxed while listening to such information-heavy topics😭
I've started going with "Adult person of any sex whose identity is expressed with feminine grammatical gender." Broad enough to include everyone, specific enough to exclude people who aren't women, easily transmutable into definitions for man or nb. It's not perfect by any means, but in the moment it usually unsettles them and puts the onus on them to define woman.
That's actually a pretty serviceable definition, and it gives room for sub-categorization (femme, butch, tomboy, etc.), I think the only hiccup might be with drag queen pronoun etiquette but that's probably something that requires Internet Persona Protocol: ask what pronouns they use for when.
@@neoqwerty and I feel like most drag queens would be pretty good about speaking up if they use other pronouns, and it also allows for a persona to be fluid between in drag and out of drag.
I feel like that's a better version of what I was thinking about going with "someone who fulfills, through choice or willing circumstance, the socialized role of women".
@@neoqwerty is a drag queens identity expressed through “she” or is it her expression/performance when in drag? I think the latter, but I’m not a drag Queen.
@@mreugenecrabs9521 yep! They can. That’s why I focused on grammatical gender and not physical attributes
Its simple. I'm a lesbian, and I like women. If I like her, she's a woman. So simple smh 😤
My parents are very conservative and I’m still at the age where I’m figuring out what all these political stances are fighting for and why. This video has me questioning a lot of what they’ve taught me, and you explained your opinion and some other opinions out there very well. Thank you!
Thank YOU! 😄
@@lily_lxndr 😮😄
This is the first of your content I have seen. I have to let you know how much I appreciate your recognition of Indigenous American cultural views on gender, prior to European colonial influence. Thank you so much for this! I think it is important to point out how "Western Culture" (basically Judeo-Christian values) has many flaws, and shouldn't be viewed as the supreme societal goal. Thank you again for helping point this out.
Thank you so much for saying so!
@@lily_lxndr Please don't think I'm attacking any ideology. I am just thankful that you have brought hope for harmony for all genders and peoples!!
I'm not sure if you know Peter Boghossians' view on "Woke Culture" as I do. He is probably the splinter of turning views.
@@kwahujakquai6726 Oh I don’t think so at all, nothing to worry about :) I haven’t heard of him but I’ll check it out
@@lily_lxndr He has a bias bullshit that is a scary following of status quo.
I think it might be worth considering that the idea of a definition is deeply connected to the enlightenment and the way that the scientific enlightenment is tied to colonialism. This drive to define and then record the world is rooted in a need to manage the population as a tool of western expansion and to take inventory of that expansion. All that to say, what about gender as a kind of familial clan that inherently isn't defined rather than something we just haven't been able to define (yet).
STRONGLY agree!
@@TheCreativeAnimation here's the thing, I don't think the OP was calling off defining things completely, but I think what they're saying is that the idea of a perfect definition, a sort of diestic worldview where things all adhere to rigid rules, is fundamentally flawed. The concept of "I know it when I see it" where there is not strict definition is a far better sense of defining things. For what you said regarding survival, for example, it wasn't useful to specifically define what makes an animal a predator or not, but rather being able to recognize that you are in danger from an animal, without a specific and concrete definition. This idea of a weak definition without specific parameters is in fact commonplace and has been forever. For example, many laws are not even that specific, an action can be illigal but it may be difficult or impossible to define exactly what that action is, which is why we have a complex legal system in the first place. If it were possible to actually accurately define things for utility, we would do so. Yet, we can't, which is why there are people whose whole job it is to argue whether or not someone is guilty, and what they're guilty of. For example, the idea of "premeditated murder"- what counts as premeditation? There's not an *exact* timeframe where something stops being "in the moment" and one where it was planned out. Of course, many cases it's obvious, following the "I know it when I see it" rule.
@@TheCreativeAnimation That's not what the person said though. At no point did they say definitions are no good or evil or to throw it all away. They literally just said that the idea of a perfect definition is flawed and that it is important to acknowledge since we can generally feel the effects of the shortcomings of definitions as seen in the examples they gave. However, you're still reasonable in stating that definitions are important and serve a purpose. Which both OP and the person you're responding to seem to agree with.
@@TheCreativeAnimation If definition is deeply connected to utility and should be accurate, please tell people to unify the botanical and culinary definitions of fruits and also the scientific and laymen's definitions of theory vs hypothesis.
ESPECIALLY the theory one. PLEASE.
I want to push back against the idea that this is fundamentally connected to colonialism. The various cultural developments in the 17th and 18th centuries we call the enlightenment also took root in places like Austria, Germany, Italy and Belgium not directly involved with colonisation. Internal European developments were just as important. On top of this it's important to note that individuals in places like India and Japan also the North American native nations also took part in the enlightenment, which we are increasingly recognising.
That is not to say that colonialism had nothing to do with the enlightenment mind you. But the idea that it is central is incredibly anglocentric.
I think the most obvious and basic concepts are often the hardest to define. The simplicity is deceptive.
I almost want to say this video is upsettingly good but it's actually really calming haha. Also your face when the generator came on was priceless.
It's funny you saying this video was a series of corrections because up to when you said that I was just thinking how well this video stands up as a piece of independent thought and in its own way a kind of from-the-ground-up synthesis. Not a defense, or an offense but obviously with a clear stance. It stands apart from the TERF biology video while also building on it.
I said this on the first video I found of yours, but one of the things that I love about your videos is that they're for us (I say this as a trans woman but this "us" can be inclusive of whoever). They dare to put out thought with minimal consideration for those who seek to do us harm, and instead focus on what is important for us.
As you said, fighting the status quo directly is an uphill battle. Something I've just thought about in writing this is that queer people make our own status quos, particularly in places where we get to consolidate in person. We take this strength from our own status quo and we bring it into the cishet mainstream and we make them contend with us. This obviously scares them and obviously often puts us in a defensive position on both macro and micro scales. But sometimes us existing and doing our thing has its own power. I wonder if a way to break a status quo is to ignore it and let that ignorance be its own bespoke critique; an invitation to create something new and greater.
Aw, this made my day! Thanks so much. It's all for the gals, that's for sure - and I like your insight about fighting the status quo
i think we can all agree that in 99,9 % of day to day cases, when we refer to a "woman" - we aren't talking about genetics or inner organs.
so a strict "definition" based on sex makes no sense. We have other words to refer to biological phenotype, etc.
it reminds me of how you have to label a product "oat drink" here - even though everyone calls it "oat milk" ... well knowing that it isn't "a nutrient-rich liquid food produced by the mammary glands of a mammal" ... 🙄
"Gender demands an underclass" is a string of words I've been searching for for over a year now and hearing it voiced I was just, "YES! YES!! THANK YOU!! THIS EXACTLY!" all over my phone screen. Gender largely exists to enforce an individual's specific actions and to establish an arbitrary hierarchy to then fit that individual into. As a gender-fluid person I really struggle with this.
Why do you struggle ?
This is exactly why sometimes I feel like the gender spectrum shouldn't even exist, keep the words wo/man for sex and adress related issues with the body in mind rather than the gender (sports, prison, medical research..) and just precise if ever some older opinionated person asks if you fit the cliché gender roles of the trad wife who loved pink/providing patriarch with cars and football or are out of this old ridiculous stereotype.
Why say you are genderfluid if it has no use but to oppose yourself to people with stereotypical sets of actions that fit the idea behind the word wo/man a part of the population beleives but is just one (very limited and oppressing) personnality type among the population of said gender?
Every time you say that traditional gender roles are a European idea you forget about essentially the entire Muslim world which fits the description and objectively goes even further in the direction of patriarchy.
Note that almost a quarter of earths population is Muslim.
Agreed. It goes beyond even that I think, though the colonialist point of Europeans imposing their gender structures on much of the rest of the world is valid. It does come across as "Europe bad, everyone else was fine until Europe screwed everything up" though.
Asian cultures, broadly speaking, have their own similar if not quite the same traditional gender roles. As, I believe did some Native American and African groups -- though some there stand out as exceptions at least on a surface level.
They are a European idea, they are also a Muslim idea and many others, but I think the thing is the gender roles pushed by European colonialism which effected nearly the whole world in some way were mainly the European idea which was kind of the focus of the video. This video is very Eurocentric but it was kind of stated that it was Eurocentric at the beginning
Interestingly relation to religion, which gave us the 'father' figure in charge of it all. Christianity obviously comes from the middle east originally, but it didn't take over as a world religion until the Europeans (Rome) converted. It was also used as a tool for power, and used as a method for colonization as well. Islam came after Christianity. Read the bible, then read the Quran. The Quran is a lot of bible muddled up, it's why Islam is the only other religion that recognizes Jesus as a prophet.
@@muppetgal True. That's great perspective.
Really, while critics try to suggest that “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman” is a useless definition because it is circular - it may in fact be the least-problematic definition we can have (at least the least-problematic _concise_ definition). And as for criticism of it because of it being circular -- what if we _did_ accept the “A woman is someone with two X chromosomes” definition. Would that not just raise the question “What is an X chromosome?”?
That said - your video _has_ convinced me (finally) that gender is _indeed_ a social construct - but in the sense that _language_ is a social construct. It is our human instinct to have a such thing as language - but the details of _what_ that language is varies from one culture to another. Likewise - gender as it exists in mainstream Western culture is a construct specific to the society that is part of. But other societies had gender too - even if very _different_ concepts of gender.
For example - the Native American examples you gave early in your video _also_ had a concept of gender - even if it was a far less _oppressive_ concept of gender because it (a) did not devalue the work done by one of the genders and (b) allowed individuals whose temperament and proclivity didn’t fit their birth-assigned gender a pathway to reassignment to a gender that _did_ fit them.
Anyway -- I still believe that it is collectively instinctive among humans to _have_ a concept of gender - even if the specifics of the concept are culturally specific. If modern society’s concept of gender is abolished (as opposed to merely reformed) then it is inevitable that it be replaced by a _different_ concept of gender. So the question of whether to abolish or reform gender should _really_ be based on one question - that being, which is a better pathway to a society whose concept of gender is non-oppressive? Is it by making _enough_ reforms to take the concept of gender from where it currently is to where it ought to be? Or is it by just chucking the whole concept that Western society has and starting from a clean slate? Which of those two paths is the better path to a non-oppressive system? I do not know - and it _may_ actually depend on which _version_ of the modern gender concept is your _starting_ point (as let us face it - society is _not_ a monolith in that regards).
I should add - all forms of trans activism (and I am a trans-woman saying this) seek either to reform or abolish the mainstream concept of gender. At very least, even if nothing else, trans activists seek to add to the gender-concept a pathway of reassignment for those who do not fit their birth-assigned gender role. Even transgender folk and allies who seek no other change to the societal gender concept seek _that_ reform. However, there are other trans activists who seek much _greater_ reforms to gender than just that -- and there are some who _do_ seek a wholesale _replacement_ of the gender system.
EDIT: And then, thirty minutes into your video, it suddenly becomes clear to me how, in hind-sight, I should not have been in the _least_ bit surprised that the author who came up with the idea of a Sorting Hat turned out in the end to be a TERF.
The definition of "a woman is someone with two X chromosomes" also has the obvious hiccups: congratulation, all Turner syndrome women with a missing X (rather than partially missing) are suddenly not women, same with Swyer syndrome XY women. And depending on if ONLY XX is accepted or XX isn't an exact case match, XXY, XXXY, etc, Klinefelter syndrome men are suddenly women now!
(I've spent too long in sex determination systems and I have seen too much of XY *and* ZW for the rest of this month.)
@@neoqwerty Very true - but I figured that my comment was getting to be long enough as is - so I had to leave a lot out.
I love this comment because it recognises that the are some trans activisms that want to abolish gender as we know it and not just find a way to fit into the oppressive system we already have! Where can I learn more about that? I've seen the gender critical argument that binary trans people only enforce gender roles through performativity too many times already! I wanna show them that's not necessarily always true instead of just trying to excuse them ('cause even though it's fair, it still doesn't disprove their argument). Thank you!
@@Artechiza - Well - such exaggerated gender performance by binary trans-women _does_ happen -- but it is not because it is the inherent _nature_ of binary trans-women to do so. Rather, it is because we get the signal _very_ clearly from society that even where we _are_ accepted as women at _all_ - it is often on a probational basis. Slight deviations from expected behavior of the gender can often be used as an _excuse_ for invalidating a trans-woman's gender identity. Sometimes trans-women _do_ respond to this pressure with an exaggerated performance of gender. And I would _assume_ that the same would likely go for trans-men as well.
Then there is _also_ the fact that those who transition despite the extreme societal pressures _not_ to tend to be those who are _least_ compatible with their birth-assigned gender. Someone whose incompatibility with their birth-assigned gender is mild is more likely to stick to that birth-assigned gender anyway rather than risk such rejection by society.
So - these are two factors that would contribute to binary trans-people having an exaggerated gender performance. In both case - the cause of these factors are not binary trans-folk -- but transphobia.
I legitimately read the title as "Why are women?".
Really glad to see you address colonialism and indigenous gender systems. So many white people like to ignore that, or treat it as an irrelevant footnote at best.
I am 44 years old and was brought up to this point in time as a cis bisexual male. I am neurodivergent and got diagnosed with autism as a mid 30s adult. So my whole life and most of this timespan, I didn‘t really fit into this society and didn‘t know how. The diagnosis autism made it a bit better, but still there was a strange divide. Then, during the past month, I got taught a new vocabulary, new definitions and suddenly I realized, that I always had an issue with my own definition of my sex. I always felt deeply attracted to people, that were in between feminine and masculine features and this seems to be, because I am in between. Not visually - I have a beard around my mouth (don‘t know the english word for that) and am visually identified as male, but I do not align myself with this. For all that is male in my person, there is an equal amount of female aspects on my inside. If I still was younger, I maybe would have expressed this feeling visually, would have been more outgoing with this identity, but I am quite Ok with how I appear but finally can define myself more clearly. I am non binary. I personally do not need my surroundings to see me as such - but to be honest I usually don‘t give a fuck on how people see me anyways. But it has become an important realization for me myself. I don‘t need to convince Nazis like Tucker Carlson and this Matt Walsh weirdo, that gender is just a construct, because it it pointless to fill that void between their ears, but definitions and the education on this matter is important to define myself within this world. To find my place - to see me for who I am. And I am so thankful for people like you, who share their experiences and knowledge on the internet and fight for a better understanding.
Personally I'm not really interested in trying to come up with a rigid, one-size-fits-all definition for "woman", nor am I interested in trying to appease the sort of people who try to wield the question as a gotcha. "A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is obviously not a useful definition but all the same, if someone tells me they're a woman I'm not gonna argue with them. That would be a gross thing to do.
Ye
The fact that the question is always "What is a woman" and not "What is a man" is also a reflection of misogyny. People do not feel the need to question or justify the existence of a man as much as they do for women.
Maybe they don't as much, or maybe it's more innate than it is explicitly stated. I've had so many "male" things foisted upon me that I didn't take part in and as such felt a target on my back. I'm definitely not trying to say it's more important than the issues at hand with defining women, but I am saying it is also a big problem.
Because men have never had their existence threatened
Also, a lot of the anti-trans movements target trans women for some reason. That might be misogyny too, or as a means to attract TERF allies.
That's because men as a group aren't oppressed. They aren't the subject of legal and political frameworks designed to protect and uplift them. Therefore, their interests are rarely discussed and the need to define that political category is rare.
@@halder8613 You don't think there are any unfairness in the system against men?
this almost feels like its going to be a culmination of a sequence of several videos now & im looking forward to it
That's sweet, thank you! Once it's out, I'm curious whether you think it is. In my mind, it's definitely built on the foundation of my biological sex & "binary trans women" videos
@@lily_lxndr while waiting for this video to release i rewatched your videos on the concept of gender ideology, politics of gender conformity, and the video on biological sex. having seen this new video now, i definitely see how it builds upon the previous ones. and even though this video reads to me quite nicely as a continuation of a larger basis of work, because it ties these concepts together, i think it stands just as well on its own.
the video on so-called gender ideology sets a sort of basis for the conversation, outlining the ways in which trans people's living conditions are impacted by their gender. the video on the binary vs nonbinary microculture war goes into how these distinctions of identity are very fragile and often don't have a major impact on the material realities of trans people in of themselves. and then the video on biological sex goes out to show that sex is just as constructed and mutable as gender. this new video then ties it all together with the idea that trans womanhood and cis womanhood are both products of human social artifice, and cannot be clearly defined. i'm reminded of the susan stryker quote you brought up in the "binary trans women" video - we are all equally constructed; the same anarchic womb has birthed us all.
in light of this video, i find myself thinking back on the concept of gender abolition as it relates to trans identities, which you touched upon in the "binary trans women" video. it's difficult to picture how trans people would navigate a world that suddenly became devoid only of the concept of gender. in an ideal scenario, if it would then be possible for all people to freely access whatever affirming procedures they desire, and have their lived experiences formally recognised where needed without difficulty, perhaps we could wave gender goodbye. but lacking this, the concept of gender, nebulous as it may be, can be as much of a tool to carve out some comfort in this late capitalist hellscape as it is a prison that maintains the position of trans people as a gender underclass.
that said, i do hope that the trans community can move beyond the microculture wars of binary vs nonbinary, "truetrans vs trender". perhaps the concept of gender cannot be safely abandoned quite yet - and some might not ever want to abandon theirs - but everyone can benefit from calling their mom and touching some grass instead of desperately trying to salvage some sort of definitions for what true transness, womanhood, manhood, or a lack of adherence to the sociocultural norms of any of these might be.
anyway, these are just some of the thoughts i've had over these subjects and your videos. all in all, thank you for another great video. looking forward to the next.
Though my goal wasn’t necessarily to try and get a definition of the word “woman”, I recently did an interview project on gender to basically describe gender diversity and it was interesting to see the distinct differences between how each person translates the idea of gender for themselves and other people. My interviews ended up ranging from 15 minutes to over an hour and perhaps some of the most fascinating things to me were that the way one of my friends and I broke down cis versus trans, by the end of that question he wasn’t sure where he fell; my mom’s job works with clothing and her definitions were often linked to the way certain clothes are supposed to fit; and another friend spent a while talking about how their understanding of gender is uniquely linked to their experience as a trans person, talking about how creepy experiences can change how you approach a situation especially if you are unsure how you are being read in terms of gender. (I hope this isn’t too rambley, I sometimes feel like my minor in gender studies makes me a little too eager to share how fun and messy gender can be)
Notice how it's never "what is a man", always "what is a woman"
Very telling that nobody asks "can you define a man?"
Yes I think its because the questions not being asked in good faith. I would say it's kinda similar to a dogwhistle( in the sense that it creates a response without directly saying the words) . the question is only asked to weaponize misogyny. People who ask this question usually proceed to invoke a sense that womens rights are being taken away. They use people's dislike of misogyny to create a false threat (Trans people especially Trans women) and basically walk people right into transphobia because they feel so strongly about misogyny that they don't see the intersections. Their whole game is "oh we need to define what a woman is because your oppressor could claim they are a woman, and gain access to you"(ex: the Trans bathroom scenario is almost always painted with women as the victim). But this idea that Trans women take away from women's rights in any way lacks any nuance or real world basis.
@@debbydee6633 yes and those resorting to such tactics are often the true oppressors of women, using trans people as scapegoats to divert attention from their misdeeds (including abortion bans, child marriage, and spousal abuse to name but a few)
@@jaynajuly2140 spot on.
@Serenth actually a lot of sexual health educators frequently say people with penises when discussing health with that organ. It is not an act of erasure, it's simply a fact that not all men have penises, and not everyone with a penis is a guy. Sure most men have penises, that's true but when discussing health you have to adress the specific population concerned.Some ppl with penises are intersex,not men and some cis men do not have penises for some reason or another. Why would that erase you?
@Serenth plenty of people do refer to 'people with prostates' etc. but that kind of impersonal medical language doesn't 'erase' anything, it's just more precise. if a cis man has had his prostate removed or was born without one for some reason, whatever is being referred to clearly doesn't concern him, but that phrasing doesn't make him feel emasculated as a result. if a trans woman has a prostate, it includes her without misgendering her. it has no bearing on the existence of the categories of 'man' and 'woman', just reflects that one doesn't have to have a certain body part to qualify.
It's a very extraordinary claim that colonist Europeans created this binary system!
I mean it's like you've never heard of Arabs, Akkadians, Egyptians, Chinese, Mongols...
All these cultures had almost entirely male leaders and warriors and other traditional gender roles.
All abrahamic religions for example (which are absolutely not European) have gender roles resembling to some extent what we have today.
Marx and Engels are political ideologs and not scientists or historians, both paint history in a way that fits their presupposed political view of the world, taking their ideas seriously leads to very disturbing results, as we all should have noticed by now.
I think ur simplifying alot of stuff. Egypt had many genders not just 2.wat ur talking abt is how Egypt dealt with certain ideas in their time, which is just as complex as gender is today. The Chinese also is quite complex with it's gendering, it's not as straight forward as ur trying to make it out to be, but yes china has a view of gender within ideas that r similar to Christian Europeans, with quite a difference do to the nature of yin n yang ☯️.
Arabs had many different genders actually, but I guess ur trying to make things simple for urself by concluding that modern day ideas of the Arab ppl r the same as they were thro history. The Jewish community has had at least 6 genders and each r actually mentioned within the tanakh itself, but r ignored for the sake of modern ideas. Christianity never had a set group of genders infact it varied by culture that would later be stomped out by claiming different cultural ideas were heretical. The mongols were quite diverse and it wasn't until Genghis Khan that we have the firm gender ideas ur trying to express. Akkadians did have quite complex gender ideas, and this is found in many cities of worship specifically. Wat ur mainly trying to say is that cis men have always had power in large nation systems, but that doesn't negate the reality that these cultures ur trying to paint with a broad brush to lie abt how these cultures viewed gender had complex and different ideas of gender and definitely more than just 2.
On ur last part abt Marxism, I think u don't understand that Marxism isn't just Marx and Engels, but it is collective of multiple ppl that continued the work of Marx and Engels. Most of Marxism we have today isn't from Marx himself, tho the works today we have derive from Marx and follow his line of work. Leninism is different, bc it's a branch off from Marxism and creates its own line of work, along with Maoism. I think ur ignoring history and following propaganda to make ur opinion for u. Overall the USSR was a nation that did great things, and operated much better than the US, and did some similar things as the US did during the same time period. I'd be happy to discuss Marxism further along with communism/socialism if ud like, but over all u seem to be ignoring that Marxism as a theoretical system for how socialism and communism will come abt, and the reason for it's appearance.
Damn, what a good video! As a trans woman myself, sometimes I question why I even feel the way I do, why I more closely associate to one abstract label than another if it is ultimately meaningless. But the truth is, it's not about concrete definitions, it's about comfort, that's what gender is about. Like you said, being a woman can mean so many different things to a person, and I'm not even sure what womanhood means to me at all, but I take comfort in it for whatever unknowable reason. It makes me feel whole and alive, and I think that's all that matters. Woman has no clear definition because no gender has real definition, it's whatever you make of it, and I think that's what's so beautiful about gender expression.
Another thank you for this comment! I have no strong gender feelings at all, so someone wanting to associate with a different abstract label has always somewhat confused me. You have to buy into those socially constructed ideals in the first place. Your comment helps me sort that out a bit. I long for a world where everyone just gets to express themselves without the abstract label attached, but obviously we're a LONG way off that type of civilization.
If you can't stop thinking about something that is meaningless, you likely have autism and are hyperfocusing. Get checked.
This is an amazing video, thank you so so much! Looking for 'what is a woman' videos online for a discussion group is painful atm, and this is a diamond in the rough.
You can do this exact thought experiment with men, asking what they are. The problem is that you can’t really define them anymore. Manly, girly, mansculine, feminine, they aren’t really apt descriptions anymore since you can’t really define an action or trait to a gender. If you get into the semantics of a term like this you end up going nowhere. So that’s why I personally think that the simple description of “an adult human who identifies as a woman” is probably the best description we can get. I think having gender and these terms is fine, because I think that we should have some ways of identifying ourselves besides just calling us humans (I think that’s just too broad and would make things way confusing), but anything more than that is reductive and circular
I quite enjoy this video and your conclusion. I'm nonbinary and an anthropologist, and I've become increasingly uninterested in trying to actually define "woman," for many of the reasons you gave. At this point I absolutely think it's true that women may have very different feelings on and experiences and reasons they have for why they are women and what that means for them, and restricting that is hardly helpful.
I can't believe you dropped out of school (even though I did too, twice). You seem like a natural teacher and your voice is so nice to listen to. Well, anyways, I guess you are teaching. I'm 2 videos in, and learning for sure. 🙏🏾
commenting for engagement
"Can you provide a definition of a woman"?
"No."
"Are you a woman?"
"Yes"
"How do you know?"
Indeed
Just a matter of time before people start questioning their own identities and then we're in for a ride
"fucking incoherent" is a fantastic way to just describe all of gender honestly. definitely how id describe myself
the world's a messy place and everyone experiences everything differently and maybe that's okay and we don't even need to come up with universal definitions half the time
incredible video. its given me even more to think about in regards to this topic and opened my eyes to some factors id never even heard of before
The "I love women in every way possible" was unbelievably relatable. I identify as a lesbian, and I'm most attracted to the concepts and ideas of feminity, as well as the technical "female" anatomy (I'll happily take girl dick any day though, I love trans queens
You had me hooked at "Europe was a mistake"
Oikophobe
One of the questions I sometimes hear is whether or not my parents are gay. I have two biological dads, one of them was my mother and is a trans man.
I understand that people would think they are a gay couple, but to me they are just two people who love each other. You can argue that they are bi or pan or even straight if you're a terf, but I don't understand how the way you describe a relationship can be any bit more important than the fact they love each other.
I also have the same approach to gender. People can describe others the any way they want, but to me that's not of use. The only thing that maters is the person and not what gender they identify as.
yeah it seems way easier to not force labels on people and not try to fit everyone into one single description but many fail to do it and end up doing more harm thinking they are doing good :/
Just try to imagine this: there was definitely a time when our ancestors didn't even know for sure what the real cause of a pregnancy was. Ever since we knew for sure how reproduction worked, in some triibes those who could give birth (those we call "women") held all the power, and in others the opposite became a rule. Since then, it's been a random and arbitrary battle of superstitions and beliefs based on "protecting the pregnancy". The concept of "sex" is not natural; it's something we've attributed to humans since we knew how to reproduce. It's kind of exciting we live in these times.
everyone always asks what are women, but never how are women
I thought the three word limiting definition was going to be “dost thou bleed” 😂
if the word woman has no definition then it has no meaning. if it has no meaning then why do people care if they are referred to with that title? i'm not trying to say what a woman is or isn't. i just don't get why people are so upset because people won't give them the title woman when they admit it has no meaning. can someone explain this please?
You wont get an explanation from these folk. They are so delusional that they fail to see the blatant inconsistencies in their ideology. There really is on hope for these people, so I suggest not taking them too seriously.
I'm not trans and am in the middle with this issue. But I think what's being said is that people give things meaning. Sometimes they also have a hard time differentiating between when they're giving something meaning and when something has objective meaning. For some, they believe that "woman" has meaning because people are giving it meaning but that the meaning they're giving it is not objective. Also, if you're attached to a certain meaning of a category and it benefits you, it may be hard based on bias to not see that you're giving a category meaning and that the meaning you're giving it, isn't objective. But if you're like, "but it is objective!" and are motivated by fear to keep seeing it that way, it can be hard to convince you because you don't want to be convinced.
Because it has societal implications
We need to be less afraid to say “I’m not going to answer that question because I don’t believe you are asking it in good faith.” Especially those in the public eye being mined for sound bytes to export to the Rage Factories or news networks.
I find it most interesting that, while it is very common to ask "What is a Woman?" to rage against transpeople, none of the bigots seem to want to ask "What is a Man?"
I came here from Nebula just to say that this was an amazing and informative video. I am really trying to educate myself on this topic. Also, i'm a big fan of your calm and serene demeanor and you just seem so well versed and educated. I'm a fan.
Keep it up
I have just started watching but it just reminded me of this: the aspect of communal family structure can even be evident in a culture’s recent or distance past just in looking at certain kinship systems. Like how the Iroquois system has all of your mother’s sisters and father’s brothers using the same word as mother and father respectively. I know this can also relate to cross cousin intermarriage, as with the Sudanese system, but I just find it fascinating how much you can infer about a given culture’s history simply by the system they use and which family members have what kinship terms.
As a biologist, the attempt to justify transphobia or definitions of womanhood via "basic biology" are SO frustrating!
1. At BEST we can tell you authoritatively about sex, not gender (For that, I refer you to the anthropology department. That's a culture thing, as we can tell from the fact that there are varying numbers of gender categories across cultures)
2. Sex does NOT boil down neatly to XY vs. XX chromosomes or even one set of reproductive equipment vs. another. Even discounting all the species that have different modes of sex determination, that have individuals that can change sex, that only have females, or that are both at once, and JUST focusing on humans... A) there's more than two sex chromosome combinations possible, and you more often than not can't tell without a karyotype test, B) genes not on the sex chromosomes and in-utero hormone exposure can also affect the develoment of sex-related characteristics, and C) intersex people exist, and have always existed.
3. You absolutely cannot make broad statements about male vs. female behavior in nature! Even looking just at our closest primate cousins, chimps have a more male-dominated society are tend to be more aggressive (hunting, having violent conflicts w/ neighboring groups), while the equally-related-to-us bonobos have a more female-dominated society where conflict is often solved with sex. Among marmosets, while females nurse the babies it is the males who carry them around all day. And so on. If we look at humans, it seems pretty clear that behavioral flexibility is one of the keys to our success - figuring out different ways to do things that suit the situation is one reason we are able to live everywhere from the African savanna to the Amazon rainforest to the steppes of Russia. So why should we assume that there is some standard template that gender roles and relations have to follow?
Those who use "basic biology" never picked up a biology book or looked at a biology paper after their mandatory biology classes in school.
In the end we're just really nervous monkeys
Due to YT BS, I just found this video today, notification are on and subscription has been there for a while now. It's a really good essay and well presented, thank you for this.
Everyone says "What are women", but noone asks "How are women"
I do t know what a women is ,but i really want to be one
Thank you so much for this video lily! As always it is so thoughtful and insightful. As a nonbinary lesbian i always find it an interesting dilemma of what lesbianism means to me and what womanhood means to me. I have no answer except lesbianism feels like home and womanhood does not, yet I am somewhat both and neither depending on how you would choose to define me.
I’ve recently been reading a collection of essays called Black Queer Studies, which feels extremely relevant to the discussion. The general thesis seems to be that the idea of assimilation into the white heteropatriarchal society is antithetical to emancipation from homophobia/transphobia, as we will always leave out queers of colour, poor queers, trans people etc. So i think having loose or no definitions of what our identities mean as a whole, but rather what they can mean to the individual, is something that needs to be embraced!
ohhh i LOVE the way you phrased it, "lesbianism feels like home and womanhood doesn't", that's some poetic stuff right here!
lately I've been questioning my identity and I've noticed that I sort of feel the same way about gayness, but towards men, despite being an AFAB person who's been identifying as non binary for some time now and using feminine forms in my language (I'm Polish, so "gender" of the spesker affects more thean just pronouns, making things harder). We'll see how it turns out, it's quite a new revelation for me, so many things may change, but there's something beautiful I defining ourselves by what makes us feel warm and comfortable instead of what doesn't. Searching for the things that just... feel right instead of running away from things that don't, giving ourself space to explore without beingto hard on ourselves. Thank you for this perspective, it really touched me. :)
Since Monique Wittig was also a lesbian who didn't consider themselves a woman, you're in good company! ;)
@@vauchomarx6733 THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR NAMEDROPPING SOMEONE THIS AWESOME!
All I can do is return the favor if you haven't heard of her yet: Madame Maupin, who would casually dress as a man and who set a dead nun's corpse (and the room of th abbey) on fire to get her lesbian lover out of a convent.
@Ryan Jones obv self hate and internalized misogyny is real d*mbass what kind of world are you living in? But having those things wont make you trans.
@@Eking-su3tr You clearly have no clue about lesbian history, you cannot speak down to me about this, i am more knowledgeable than you on this topic.
This is only like the third video I've watched on your channel but I am so impressed by the thoroughness and conciseness. You rock, thank you.
It always bothered me that the conversation was so often about defining women in particular. Rather than trying to clarify what it meant to be a woman, it always felt more like there was a specific thing they wanted women to be. Having the historical context for that makes this make a lot more sense.
I was in complete opposition to basically everything in this video a couple years ago. Now I get it lol. Weird. Great video! Thank you.
Edit: And I'm someone who hates change lol fml.
This video is the perfect opposite to "that guys video" of a similar title, thank you for this reasoned approach to this topic