Women Can Have Penises Too

A defense of *shudders* Chase Strangio

lol

Look, I understand why you might be skeptical of this.

In many ways, I am too—though I believe trans women are women, I think it’s only true in that the word “woman” points toward a specific cluster of womanly things: including longer hair, higher voice, smaller muscles, and no penis.

But it’s womanly things, plural: if you check enough boxes well enough, you can probably leave one or two little boxes unchecked, and get away with claiming womanhood nonetheless (cf.

Katie Herzog

). And I’d like to convince you that, in line with Chase fucking Strangio, “no penis” is often one of the least costly boxes to leave unchecked.

(To be clear, I’m not gonna argue that a penis isn’t a male body part. Male is a biological category: I’m arguing that the penis, while typically associated with men—a gender category—can also pretty easily be something that a woman—someone of the other gender category—has.)

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Why do transgender activists care so much about pronouns?

Taking them at their word (i.e., we’re gonna assume it’s not about mind-control or speech-stifling)—it’s a matter of affirmation. It makes them feel good to be seen as one gender rather than another. And given that we humans are using language all the time, the best way to prove that you see them as their preferred gender is to use the words associated with it.

But there’s something funny about English—and this isn’t universally true across languages¹—we have only one second-person pronoun: “you.”

When someone transitions, they might change their name, they might change their third-person pronouns, but they’ll still answer to “hey, you.”

If transgender people were mostly worried about being affirmed in one-on-one social engagements, pronouns wouldn’t be such a big deal. Fine, maybe they’d still be concerned about deadnaming or honorifics (“sir”/“ma’am”), but how often do you really use names and titles in conversation? Maybe once or twice to get things started, or in little coffee-shop interactions, but when you’re with your friends, with people who know you and whose opinions you really care about, it’s all “you, you, you.”

But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s important to understand why “pronouns” have become a completely appropriate stand in for “gender identity”—think, “please state your name and pronouns.” Gender is most closely associated with third-person interactions: other people talking about you, not to you. Relating in the I-It sense, rather than the I-Thou.

The I-It focus makes sense: it’s related to the reason we have names and pronouns at all. Our neural and social and linguistic machinery are all shaped for gossip—Robin Dunbar (of Dunbar’s number) thinks that language itself was invented solely for the purposes of gossip. You can believe that or you can not, but you can’t deny that everyone loves talking about everyone else, and everyone cares about what everyone else is saying about them.

The fact is, third-person engagement governs most of our internal and external lives. We conceive, even of ourselves, as mostly objects of perception, not subjects of address.

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There is, of course, one sphere in which our object-boundaries mostly dissolve, and we become engaged participants in a siloed I-Thou subjective experience: copulation.

If a penis is involved in your interpersonal interaction, and Aella’s nowhere to be seen, then you’re probably engaged in a one-on-one act of sexual subjectivization.

While these experiences can be deeply meaningful, they’re rare for many Americans and getting rarer.

source

On top of that, trans people appear to have a lot less sex than average, and when they are having sex, they’re doing it in exchange for money, food, or housing, at a much higher rate. “Exchange sex,” as it’s called, is clearly a more objectifying experience, one that fails to address its participants as full “yous.”

…And even if all that weren’t the case, and transgender people were having subjective, meaningful sex on a regular basis, it would still be true that third-person, penisless interactions felt more important.

Why?

Because when you read the word “penis,” you get a little uncomfortable-feeling, don’t you? There’s a taboo around sexual-subjectivity, and so we don’t really like to bring it up in polite society. Naturally, to reduce the mental load of not talking about penises all the time, we’ve adapted to push our penis-thoughts down too. To ignore sex and the associated organs as much as possible, to deny we ever think about them, eventually to actually stop thinking about them altogether—outside of the very specific situations where we feel we can.

(This is supposed to be a sort of subtle nod at the whole workplace-desexualization thing too; did you catch it?)

The upshot of all this, of course, is that the penis has never been further from day-to-day consciousness. In our usual conception of “man” and “woman,” sexual organs tend to fade from view. No one pictures a naked Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden anymore—we see John and Jennifer, in near-identical suits, sitting in some office somewhere.

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It gets better (worse?).

There’s a new kind of social communicator in town, have you heard of it, it’s called the Internet.

On the Internet, you mostly interact with people via text and memes. If you don’t want anyone to know what your face or body looks like, you don’t have to let anyone know what your face or body looks like! You can have a rich (somewhat rich) social life through the text and the memes alone.

You know what’s easy and socially-acceptable to digitize? Pronouns.

You know what’s much harder? A penis.²

In most of our daily lives, we characterize people’s genders based on their physical appearance: a woman looks womanly, a man looks manly. But if you’re doing most of your interactions online, the salience of “physical gender” is reduced relative to the emotional, the intangible, the internal sense of “gender identity.”

Here’s an interesting result:

In a sample of 9859 adolescents (48.8% female, 47.6% racial/ethnic minority, 1.0% transgender, 1.1% gender-questioning), transgender adolescents reported 4.51 (95% CI 1.17–7.85) more hours of total daily recreational screen time including more time on television/movies, video games, texting, social media, and the internet, compared to cisgender adolescents. Gender-questioning adolescents reported 3.41 (95% CI 1.16–5.67) more hours of total daily recreational screen time compared to cisgender adolescents. Transgender identification and questioning one’s gender identity was associated with higher problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use, compared to cisgender identification.³

Yes, part of the reason for this association is a social-media-mediated-social-contagion—but part of it is social-media-mediated-dephysicalization. The more time you spend on screens, the more time you’re spending inside your own head (where emotions live), and the less time you’re spending in meatspace (where bodies live).

Here’s a good proverb:

If you’re absorbed in pronouns and feelings, then your world is pronouns and feelings. What could penises possibly have to do with gender?

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So far, you may notice, I’ve been entirely descriptive. I’ve told you about all the various reasons that transgender people have for disregarding penises in favor of the thousand other more nebulous signals of gender identity. I think you should understand now why Chase Strangio believes that penises aren’t strictly body parts for men, why they can easily also be a woman-thing.

But I haven’t done much to convince you that Strangio’s view is normatively right: that we should be mostly disregarding the subjective and the physical and the taboo, and more often defining “woman” with near-complete ignorance of genitalia.

For this, we might have to get a bit radical.

Simone de Beauvoir famously opened the “Childhood” chapter of The Second Sex with the claim, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”⁴

The mechanism she describes for this is perhaps less famous, but quite relevant for our purposes:

The [male] child is persuaded that more is demanded of boys because they are superior; to give him courage for the difficult path he must follow, pride in his manhood is instilled into him; this abstract notion takes on for him a concrete aspect: it is incarnated in his penis.⁵

The young girl, on the other hand, learns her inferiority through lacking such an appendage:

To urinate, she is required to crouch, uncover herself, and therefore hide: a shameful and inconvenient procedure. The shame is intensified in the frequent cases in which the girl suffers from involuntary discharge of urine, as for instance when laughing immoderately; in general her control is not so good as that of the boys.

To boys the urinary function seems like a game, with the charm of all games that offer liberty of action; the penis can be manipulated, it gives opportunity for action, which is one of the deep interests of the child. A little girl on seeing a boy urinating exclaimed admiringly: "How convenient!" The stream can be directed at will and to a considerable distance, which gives the boy a feeling of omnipotence.⁶

Indeed, while boys project agentic, omnipotent subjectivity onto their penises, girls are left to play with passive, impotent, objectivizing dolls:

it is a statuette with a human face—or, that lacking, an ear of corn, even a piece of wood—which will most satisfyingly serve the girl as substitute for that double, that natural plaything: the penis.

The main difference is that, on the one hand, the doll represents the whole body, and, on the other, it is a passive object. On this account the little girl will be led to identify her whole person and to regard this as an inert given object. While the boy seeks himself in the penis as an autonomous subject, the little girl cuddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams of being cuddled and dressed up herself; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvellous doll. By means of compliments and scoldings, through images and words, she learns the meaning of the terms pretty and plain; she soon learns that in order to be pleasing she must be ‘pretty as a picture’.⁷

de Beauvoir and the feminists that followed her had various complicated social remedies for the differences and injustices between the sexes. The idea was, in essence, to remove from the penis its agentic symbolism, or, that failing, to otherwise imbue an equal amount of agency in girls.

This movement was broadly successful—equality exists between the sexes like never before—but many radical feminists feel as if the transgender movement threatens their progress. As if expanding “woman” to include some with penises will dilute all the effort they’ve put into teaching society to treat women subjectively despite their lacking a maneuverable urinary appendage.

However, I think this is a flawed understanding.

No one can really think that sex inequality is a result of the penis itself; de Beauvoir was obviously spouting Continental-crackpottery. Far more likely, it’s a result of the many other more salient physical differences between men and women—muscle mass, aggressivity, and so on; in a word, testosterone.⁸

Penis-havingness and the state of being filled with testosterone have historically been categories that mostly overlap. But with the advent of cross-sex hormones, that’s no longer true. And lower-testosterone, higher-estrogen penis-havers (i.e., some trans women) are, in fact, pretty unlikely to experience male privilege, and so somewhat deserving of feminist support.

There are caveats, of course: in spaces especially defined by physicality (e.g., bathhouses) or subjective intimacy (e.g., dating), it can make sense to exclude those with penises. When the penis is relevant, it’s really truly very relevant.

But most social situations are not like this. Most trans-women-with-penises aren’t out flaunting their penises all the time. Their genitals are often, in fact, a very small part of their identity—especially if they spend a lot of time online, or very little time in intimate relationships.

Chase Strangio says a lot of very stupid things, and I’m sure he meant something very stupid when he said it—but it’s true that the penis is “just an unusual body part for a woman.”

(In most contexts.)

welp, those are all the male body parts, and I certainly don’t see penis on the list, so I guess case closed.

1. Substack tells me I have six (six!) Israeli subscribers: can any of you tell me how non-binary / “unsure of gender” addressing-situations are handled in Hebrew? Online information is pretty scant… do you just ignore preferences and use whatever?

2. 😁

3. Fun fact: the data for this claim comes from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, of which I am a part! They pay really well…

4. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. United Kingdom: Jonathan Cape, 1953. 273.

5. Ibid, 276.

6. 278.

7. 283.

8. As

Ozy Brennan

has illustrated well, women’s ability to get pregnant also plays a significant role in their oppression. This constitutes, admittedly, a good reason to be a bit trans-exclusionary, at least until someone figures out the whole artificial-womb thing. (However, this is reason only to be trans-exclusionary in birth-ish spaces. Not in general.)