What Is a Woman?
A Question Asked in Bad Faith
A woman is not a riddle. She is not a courtroom exhibit or a meme. She is a person who names herself, lives her life, and carries the weight of a body politic that constantly tries to define her.
What Would Jesus Do?
When Jesus stood before the high priests and Pilate, the question was simple on the surface but sharp underneath:
“Are you the Son of God?”
It was never asked in good faith. If he said yes, they could accuse him of blasphemy. If he said no, they could dismiss him as a fraud. Either way, the question was designed to condemn him.
He did not walk into their trap
In Luke he answered, “You say that I am.” In Matthew, “You have said so.” He refused to let others fix him inside their narrow definition. His identity was not theirs to grant or deny.
The truth didn’t belong to the questioner
The modern refrain “What is a woman?” is a question of the same kind. It presents itself as inquiry, but it is posed as an interrogation. Its purpose is not to understand but to control. If you reduce womanhood to biology, you erase the lives of millions. If you refuse the reduction, you are painted as evasive or dishonest. It is a trap that shifts the power of definition away from those who live it and into the hands of those who want to police it.
The truth is larger than the frame of the question. It requires us to be clear, to speak with humility, and to resist the temptation to answer on someone else’s terms.
Biology: Real, but Never the Whole Story
Biology matters. But it has never been as simple as the political slogans make it out to be.
Human development is not binary in the way some would like us to believe. Chromosomes vary: XX and XY are common, but not universal. Some people are born XXY, XO, or with other variations. Roughly 2% of the population is intersex, their biological characteristics don’t fit neatly into “male” or “female.” That percentage is about the same as people with naturally red hair. Nature has always been more diverse than the definitions imposed on it.
Even within the binary, biology does not map cleanly onto identity (i.e. how a person understands and experiences themselves) and does not always align with sex assigned at birth. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the World Health Organization all affirm that transgender identities are valid and not a disorder.
And it is worth remembering:
Even if we looked only at reproduction, that has never been the sole marker of womanhood. Many cisgender women cannot or do not bear children. They are no less women for it. To reduce “woman” to the capacity for childbirth erases not only trans women, but millions of cis women as well.
Biology is real. It is a part of the picture. But it has never been the whole story.
Law: Always Shaped by Power
The law has never treated “woman” as a fixed or eternal category. It has always been shaped and reshaped by politics, power, and struggle.
Early voting rights and revocation
In the years after independence, some women could legally vote. New Jersey’s 1776 state constitution allowed “all inhabitants” who met property qualifications to cast ballots, which included unmarried women and widows with means. For three decades, women voted alongside men. But in 1807, the state legislature rolled it back, restricting suffrage to white men only. This moment is telling: women’s rights were not just denied but actively revoked once their political participation was perceived as a threat.
The long disenfranchisement
After New Jersey’s reversal, women across the U.S. were barred from voting for more than a century. It took the 19th Amendment in 1920 to guarantee suffrage, and even then many women of color were blocked in practice through poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and Jim Crow laws.
Property and economic rights
For centuries, women were bound by the legal doctrine of coverture. A married woman had no separate legal identity from her husband. She could not own property, control her wages, sign contracts, or have any right to her own body. In many states, women could not open bank accounts without a husband’s approval well into the 20th century.
In practical terms, “woman” meant dependence, no matter her skills or labor.
Education and professional life
Women’s access to schooling was not always absent. The Protestant Reformation stressed literacy so that every believer could read scripture, which meant basic education for girls was often promoted, at least in Protestant regions. In the U.S., girls attended elementary schools from the colonial period onward, though often in separate or less-funded tracks.
The barriers came at higher levels. Colleges, universities, and professional training programs were largely closed to women until the 19th and 20th centuries. When women did gain entry, it was usually through separate institutions (women’s colleges) or under the label of “exceptional” cases. Elite universities like Yale and Princeton did not admit women until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Medicine, law, and ministry (i.e. professions tied directly to authority and public leadership) were especially guarded.
So while education in the broad sense was not denied to women, higher education and the professions that conferred power were systematically restricted. This division reinforced the legal and social message: women could learn, but only enough to remain dependent.
Racial exclusions
Even when rights expanded on paper, they were not extended equally. Black women, Indigenous women, Latina women, and immigrant women were systematically denied the full protections that white women began to claim.
For Black women, the promise of the 19th Amendment was gutted by Jim Crow. Literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation at the polls, and outright violence ensured that many were still unable to vote well into the 1960s. Legal segregation also excluded Black women from many schools, professions, and public services. Even feminist movements often sidelined them, centering white women’s struggles while ignoring or minimizing racial barriers.
Indigenous women were not recognized as U.S. citizens at all until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. Even after that, states found ways to keep them from voting, including residency requirements that excluded those living on reservations. Federal law systematically undermined tribal sovereignty, stripping Native women of both their political voice and the protection of their own nations’ authority.
Immigrant women often faced double exclusions. The Page Act of 1875 was the first federal immigration law, and it specifically targeted Chinese women, portraying them as threats to “morality.” Later, restrictive immigration laws barred or marginalized women from Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Even when they were legally present, immigrant women were often excluded from labor protections, social services, and public recognition as “real” women in the American body politic.
The story of women’s rights in America is not one of steady progress, but of gains won, stripped away, and fought for again. And at nearly every stage, those gains were framed through white womanhood, while women of color were left exposed to exclusion and violence.
To be recognized as a “woman” under the law often meant to be white, middle-class, and respectable in the eyes of the state. Black, Indigenous, and immigrant women had to wage separate, parallel battles simply to have their womanhood (their labor, their voices, their bodies) acknowledged as worthy of protection.
Contemporary law
Today, definitions continue to evolve. Title IX prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of sex, now interpreted to cover gender identity. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Supreme Court ruled that employment protections under Title VII extend to LGBTQ+ workers, affirming that discrimination “because of sex” includes gender identity and sexual orientation. The legal meaning of “woman” continues to expand, even as it is attacked in state legislatures.
The legal category of “woman” has never been static. It has always been contested, revised, revoked, and re-won. Law tells us less about what a woman is and more about who society is willing to recognize as one
and who it is determined to exclude.
Lived Reality: Who Gets to Say
Biology is complex. Law is inconsistent. But for most people, the meaning of woman comes down to lived identity:
how someone names themselves,
how they move through the world,
how they are recognized (or denied recognition) by others.
Trans women exist. Their lives are not abstract debates or thought experiments. They are daughters, mothers, coworkers, neighbors. Every major medical and psychological association affirms that gender identity is real, deeply rooted, and not a disorder. Trans women live as women, in both the ordinary rhythms of daily life and the extraordinary struggles against exclusion.
Cis women, too, resist being reduced to biology. No one introduces themselves by karyotype or capacity to reproduce. Infertile women, post-menopausal women, women who choose never to have children, all are fully women. Womanhood has never been confined to reproductive potential, even when law and custom tried to make it so.
And community matters. Feminism itself has always been a process of expansion. In its early forms, it centered white, middle-class women and excluded others. Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, lesbian women, and trans women all had to insist on being included, often against resistance. Over time, the category of “woman” has stretched, not because the word changed in a dictionary, but because people demanded their lived realities be recognized.
That history tells us something essential:
Womanhood is not granted from above.
It is not decided in courts, parliaments, or pulpits. It is claimed, lived, and defended in the everyday acts of those who bear it.
Closing Frequency
The question “What is a woman?” is not inquiry. It is interrogation. Its purpose is not to clarify but to control.
The honest answer is simple, if unsatisfying to those who want power over others:
A woman is whoever claims and lives that identity.
That answer protects cis women, trans women, and intersex people alike. It aligns with science, with law, and with lived experience. And it refuses the authoritarian demand that we shrink human reality into a trap disguised as a question.