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What Is a Woman?

The bumbling began after Matt Walsh, a commentator at the Daily Wire, threw out the question “What is a woman?” to his debate opponents on Dr. Phil. None of those arguing for the idea that men can become women could answer the question.

It’s a good question for us to explore in this age when men can supposedly become women and women become men as if by alchemy. So how do we define a woman?           

When no one on Dr. Phil’s panel replied to the question except by beating around the bush, Walsh defined a woman as “an adult human female,” journalist and author Megan Fox reports. Walsh went on to say, “What you want to do is appropriate womanhood and turn it into basically a costume that can be worn.”           

At this point in her article, Fox explodes in agreement:

That was straight fire. As a woman, I’m offended when a man puts on a dress and pretends to know what my struggles have been as a biological woman. The h— you do. A woman is biology. It is experience. It is not a costume. And any man attempting to put on that experience without having lived it is appropriating my sex. We are told that cultural appropriation is wrong and racist. Appropriating the appearance of a woman and then gaslighting other women to accept you as one of them is sexist. Get out of here with that. Stop trying to take over women-only spaces. We need protection and safety from men. We need places to go where no men are allowed. Our girls need their sporting events to be segregated for their safety and fairness. Enough of this madness already!

Agreed, though I would add that the reverse is also true—that any woman “attempting to put on that experience [of being a man] without have lived it is appropriating my sex.”           

I do find it strange that the three people debating Walsh and arguing for transgenderism can’t define womanhood. Instead, these panelists offered such rejoinders as “Womanhood is something that I cannot define. I cannot define what a woman is because I do not identify as a woman. Womanhood is something that is an umbrella term—it includes people who identify as a woman.”           

Sorry, folks, but your subjective definitions don’t hold water. I don’t identify with Sphinx, my daughter’s cat, but I can tell you what a cat is. I don’t identify with the poor doe who limps through my yard from time to time, but I can tell you what a female deer is. (Don’t get me started, or I’ll be winging my way through “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music.)           

I turned for help to my online dictionaries. The first definition of “woman” that popped up was “an adult female human being.” Sound familiar? When I Googled “female,” I found “of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.” For “female human,” Dictionary.com gave me “a person bearing two XX chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively rounded body and enlarged breasts, and retaining a beardless face; a girl or a woman.”           

Sounds like my high school biology class. It also looks as if the PC police have gone a little slack. Sooner or later, I expect, we’ll find these definitions changed to include “identify” as part of the meaning of woman and female.           

Here’s a thought: How about if we quit linking “man” or “woman” with “transgender”? If you’ve undergone the process, should it not be pretty apparent which direction you took? But if you call yourself a “transgender man” or a “transgender woman,” I have trouble knowing which one you were or which you are presently claiming to be. If you just call yourself a “man” or a “woman,” at least I’ll know what you were aiming for.           

And how about if we quit putting male prisoners claiming to be women into the female prison population? Doesn’t that arrangement strike most of us as insane, as well as cruel?           

And yes, as Megan Fox says, we should make female sports available only to women who were born female. Whatever his claims to gender, let the man who is a biological male compete only in male sports.           

And me? Though I never watched the television series “Portlandia,” a number of years ago I stumbled across this clip, which I find hilarious and which would probably never make the cut in today’s market. As for identifying someone as female, like Bob says in this scene, “I just feel like I’m good at recognizing a woman when I see one.”

Now, now, don’t take offense at my remark. I said I could recognize a woman.