In the linked essay, I mention Nancy Mace's standard TERF question, asked most recently to Tim Walz: "What is a woman?"
My answer is simple. A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.
I want to expand a bit from the essay on why I think this matters.
Mace鈥檚 question seems like a non sequitur, since the topic was immigration. It鈥檚 actually part of a unified supremacist frame of domination.
The question invites us into a frame where a woman can and must be defined. It's very important to refuse the invitation by rejecting the frame.
In this frame, a woman is a thing that must have a definition. Once you accept that premise, all that's left to determine are where the boundaries are and who gets to establish and enforce those boundaries..
So, from the fascist frame, it is a border security question of sorts.
Fascists like Mace know we are wired to accept premises, and so they construct questions in such a way as to win the venue. This is true even if we disagree with the person who is offering the proposition. We accept the frame, then we argue the contrary position.
But first we accept the frame.
Even if you start to define a woman in a way that includes trans people, you鈥檙e accepting that establishing definitions of who is and who is not a woman is the correct frame of debate.
As soon as you start to answer it on its own terms, you've lost the venue.
Once we鈥檝e accepted the fascist venue, we鈥檙e going to spend all our time in their frame, defending our more expansive definitions of women against the more constrained definition, but it is now a given that a woman can and should be defined. We鈥檝e already lost.
What we need to do is get very good at spotting this & rejecting the premise from the outset, and then choosing a better frame.
What is a woman?
False premise. A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.
Fascists do not want to see people as "whos." That isn't their venue.
This may seem like sophistry, but it isn鈥檛. Look at what this does.
First, it names what the supremacist is doing鈥攖rying to make a person into a thing, in order to control their definition, in order to enforce those boundaries, in order to exclude people, in order to abuse them鈥攁nd rejects it.
Next, it expands the venue to the correct one: a focus on women as people. When you do that, you don鈥檛 enforce boundaries; you expand.
Who is a woman?
Well. There鈥檚 no end to the answers there. There are billions of answers.
@JuliusGoat@mastodon.social
Who is a woman? A woman is a person who knows that they are a woman, and all the diversity that entails.
Even Nancy Mace. Ask her if she knows she鈥檚 a woman.
Now she has something in common with trans women.
You know what that is? Unity鈥攊f she wants to accept the invitation.
This is the thing I try to do, and it鈥檚 what I encourage us all to do, especially in places where supremacists seem to feel they have achieved some sort of rhetorical advantage. Think about the underlying premise being offered. Think about whether or not that premise should be engaged or rejected.
Find how that premise seeks to control and define and dominate other humans鈥攊t always does鈥攁nd reject that lie in favor of something better.
Before answering, always reject the fascist venue.
Make a better invitation.
