Can we please invent a non-cissexist word for “the sex that has ovaries, ova, breasts, a uterus, a vagina, female-typical hormones, and two X chromosomes” and its converse?
The ones most cis people use, I think, are either “female-sexed” or “female-bodied.” (That is, the cis people who are aware and cool enough not to use “woman.”) The really obvious problem here is that while female can be used to refer to someone’s sex (it’s in the dictionary and everything!), it is also the adjective form of “woman.” “Woman-bodied” is not remotely the term we’re looking for. Women have all sorts of bodies, sometimes including penises and Y chromosomes.
Also we’d have to use the term “females” a lot, which would make the “if someone refers to women as females they’re a douchebag” heuristic way less effective.
When I complained about this on Twitter, someone suggested “female assigned at birth.” Unfortunately, that term (while useful) doesn’t help in this situation. Lots of intersex people were assigned female at birth. Many people who were female assigned at birth transitioned and now have male-typical hormones and/or no uterus.
The other really obvious workaround is “cis female,” which is one I’ve used in my own writing. The problem is that there are many trans people– including myself– who have uteruses, vaginas, breasts, et al. It doesn’t make sense to exclude us.
The final workaround that most people end up using is “people with vaginas” or “people with uteruses.” This phrasing sucks. It is so fucking clunky. Literally the only reason anyone uses it is because no one has managed to think of something else. Imagine changing a phrase like War on Women– dramatic, alliterative, punchy– to War on People With Uteruses. The ear cringes.
There are, of course, many more sexes than the standard two we are taught to believe in. What I don’t understand is why no one in the trans community has managed to come up with a name for the standard two. Please, guys. You’ve done it before. “Cis” is an awesome word! Make the magic happen again. Please stop making me say “people with X,” it is gross and ugly and makes me want to cry inside.
Thing of Things 
I am a cis straight white male, and not a feminist, but still: what about “biologically female” ? You can shorten it to “bio-female”, if you want. As far as I understand, when biologists use the word “female”, they mean something like, “any organism with a female genotype that expresses a female phenotype”, which is pretty close to what you’re looking for. This way, you could say, “Bob is a bio-female trans man”, or something to that extent.
That said though, perhaps the reason no one’s come up with a decent term for the concept is because the concept itself useful only situationally. The number of situations when you need to refer to a person’s gender is much smaller than the number of situations when you need to find out exactly what is in that person’s pants.
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In humans, I generally use ‘chromosomally male’ for people with XY sex chromosomes and ‘morphologically male’ for people with all the relevant primary sexual characteristics. If we come up with some good definition for ‘hormonally male’, we could define a biologically male human as one who’s simultaneously chromosomally, morphologically, and hormonally male, whether or not they’re psychologically masculine or are seen (by themselves or others) as a man. That’s a pretty strict definition, though; do we want to call everyone who lacks even one of the aforementioned traits ‘biologically intersex’?
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Er, I meant, “…much larger…” instead of “…much smaller…”, duh.
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I like “androus” and “gynous”. “War on Gynous People” still sounds terrible, but it would be an improvement. But I’m not trans, and so there might be issues with these terms that I’m not aware of.
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It’s not too late to take back ‘android’ and ‘gynoid’!
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No, it’s definitely too late.
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Stick with ‘female’ for “the sex that has ovaries, ova, breasts, a uterus, a vagina, female-typical hormones, and two X chromosomes” and stop using female as the adjective for woman.
This is just by far the easiest option because female as noun for the sex is deeply entrenched in biology* and society and would be impossible to move. Female as adjective is not as common and eliminating it would not require textbook reprinting.
I suspect if you do manage to clearly separate ‘females’ from ‘women’ then you’ll solve a lot of the antagonism between terfs and trans feminists as well, which would be nice. Terfs would focus their activism on ‘females’ and I think if they could have female-only spaces they would be happy to share women-only spaces with trans-women.
*I mean, it’s used by biologists, not that we have a biological imperative to say female.
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Shiiiiit! Just realised that a post addressed to the trans community might not be the place for suggestions from cis-people? If so, sorry for butting in.
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I don’t see ‘stop using female as the adjective for woman’ as a thing that will happen tho.
I was digging around trying to figure something about but all I came up with was maybe fudging together Greek or Latin or whatever for things that mean ‘big seed’ and ‘little seed’ to denote people whose bodies produce eggs and people whose bodies produce sperm.
Megaspiros and Minispiros.
I don’t see it catching on.
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I like megaspiros and minispiros! Let’s make it happen! If only I was any good at thinking of clever viral campaigns…
WRT female as adjective: maybe I am suffering from typical mind but I hardly ever see female used as an adjective because there aren’t really that many occasions where it’s necessary. If you’re asking about a person’s gender then ‘she’s a woman’ is far more common than ‘she’s a female person’. I most often see female-as-adjective about things like ‘knitting is a female hobby’ which could easier be changed for ‘knitting is a womanly hobby’? Maybe?
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Yes, but “womanly” doesn’t have the same connotations as “female.” First, “womanly” implies *older*, which stands in contrast to “girlish.” So do we talk about the “womanly students” or the “girlish students”?
Doesn’t that sound odd to you?
Furthermore, “womanly” also stands in contrast to “manly,” which has connotations that emphasize oppositional sexism. Things that are womanly, such as being pretty and compliant, are not things that are manly, such as being brave and firm.
Perhaps these connotations could change over time, but it’s really hard to push language against the grain. In fact, I think the historic move to such terms as “female students” and “male students” was to push away from sexist assumptions, which matched the zeitgeist of the time, which is why the change was able to happen.
I have no idea why the adjectival use of the terms sounds okay when the nominal use does not. But it seems to be the case.
(As an aside, are you aware that “housewifely” is a word? Which, it is! As a feminist I so rarely have use for it, but golly it’s an adorable word.)
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Re: Pluviann: “female” as an adjective is frequently needed in phrases like “female student”, as Victoria said, as well as “female professor” or “female engineer” or anything else of that sort.
There are indeed people who try to move away from that and say things like “woman engineer” instead, but I think they’re the minority. I suppose it’s possible this usage could catch on, but I think it would take time, and then it would take even more time before “female” as an adjective could unambiguously mean what you want it to mean.
And because of this ambiguity, many trans people strenuously object to having their assigned sex called “female” or male”, because even though it’s possible to attempt to be respectful when saying things like “Sandy is a woman, and her sex is male”, the words “female” and “male” carry a really strong connotation of gender and therefore come really close to misgendering trans people. (Note that the word “but” would have almost seemed more felicitous than “and” in my example sentence just now.)
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And re: myself: Whoops, I thought Veronica’s name was Victoria for some reason. Sorry!
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You’re not the first. Just don’t call me late for dinner. 🙂
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I have no ovaries, no ova, no breasts, a uterus, a vagina, male-typical hormones, and I don’t know my chromosomes. What would you call me? Which of those things would take precedence?
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Well, I would call you whatever you wanted to be called.
I think this kind of terminology is useful for larger conversations. I mean, the vast majority of people are going to fit easily into one of two biological sexes: male and female, so it’s really useful to have words to describe those two groups for when you need to talk about groups. It’s possible to talk about groups in general without insisting that everybody in the whole world fits neatly into a category. We can talk about males and females while still acknowledging that intersex people are real (not making any assumptions about you!).
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Transgender. You are observably not one of the standard two sexes that I want a word for.
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Of course I’m not one of the standard two sexes, but waving me away with the term ‘transgender’ isn’t what you want, either. It won’t solve the problem in your post where people with vaginas are called women – anyone who deviates from that is transgender, regardless of what their body is like.
There’s also a tremendous amount of sexed variation in bodies even before we get into what we call intersex. Is gynecomastia intersex, regardless of the cause? Female hirsutism? Both impact secondary sexual characteristics.
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Re: ozymandias:
Your answer surprised me: I would’ve expected the answer to be “intersex”, since in my understanding “intersex” refers just to sex (which is what ninecarpals was describing) whereas “transgender” refers to a relationship between sex and gender. Would you mind sharing how your definition of “transgender” leads to your answer?
Or is it that “intersex” is only when a person is outside the standard sexes at birth? (I don’t know ninecarpals so I don’t know the situation here.)
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Female as adjective is super common, it’s what you usually fill out on forms.
Also, as you just demonstrated, people promptly start using ‘well OK you’re a woman, but this is a *female* only space’ to exclude (and misgender, because the kinds of people who do this tend to want to get away with misgendering trans women, not stop) trans women.
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Aw come on. I think ‘vagina-havers’ is fun to say, even if it doesn’t quite bound the category you’re trying to get at.
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Plus saying “I want to be a vagina-haver” has all kinds of pleasant ambiguities.
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Do we know who started cis cause we could ask them
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Biochemists. Well, probably college biochemistry majors, TBH.
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From here:
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Outside of doctors who needs these words? Why does society want more words that refer to someone’s physical genitals and chromosomes?
In almost all cases what one should care about is a person’s sexual and gender identity. So unless you are thinking about a medical context I don’t support adding more words that are biologically determined.
*I am cis not trans btw
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Lots of people genuinely have a preference in their partners genitalia. Like, if you have a vagina and want a penis inside it, someone’s sexual and gender identity really isn’t important – it’s whether they have a penis.
This is a totally acceptable preference to have, and I don’t see anything wrong with wanting words for it.
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But if it’s really about the penis — really, really, really just the penis — then “penis-haver” is precisely the term you want and no other will quite get there.
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Yes, it primarily does come up in medical contexts, but medical contexts actually do come up a lot if you think about it. People commonly educate each other about sex (for instance, in the sex-positive movement), reproductive health is heavily politicized, and sometimes people just want to commiserate about periods.
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I think the word would be mostly in a medical context, but not a confined-to-doctors medical context.
And sure a doctor could say ‘this patient has ovaries, a womb, a vulva’… etc, but they won’t and certainly the public won’t, so if we want to help people talk about body type and gender as different things, it will help to have words for that.
So for the doctor, >95% of the time the sexual characteristics and hormones configuration will fit into one of two neat categories, so the other <5% of the time he can be more specific about what he means. So if what-people-call-female-bodied is a blerg and the other big category is 'gerb', the magazine can say 'blergs dealing with menstrual pain can try raspberry tea!' without making the assumption that all people likely to get menstrual pain are 'female' or 'women'.
Similarly, 'you might find this climbing harness is more comfortable for blergs', or 'it is recommended that blergs drink no more than 3 units a week, and gerbs no more than 5'.
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““if someone refers to women as females they’re a douchebag” heuristic”
Could someone explain this to me?
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There is a stereotype, which I’ve found surprisingly accurate, that dudes on the Internet who say “female” instead of “woman” are misogynist weirdos and probably agree with a lot of PUA-type pseudoscientific rhetoric.
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Using “female” as a noun rather than an adjective when referring to women (eg “females are all crazy about fashion and puppies and stuff”) has an extremely high correlation with being a douchebag.
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Bleh. It’s based on the fact that someone noted a while ago that female animals are typically called ‘females’ whereas female humans are typically called ‘women’. Hence a person calling a female human a female is engaging in subtle dehumanisation. Petty, obstructive rubbish in my opinion; making that kind of judgment from simple word choice assumes far to great a knowledge of the inner workings of another individual’s mind.
Unless I hear otherwise I’m going to ignore that passage as a likely example of ‘things Ozy no longer believes’ (as zie warned us that may come up in these reposts) and concentrate on contemplating alternates to ‘vagina bearer’.
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No, I still think that “people who use the word ‘female’ are douchebags” is a perfectly reasonable shibboleth. This doesn’t mean it’s *morally wrong* to call women females, of course, or that it has any sort of negative effect. But as it happens calling women ‘females’ is correlated, in my experience, with being a jerk.
(It is sort of amusing that people keep concluding I disagree with things I actually still believe.)
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Hope springs eternal 😉
People are likely to disagree with at least a small part of what their favourite writers say, and it tends to be a source of discontent. With your ‘I am reporting and may not agree with every element of what old Ozy has written’ thing, you have given us an ‘out’. Although it does not seem to occur to any of us that you may now disagree with things you have previously said that we actually like…
Anywho, I have a background of working in reproductive research (and no experience with red-pillers) so, based on what Veronica has written above, I probably have a skewed experience of people using ‘female’ and not being jerks.
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Also, if one taboos “females,” then there is no noun that encompasses both women and girls. One can, of course, say “women and girls,” but it’s a bit awkward to use a compound phrase when one is actually referring to a group defined by a single* trait.
*To a reasonable approximation, for most purposes.
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@osberend
And likewise, there’s no word for “men and boys”, other than “males” — but I’ve seen people use “men” and “females” in the same sentence, usually when talking about sex or romance, so I doubt they used it to include (actual, young) girls, specifically.
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I think we’re arguing/discussing a bit past each other. I agree that “men and females” is a good marker for douchebaggery under most circumstances*; I just don’t think that “females” on its own is sufficient. I’ve been known to contrast “males” and “females” in order to deliberately highlight that I the contrast I am making is biological and/or to draw animal parallels, and while whether I’m a douchebag is a subject of much debate, I’m certainly not the sort of doubchebag in question.
*The only real exception would be when describing either highlighting selectively incomplete data (e.g. “3 men, 2 boys, and 4 females of unspecified age”) or highlighting the specific absence of juvenile males (e.g. “25 men and 39 females of various ages”).
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Well, Ozy did say that “females”->douchebag is a heuristic, not a rule.
The only issue I have with “males and females” is that some people use these words instead of “men and women” to make their arguments and speculations sound more “objective” or sciency. But that’s not sexism, obviously.
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There does seem to be a correlation between calling women “females” and being kind of a douchy redpill type. Which, I think it just became a *thing* in redpill discourse to sound all fake-objective and mock-sciency, like they are junior biologists or something. Anyway, if you get into enough online conversations about gender you will probably see this.
Which, to analyze the difference, we have to move away from pure denotational meaning and into areas of stylistics, which are difficult to nail down. In any case, the terms “men and women” seems to have a rather different feel than “males and females.” The former terms are reserved for humans. They emphasize our roles within culture and thus are humanizing. The latter terms have a clinical feel. They are used for animals as well as people. Furthermore, they are often used in scientific discourse, where the subjects are viewed in an objective and detached way, which can be rather off-putting when the person doing the analysis has no real scientific training.
In other words, it comes across as a kind of status grab, a clumsy attempt to elevate the banal.
My suggestion is that if you are talking about people in terms of their cultural roles, stick with “men” and “women.” If you need to talk about biological function, only then use “male” and “female.” (At least as nouns. As adjectives they seem to work fine.)
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Cool, so all those feminists who talk about male privilege are making status grabs and being dehumanizing?
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Re: Jiro: Um, Veronica specifically said that “male” and “female” work fine as adjectives.
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>My suggestion is that if you are talking about people in terms of their cultural roles, stick with “men” and “women.”
Don’t use “men”! It causes confusion.
“Men”, unfortunately, can mean both “humans” and “the subset of humans who are “men”, whatever that means to the speaker.” Seriously, it’s truly astounding how often this causes problems.
Calling guys “males” and gals “women” seems vaguely unfair or something, when you point it out, but it’s really the most effective usage in practice (I’ve found.)
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As a cis-patriarch, I’ve got to say that using “females” as a collective noun for humans of a certain gender doesn’t work for me. It sounds de-humanizing and creepy, and I’d rather not use that word in that way. But that’s just my 2 cents.
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I’m pretty sure that when I’m writing about gender stuff, like exactly zero people are confused about who I mean when I say “men.”
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@MugaSofer: Clearly, we need to reintroduce the term “wer.”
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It’s a rule of thumb, not a law of nature, but in general referring to men as men and women as females correlates quite strongly with expressing opinions that women are innately stupid and emotional because science.
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What about “males” and “females?”
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I’ve been using Vulvan and Penisian myself – the meaning is still just “person who has a vagina / penis”, but now with 80% less clunky awkward phrasing.
That said, I suspect these are a bit too tongue-in-cheek to really take off as mainstream phrases. Even if, IMO, “The War on Vulvas” and “Penis Privilege” do have a certain cheeky ring to them 🙂
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“Penis Privilege” seems incorrect, though, since trans women (at least those who are out) don’t seem to share in male privilege much.
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I think there are certain privileges that come from the biological difference of having a penis, like urinals and not having to worry about pregnancy. I also think there’s social advantages to being raised male, but I’d have trouble articulating them.
I’m not saying it outweighs all the oppression they gain for being female-presenting or trans, just that there is some degree of privilege that comes from that direction.
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Hmm, I think biological privileges usually aren’t part of what people mean when they talk about privilege, although that is interesting to think about. I don’t think urinals are really a privilege, but not having to worry about pregnancy is certainly a big thing. (But lots of people like pregnancy, also.) On the other hand people without penises don’t have to worry about visible boners and can masturbate without putting any thought into how not to make a mess 🙂
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not while they are menstruating!
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Why not “female human” or “female person”. The distinction you want to make here is a biological one, so why not use biological terminology?
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Honestly, I think the best solution is to use man/woman to refer to gender (encompassing both cis and trans individuals), and male/female to refer to physiology, and just add further qualifiers as necessary — e.g. I might describe myself as a ‘male-bodied woman’, if ‘trans’ wasn’t specific enough for some reason. Sex and gender are not binary, but they are strongly bimodal, so it makes sense to optimize for the most central cases.
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I feel like any word to describe this is going to feel unintuitive, clunky, or migendery to some people. Like if you start saying “hermite” and “aphrodite”, no one will know what you’re talking about, but if you go around saying “male-bodied” and “female-bodied”, people will be sad that they’re in a category that has their assigned sex in the name. If you say “medically nontransitioned A(M/F)ABs” congratulations that’s nine syllables. If you go with an unintuitive solution in the hopes that it will become intuitive, you’re going to have to wait until the trans community standardises on one which I wouldn’t hold my breath for.
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I think transphobia will totes die out among cis folks long before you can get more than seven trans folks to agree on anything. So yeah, holding your breath would be ill-advised.
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This will never happen. If such a word were created and actually popularized, it would gain the connotation of referring to “real women,” as opposed to trans ones. And then the trans community will want the word to refer to them too, and the whole project will break down.
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My first thought is that it’s hopeless– the category you want a word for is a complicated combination of physical and social traits, and we’d need a language which could handle categories in a much more sophisticated way.
Am I giving up too easily?
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So, uh this is a clearly flawed concept i ran into during one of my aimless treks around the internet, but i do think it might be a kind of starting point?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranian
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[content warning: defense of what might be considered misgendering]
Why not just acknowledge the following:
1. There is a large set of human traits, most of them bimodal, that are all correlated with each other, but few if any pairs of which are perfectly correlated.
2. These traits, taken together, can be used to define two modal regions of multi-dimensional space.
3. In actual practice “man” and “woman” describe less the value that an individual has for some specific trait than which of the two modal regions that individual falls into.
4. The division of the complete space into these two regions (or into two regions plus “inter-regional” (i.e. intersex, genderqueer, etc.)) is not automatic, but depends on the relative weight given to different traits, and on how cutoffs are set.
5. The most appropriate set of weights and cutoffs depends on the context for which the division is being made.
So if you’re deciding what pronouns to use socially*, then someone is “a woman” if and only if they identify as such. If you’re writing a game that teaches women how to masturbate effectively, and gives them points for doing so regularly, then someone is “a woman” if and only if they have fairly standard female genitalia. If you’re determining who is at risk from a carcinogen that selectively causes uterine cancer, then someone is “a woman” and only if they have a uterus. And so forth.
This does mean that, for at least some people, the strictly correct answer to the question “are you a woman” is “in what context?” But is that really an overwhelmingly difficulty?
*And you care about the feelings of the person involved, and there isn’t a more compelling reason to do otherwise.
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Yes. I am not a woman in any context.
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[Content warning continues to apply—I certainly don’t expect anyone to trigger themselves for the sake of my theorizing. I’m also not sure if this crosses the line of your commenting policy or not, although I hope not. And, of course, even if it doesn’t, I don’t at all believe you’re under any obligation to respond—that probably should go without saying, but figuring out what does go without saying is not one of my strong suits.
Also, for whatever it’s worth in contextualizing the following, I don’t object to (or “disagree with,” whatever that would even mean) your gender identity, and I refer to you as “they” off-site as well as on.]
That’s an elegantly terse statement, but I’m not really sure what it means, in the context of my contention that “a woman” doesn’t in practice really refer to any one of biological sex, gender identity, or gender performance (either in its entirety or in some constituent piece), but to a vague conglomeration of the three, one that looks different from different angles.
The simplest possibility I can think of is that it’s actually a request/demand (“do not refer to me as a woman in any context, or encourage others to do so with your theorizing”) masquerading as a statement. If so, then that isn’t really an argument (so I’m inclined to look for another parsing, out of epistemic charity), but hey, your blog, your rules.
Another possibility is that you’re arguing that gender identity is or should be uniquely definitive of who is “a woman.” If you’re arguing that it is, I think that’s empirically wrong (in a descriptivist sense). If you’re arguing that it should be, I’m curious why. If someone respects your identity, why does it matter what terminology they use for your biological sex? In the highly unlikely event that a karyotype were to reveal that I’m an XX male, I really don’t think* I would have a problem with being referred to as “a chromosomal woman.” Is this just different because of bad associations with actual misgendering? Or something else?
Finally, it’s possible that you parsed my (somewhat ambiguous) phrase “in what context” as “in what social context” (e.g. “a woman at the doctor’s office, but not among friends”) rather than “in what conceptual context” (e.g. “a woman biologically, but not socially/not as a matter of identity”). If that’s the case, I apologize for the imprecision. I’m not defending situational closeting, just the use of “a biological/hormonal/anatomical woman” as the noun form of “biologically/hormonally/anatomically female.”
*Granted, speculation about such matters is tricky, given that human reactions are often non-rational, and therefore hard to predict even for the individual in question. So it’s possible that I’m just wrong about what my reaction would be.
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I forgot to add to my list of possibilities: Or I’ve completely misinterpreted you, and you mean something completely different from any of the above.
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