Biological, Chemical, Nuclear: The Types of Woman (& Weapons of Mass Destruction).
You better believe I'm ready to blow my stack.
Sometimes it feels like the only thing stopping my heart going nuclear is the leaden exhaustion that has seeped into my bones. If our conservative politicians ever realised just how many British Thermal Units of raging fucking heat I can pump out of this bad boy *slaps hood*, I’m sure they’d immediately devise a national energy plan centred around me conducting the emotional fucking labour of “getting through the day”. Shame they’d probably realise too late that the fissile material in my chest is the sort that is good for bombs, not for power stations.
I am woman… hear my (thermonuclear) roar.
Cause I really AM a woman. Not just in my mind. Legally. My birth certificate says “F”; not “changed to F”, not “was M but we are gonna enshrine the act of transition on this primary document that will follow this person around for the rest of their life and say they “became an F”… Just “F”.
On this front, I had the good fortune not to be born in Australia.
We are still waiting for the promised legislative changes in the Births, Death and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 (‘BDMR Bill’). It is currently being held up because the Police Powers and Responsibilities And Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 hasn’t passed. Why hasn’t it passed? Because the Police need clarity on the rules about officers strip-searching trans folk. So, the BDMR Bill probs won’t become the BDMR Act. Trans people born here… Sorry, you will just have to put up with the sex on your documentation being what was assigned at birth.
I am one of the trans people that get to count their lucky stars they were born somewhere that has a shred of respect for an individual’s unalienable right to know thyself. This is not the case here is Australia and I cringe when I think of the term “nanny-state” as I can only hear it being said in the voice of a shrill middle-aged man wearing a suit from Tarocash as he’s interviewed for Sky News. But that’s what this shit is. A top-down, father-knows-best approach to public policy on something that has zero impact for those it has nothing to do with.
With all the hand-waving and dire predictions about the disruption to the “traditional family unit” and the breakdown of the very fabric of our society, you’d swear my trans-ness was a cloud of toxic gas seeping through the streets in the pre-dawn. My deviancy, mustard-gas-insidious, its tendrils snaking into gardens, into homes, into sleeping children’s rooms while droves of birds take to the silvery sky to flee for the hills. Fuck, I wish they put this much fearmongering into, oh I dunno, climate change? But no, keep pumping metric fuck-tons of emissions into the sky, we gotta focus our attention on whether or not this woman has a dick.
As it may be clear to some of you with more than primary school reading level there are a plethora of ways to define what a woman is. Despite the smirking dog-whistle question that so often gets asked of political candidates in an attempt to get a “gotcha”, the answer is wonderfully complicated. Turns out there’s joy and beauty and fucking goddamn wisdom to be had in nuance and complexity.
I like to joke that “women” as a concept to be defined can be described very much akin to the way we define arsenals of weaponry (conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear etc). Not to disrespect women of course, but to draw a line directly between the understanding of “what is a women” and the “fuck around and find out” nature of digging into it without any delicacy.
So, as stated I am legally a woman.
All of my documentation reflects this. The ways in which I navigate the world through bureaucracy, laws, contracts… I exist exactly the same as a conventional cisgendered woman. In this way I am entirely, gloriously unremarkable. I downloaded the forms from the Republic of Ireland’s web portal (yes, I’m ALSO one of those terrifying immigrants that you keep hearing about that are destroying the fabric of Australia. Hell of a two-for-one that you are getting here, folks.) The process was relatively simple. I had to have them notarised. The notary was giddy over the prospect of a new kind of form that he’d never seen before. The finality of that reassuring thump of the stamp was just as satisfying for him as it was for me. He even thanked me for the opportunity to help me because for him it was “a real treat” to fill in a form for the first time. Pop off my king.
Forms got sent, a brief conversation with a sweet old lady named Sharron in County Leitrim who was terribly worried that I had forgotten to pick a new name (I reassured her I’m keeping my name), and then it was done. New birth certificate issued. Legally a woman.
And even better? It’s an official document from a foreign country so Australia is required to recognise it. If I had been born in Queensland, the law requires I would need to have bottom surgery to be legally recognised as a woman in this state (as at April 2024 anyway).
So, that’s how Queensland defines it. Let’s dig into another way to look at it: Chemically. Chemically things are much more interesting. As yet another obscene expenditure of public resources approaches (I’m talking about the Olympics), the measures of testosterone in women’s bodies is again in the news. Trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympic Games since 2004. Twenty years went by without it being a problem. There was no influx of “men masquerading as women” destroying women’s sport. Now though, despite it being blatantly obvious that the trumped-up fears about trans folk in sport are just the latest salvo in the hetro-activist agenda to limit the rights of LGBTQI+ people, more than 80% of people in this country still think that trans women have an unfair advantage.
There are no studies that prove this, only anecdotes.
Do you know why we need studies? To control for individual genetic advantages and/or metabolic characteristics. To control for nutrition, coaching, the quality of the goddamned training equipment. Without these controls, we’re saying that none of this has any bearing on the quality of an athlete.
Never mind all of this. A trans a swimmer came in fourth place and now women’s sport is over. Testosterone! Not training. Not genetic luck. Testosterone!
All bodies produce testosterone; cisgendered men and women alike. But now when a cis-woman naturally produces an elevated level of testosterone she has an unfair advantage according to the International Olympic Committee (‘IOC’) and World Athletics Associations. I didn’t see them rushing to say that Michael Phelps had an unfair advantage. He has an abnormally proportioned body and double-jointed ankles, all naturally occurring and all universally acknowledged to be the thing that netted him 28 Olympic medals. Didn’t that make it it unfair for everybody else to compete against him?
If you’re interested in a very simplified version of the chemical balances of testosterone in the body it breaks down like this:
Cis-women typically sit in the 0.5 – 2.4 nanomoles per litre
Cis-men are in the 10 – 35 nanomoles per litre
The IOC previously drew a line at 10 nanomoles. Above is male, below is female regardless of whether it is naturally occurring, regardless of any measurable benefit. An entire person boiled down to two-digit number.
For reference, my number is 12.
For a man I would be considered to have low testosterone, for a woman I wouldn’t be allowed to compete in an Olympic sport. Except, there’s more to it than that. I take testosterone blockers. They don’t stop my body from producing testosterone. They stop my body from absorbing it. Spironolactone is an androgen receptor antagonist. It fills up the receptor slots and prevents testosterone being utilised by the body. My blood has testosterone in it, but my body is only benefiting from a small fraction of it. This is the detail that the 10nmol/L metric fails to account for.
It is an arbitrary line designed to eliminate nuance which means none of that matters. It doesn’t matter because the IOC are, at their heart, cowards. They have decided to defer the guidelines to existing independent international bodies. Sporting bodies which are themselves influenced by corporate and political interests so the new ruling has landed that an athlete must have completed their transition before the age of 12. Which is effectively a ban on trans athletes. You can’t “completely” transition before the age of 12. Or if you can, the possibility that you would have is so vanishingly small that it will likely mean transgender people will not be allowed to compete. Again, another arbitrary line drawn that fails flesh and blood people.
If you want to get into the community sport aspect of it, I can tell you from personal experience that community sports have been managing just fine for decades with the inclusion of trans people. I, a transwoman, play roller derby with a wide array of cis and transgender individuals. I absolutely get my ass handed to me on the reg. And sure, y’all might be thinking, “well maybe she isn’t that good at roller derby?”
[Insert your favourite buzzer noise here] Wrong! When I was living as a man, I played on the Australian national team. I competed at an international level. I am both not-shit-at-roller-derby and regularly-smoked-by-cisgendered-women-players.
Turns out organised sport is really good at having rules specifically for leveling the playing field. What a thought! That sport is not some wild melee? Not some unregulated free-for-all? Amazing!
Having played with trans and nonbinary athletes it is clear that a dedication to training, a healthy attitude to putting your body on the line and skillful use of strategy is the thing that breeds success. All the players, the ones who I skated with three times a week for the better part of a decade, can attest to how different this body is. The introduction of elevated estrogen and receptor antagonists to stop my body utilising testosterone have changed me. I’m still a good player, not because I used to be a man, but because I know the sport. I am chemically a woman, and my advantage comes from experience and training – things I made happen. Not some unearned quantity of sex hormone.
What’s next in the arsenals of weaponry? Biological? Fucking yes. Fucking biological.
This is the last bastion of the nay-sayers. All the clamouring about genitals and chromosomes… I swear to fuck that every person who claims that chromosomes are the key indicator couldn’t produce documentation to prove their own genetic makeup, so they can get fucked if they think I’m gonna provide them with mine.
Let’s break some things down for you.
When I say the death of our education system is to blame I literally mean that communities that don’t explain how reproduction works have created a population of morons. When in the womb, all people, all mammals, start out as female and then became male. It is a feature of our categorisation. All human beings, while they gestate, develop along a biologically female path until they diverge. Nearly 10 weeks of a pregnancy goes by before the embryo’s hormones shift and the tubercle starts to become a penis. Hell, we can’t even actually tell for another month of gestation. A whole third of the pregnancy elapses before you can reliably differentiate genitalia.
At this point, all the hand-wringers have already been considering this foetus to be a person with inalienable human rights. At this point the “Heartbeat Bills” have already triggered. After 3-6 weeks of pregnancy, cardiac cells can be detected. Neuron activity is detected at 8 weeks and thus, according to these made up rules, it is a person to be respected and honoured. A person who hasn’t developed a detectable sex. So, if you wanna get on your “every life is scared”, “made in god’s image” bandwagon about trans people being deviants and abominations then I’m sorry to break some bad news to you; the knife you use to parse the counting of individual days of a pregnancy to define the status of an unborn child cuts both ways chuckle-fucks.
Biological Woman is a meaningless term. All cis-men were once biologically women.
So be it a Conventional/Legal Woman, a Chemical Woman, a Biological Woman or even a Mushroom-Cloud-Laying-Motherfucker-of-a-Woman… This is a woman. We are past this “debate”. It is done. Academically and scientifically settled. There are no types of woman… A woman is whoever the fuck tells you she is a woman.
The purpose of any further discourse is to distract, entangle and otherwise delay the march of progress. This pettifogging and what-about-ism is a deliberate campaign to harm trans people. It is a wedge to leverage letters, chisel off members from the growing LGBTQIA+ acronym. A clear attempt to make public life as deeply unpleasant as possible. A campaign to do everything short of outright bans to force us back into the closet where they hope we will die out.
Frankly I have no intention of giving them what they want.
–S