‘It is really not so simple to define who or what is a woman’

“Sugar and spice and all things nice / That’s what little girls are made of.” Clearly whoever wrote this had never been to an all-girls school…But if it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean to be a woman? Does it mean to like pink, glitter and frills? Or to be maternal and nurturing? Or to find one’s fulfilment in supporting others?

Can a brain have gender? I didn’t really think of myself as a woman until my late 20s. Yes, I had a woman’s body (though without much bosom and not at all curvaceous) but it didn’t feel at all as though my brain had a gender. I just thought of myself as a person! That’s why I find it hard to understand my several transgender friends, who in most cases ‘knew’ from an early age that their sense of their gender didn’t match the body they were born in. But I take them at their word, not least because all of them are Christians and three of them in ordained ministry. And most of them transitioned long before there was any such concept as ‘trans ideology’ (an idea I treat with the same scepticism as ‘the gay agenda’).

Culture, biblical guidance and biology

The problem is, our idea of what makes a woman is so culturally determined. We even stack toys on supermarket shelves in boys’ and girls’ sections, ignoring the fact that some girls want a toy train and some boys want to play with dolls (and not just Action Man). I sometimes wonder whether if a boy likes things that are thought of as ‘girly’, and vice versa, they therefore conclude that they are in the wrong body. What would happen if we just allowed boys to wear pink dresses or girls to wear camouflage and didn’t make it into an existential crisis?

Being Christians, of course, we look at the Bible to see what it says about this matter. But it is surprisingly of little help here. The foundational document of Genesis 2:23 tells us more about the likeness between woman and man than it does about the difference: “The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called “woman”, for she was taken out of man.’”

Deuteronomy 22:5 tells us that “a woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing”, but we have long accepted women wearing trousers, and just six verses later we are told not to wear clothes made of mixed fibres, and who worries about that now? (Polycotton blouse, anyone?) We are under the new covenant, not under the law. 

Our idea of what makes a woman is so culturally determined

If what we wear, what work we do, what roles we play no longer define a woman, what about biology? The recent UK supreme court judgement that, in terms of the Equality Act, a woman is defined by biology; sounds like a simple solution but is actually far from that. I have just learned that a friend’s ex-boyfriend is a hermaphrodite: assigned male at birth and brought up as a boy, s/he actually has a retracted penis, undescended testicles, traces of ovarian tissue and, I believe, a womb, and now identifies as a woman. If they were younger and fitter, could they compete in women’s sports? What toilets should they use? And in fact people with what we are now supposed to call ‘disorders of sexual development’ make up almost two per cent of the population. You and I probably know someone who is intersex, though we may not know it.

A changing definition

The fact is, it is really not so simple to define who or what is a woman. Definitions have changed over centuries. Apparently a 19th-century medic and sexologist declared that no healthy woman had a clitoris – which is news to women today who almost universally do! Should we then accept as a woman anyone who declares themselves to be one? It seems obvious to me that we should not. The growing recognition of transgender women provides an ideal cover for the (admittedly tiny) number of criminal men who want to enter women’s spaces. Surely someone born male should only be recognised as a woman if they have had gender reassignment surgery and have been assessed not to be a threat. And in sport, their testosterone levels need to be shown to be no higher than a cis woman’s.

Most of us, fortunately, are perfectly clear on what sex/gender we are. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother to think about those who aren’t. We are told in 1 Corinthians 12:22-23 that the members of the body of Christ who are ‘weaker’ should be treated with greater care and respect. Let us never use our ‘normality’ as a pretext to exclude or decry others who don’t fit into a neat category.