Born This Way: What It Means To Be a Woman - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Born This Way
by
Mark Shatz

A woman born a man is not a woman. This is a heretical statement to the most high prophets of the Church of Intersectionalism (the feminist religion that creates hierarchies of grievance based on how one’s statuses overlap), but it is true nonetheless. It is, to use a word that’s been beaten nearly to death and shivers cowering in the corner, science. It is objectively definitional that a person with an X and a Y chromosome is a man and therefore, and by definition, is not a woman. He is something that means that he is not something else.

The converse is also true. A man born a woman is not a man. She is a woman manipulating her hormones or amputating her breasts or stroking her chin and contemplating her hormonally induced beard, but she is not a man.

Intersectionalists, first, don’t consider biological sex a fact. Indeed, it’s a gender construct that privileges those whose self-identity aligns with their biology. Second, since women as a construct are discriminated against, those who identify as women, but are not biologically, are objects of even more discrimination and so rank higher on the grievance ladder and should receive more deference and privilege to countervail the systemic discrimination they face for their lack of biological privilege.

Yes, it’s gobbledy-gook.

Why is it important to clarify something so obvious as the fact that a man is a man and a woman is a woman? Because the Intersectional religionists, seeking as ever to confuse the culture and by doing so control it through distorting language, are on the rampage. The current trend to achieve their power ends: transgenderism. The trigger for this post? CNN’s absurd tweet:


“Individuals with a cervix” is laughably Orwellian. The statement raises the question, “Who are individuals with a cervix?” The Intersectionalists will assert that lots of types of beings have cervixes. Science, biology, theology, and common sense will answer that only females of the species have cervixes. Females are women. Further, they are not men. Intersectionalists at CNN ask the reader to pretend and to play along with them and use language that obscures the facts, the obvious truth.

Anyone who cares about science, biology, facts, philosophy, language definitions, and truth should strenuously reject this malevolent sophistry. The end result of splintering people into abstractions is to flatten the human experience. To have distinctions but no differences. Men can be women. Women can be men. Therefore, both terms become meaningless because anyone can be anything. Give the “anyone” opposing hormones, and s/he looks like a vain approximation, a sloppy forgery. The end result of these neutered “anyones” is to be purple-haired or shaved-headed or tattooed, moderately muscled androgyny where abnormality becomes the norm and no one is anything except exceedingly angry at not being accepted as something else.

It is an attempt to confuse and undermine. In any sport one can imagine, the offensive player must get the defensive player off-balance, on his back foot, as it were. By the time the defensive player corrects and rights himself, it is too late. The offensive player is farther down the field and maybe in scoring position. Transgenderism is a new offense by the Left to cause those who value truth, tradition, science, and sound-mindedness a moment of doubt, and let the Left get by. Score another point for Marx by using dirty Leninist methods.

The way to fight back is elegant in its simplicity: Call things and people what they are. Women are those who have an XX chromosome and therefore are the only sex of the species to possess a cervix. Men have an XY chromosome and therefore are the only sex of the species to possess a prostate. No amount of surgery and hormone treatment can change these biological facts.

Americans are a tolerant people. They are content to let adults be weird so long as it doesn’t infringe on their rights. Want to wear stilettos, a corset, false eyelashes, a thong, and a wig, and get breast implants? Want to lop off your penis and create some medical abomination between your legs? That’s some serious, long-term commitment and more than a little disturbed. It’s clear not only that you want to be a caricature of a prostitute, but also that you’re a masochist. Whether or not the medical professionals should play along with the charade is a legitimate question, but not that big of a concern as it doesn’t affect most people.

Things change, though, when parents dress seven-year-old boys in dresses and then force teachers and ex-husbands and school children to call a boy a girl. And it all comes to a screeching halt when a teenage boy wants to dress with a teenage girl in a girls’ locker room, tape up his penis and testicles, press on long nails, say he’s a girl, and then beat biological girl competitors in the 100-yard dash. Note that the reverse is exceedingly rare: Most girls who would be boys, even with testosterone, are such poor imitations of the real thing that they pose no threat to the athletic success of biological boys. In this way, boys win as boys and boys win as girls, too. Girls become a historical artifact.

A biological girl’s experience is co-opted by men. Feminists defend this. Well, most do. The other sensible feminists are summarily discarded as, ironically enough, bigoted. But who is the bigot? The person defending the experience of a woman who was born that way and must integrate the reality of her biology to create a sum of experiences, or the person telling that woman that her sex isn’t unique and is easily aped by superficial changes such as length of hair and nails?

One person’s dysphoria is not another person’s problem when the crazy is contained to that person’s life. It’s a whole other thing when the rights of that person’s obliterate another’s rights to privacy and fairness.

Last week during a Senate hearing that got lost in the Big Tech hearing bubble, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) grilled the president of the NCAA about transgender people being allowed to compete against women.  A group titled Save Women’s Sports released an open letter to the NCAA. The text of the letter can be found here. The nut of the argument:

Fairness for female athletes should not be a political or partisan issue. We athletes have diverse views on many topics, but stand united on this fact: protecting the integrity of women’s sports is prowoman, pro-fairness, and consistent with the purpose and promise of Title IX.

Each one of us has benefitted personally, and many of us professionally, from a fair and level playing field. We have achieved striking success in the sports we love, and we are committed to preserving the same equality of opportunity for future female athletes.

We strongly believe that everyone should have the opportunity to compete, but true athletic parity for women demands that women’s sports be protected for biological females. Protecting the integrity of women’s sports has, for decades, played an integral role in remedying past discrimination against women and empowering them to achieve their full athletic potential.

But, Intersectionalists would say, there are no women — only people with cervixes. And those without cervixes can be women and compete in women’s sports because they feel that way.

Actually, no they shouldn’t.

Women are born women. Biologically.

Besides owning a cervix, what does it mean to be a biological woman? Womanhood starts in the uterine environment.

Once an egg is fertilized en utero, and a female zygote is created with the X chromosome from the biological male aka father, a cascade of hormonal and embryological processes occur that shape and make the microscopic woman. Her brain is structurally different. Her corpus callosum, the nerve interface between the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is comparatively huge when examined alongside a boy’s. In her ovaries, the eggs that inhabit them, all of them that she will ever have for a lifetime, exist already. Her placenta signals her mother’s body to create a perfect hormonal, nutritional soup for her. That signal is initiated by her X chromosome. Twin girl and boy babies have their own placentas signaling their own needs. Amazingly, their mother’s body responds.

Mother, their mom, a woman. Because only a woman’s body can host a fallopian tube that rolls a fertilized cell the size of a pin dot down to the uterus that can expand to host 10 pounds of baby, or in some cases, 20 pounds of baby or more. When the bundle of joy is born, the mother’s body again creates the means to sustain the baby — perfectly. Each baby has milk tailored to her needs. Further, each meal is tailored perfectly to the baby’s needs.

A woman’s body is constantly conforming, evolving, not only from conception to birth but throughout her lifetime. Her hormones rise and fall cyclically. (Men, in contrast, are relatively simpler and more constant hormonally.) Eventually, a woman’s hormones change again, and in middle age her body ceases to be able to support a new life. All these physical changes influence her inner emotional reality and needs, too.

The strength, flexibility, and resilience it takes to make, carry, give birth to, and nurture a life come with vulnerabilities. A woman’s schedule, her career choices (a pregnant woman does not want to be working on a six-month oil rig assignment, for example), her mate choices (change a woman’s hormones and change her choice in mates), and her behavior choices are shaped by her biology as assuredly as a man’s choices are. There are grave consequences not just to her, but her progeny, if she chooses poorly.

Then there is the cultural and social upbringing of a woman. Girls develop at differing rates and in differing ways. It shapes them. A girl who develops breasts at 10 will be sexualized from a young age in ways that young boys (who have different cultural pressures) never face. A girl who has a more athletic body will receive different messages. Tall girls face challenges. Tiny girls with tiny voices face challenges. All the messages these infinitely variable women receive is something unique to a woman’s view of herself and how she develops.

Are we to believe that a man, even a teen boy, can, with some hormones and a few superficial changes relate to and have the same experience? The very same Intersectionalists who say that corn rows, hoop earrings, and afros are cultural appropriation are indifferent to men appropriating the whole of womanhood and claiming it for their own.

There have been comically revealing interactions between transgender “women” and men. The transgender acts very male under stress, reverting, if you will, to type — aggression, intimidation, man-handling, and even physical confrontation. Ben Shapiro nearly got clocked by a transgender dude. Then there’s the deviant transgender guy in Canada wanting women aestheticians to wax his feminine scrotum. And who can forget the freaked-out transgender screaming, “CALL ME MA’AM!” before stomping out of a video store leaving toppled video towers in his wake. These fair ladies call to mind Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire during an attempted purse-snatching: “BACK OFF, ASSHOLE! BEAT IT!” and then, back in character, “Broke my bag!”

While the XX chromosomes might be set firmly and absolutely, there is much variability within womanhood. The transgender movement seems to only imitate certain kinds of women. Women must have long hair, wear make-up, wear high heels, and flounce around. They pose as caricatures. But not all women conform to these superficialities. Just as a slightly built man will unlikely become a nose tackle on a football team, a woman’s physiology, talents, and interests will send her in directions as unique as she is.

Not all women choose to be mothers, and not all women have the ability to become mothers even though they possess a cervix. Some women have what might be considered more traditionally male interests, but that in itself is rather sexist. Who says a woman can’t be interested in cars, politics, and sports and wear frilly dresses or be interested in homemaking and wear overalls? Within the biological constraints of womanhood there is enormous freedom and diversity and uniqueness.

It is patently offensive that the parents of a boy or that a man believes that he can, through hormone therapy and wearing gaudy earrings, be anything other than a facsimile of his image of what a woman is. A woman’s genetic markers, her biology, her talents, her potential, and, yes, her cervix, make her a woman. Having a boy with feminine interests (again, sexism!), means the boy is still a boy. He just has atypical interests. It makes him no less a boy. A person with a cervix is a woman with all the potential and variability that entails.

She was born that way.

Melissa Mackenzie
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Melissa Mackenzie is Publisher of The American Spectator. Melissa commentates for the BBC and has appeared on Fox. Her work has been featured at The Guardian, PJ Media, and was a front page contributor to RedState. Melissa commutes from Houston, Texas to Alexandria, VA. She lives in Houston with her two sons, one daughter, and two diva rescue cats. You can follow Ms. Mackenzie on Twitter: @MelissaTweets.
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