The question sounds biological. It rarely is.
Bodies exist. Chromosomes exist. Hormones exist. Biology shapes aspects of human development. Yet the meaning societies attach to bodies, the roles, expectations, permissions, risks, protections and hierarchies associated with them, is not determined by biology alone. These meanings are socially organised through law, culture, religion, economics and power.
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that one is not born but becomes a woman (Beauvoir, 1949/2011). She was not denying biology. Rather, she was exposing the social process through which societies interpret bodies and assign them meaning. The category “woman” is therefore not simply a biological description; it is a social position produced through history, institutions and cultural expectations.
To become a woman is to enter a social category.
And social categories are never neutral.
For some of us, that becoming did not unfold gradually through age or socialisation. It arrived abruptly, through moments when our bodies were no longer treated as entirely our own. Moments when responsibility quietly shifted away from those who acted and towards those who endured. Moments when silence felt safer than speech.
I do not need to provide detail. The pattern is historical.
Across centuries, women’s bodies have been regulated legally, morally and socially. In the United Kingdom, marital rape was not recognised as a crime until the landmark legal ruling of R v R in 1991. For much of legal history, women’s testimony in sexual assault cases required corroboration, reflecting institutional scepticism toward women’s accounts of harm. Women’s distress was frequently medicalised under diagnoses such as hysteria, framing emotional suffering as pathology rather than as a response to social conditions (Showalter, 1987).
Even credibility has historically depended on respectability, an uneven standard shaped by race, class, disability and sexuality. Feminist scholars have long documented how some women have been believed more readily than others, while many have been excluded entirely from dominant narratives of womanhood (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 1981).
Sexual violence is therefore not an anomaly within the historical experience of womanhood. It has been structurally embedded in how societies have organised power around female bodies.
But this is not the whole story of being a woman.
Because the category itself is unstable.
Judith Butler later argued that gender is performative, produced through repeated social norms and practices rather than simply expressed from biology (Butler, 1990). Gender is not something one simply is; it is something societies continually enact and enforce. Through everyday interactions, expectations and institutions, people learn how to “do” gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Behaviours are rewarded when they align with dominant norms and corrected when they diverge.
In this sense, gender is less a fixed property of individuals and more an ongoing social process.
Transgender women illuminate this dynamic with particular clarity.
If womanhood were purely biological, it would not require constant policing. It would not provoke political panic, legislative battles or intense cultural debate. The anxiety surrounding transgender women reveals something deeper: that womanhood has always been socially organised, negotiated and defended.
Transgender women do not destabilise womanhood. They reveal its construction.
They show that identity is lived and embodied within social recognition, not reducible to reproductive anatomy alone. Their experiences expose how fiercely societies defend particular definitions when those definitions are tied to power.
History shows that the boundaries of womanhood have always shifted.
Racialised women were long marginalised within dominant feminist movements. Disabled women were frequently cast as asexual or incapable of autonomy. Working-class women were labelled immoral. Lesbian women were pathologised. Today, transgender women face political and legislative battles over belonging.
Each era redraws the boundary.
Each redraw reveals that the boundary was never fixed.
To ask “What is a woman?” is therefore not simply a question of biology or ontology. It is a question of authority.
Who decides?
Who is protected?
Whose harm is recognised?
Whose voice is believed?
Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that power operates not only through laws and institutions but through knowledge itself, through the categories societies construct to describe reality (Foucault, 1978). The categories through which we understand bodies shape whose experiences become visible and whose remain marginalised.
For many women, cisgender and transgender, the nervous system learns vigilance early. It learns that safety is negotiated rather than guaranteed. Bodies can become politicised, scrutinised, legislated, desired, dismissed or violated.
For neurodivergent women, this negotiation may be even more complex. Social expectations that are implicit for others may not be intuitive. Masking can become a survival strategy. Direct communication can be misread as defiance. Compliance can be exploited.
When sexual harm intersects with social marginalisation, silence is not simply personal. It becomes structurally reinforced.
Yet womanhood cannot be reduced to vulnerability.
Women have also been theorists, organisers, leaders and architects of social change. Across centuries they have challenged the very institutions that constrained them. Feminist movements have transformed law, labour rights, reproductive autonomy and cultural norms.
Transgender women have also been central participants in struggles for liberation, even while being excluded from parts of feminist discourse.
If gender is socially constructed, then it is also socially reconstructible.
Existential philosophy reminds us that identity is lived within conditions we did not choose. We are shaped by history, but we are not entirely determined by it. We inherit categories, but we also participate in reshaping them.
For me, being a woman now means holding tension.
It means recognising that harm has been patterned, not random.
It means understanding that definitions shift because power shifts.
It means acknowledging that womanhood has been both imposed and reclaimed.
It also means refusing narrowness.
Womanhood cannot be reduced to reproductive capacity.
It cannot be reduced to victimhood.
It cannot be reduced to stereotype or compliance.
It is a social location that continues to evolve.
The future of womanhood will not be secured by policing its boundaries more tightly. It will be secured by expanding dignity, autonomy and safety for all who live within it.
The question is not only what is a woman?
The deeper question is this:
What kind of world are we constructing when we answer?
Cara Langford Watts
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (2011). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1949)
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–167.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1 – An introduction. Pantheon.
hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press.
Showalter, E. (1987). The female malady: Women, madness and English culture 1830–1980. Virago.
West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243287001002002
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