Immaculate Forms
The question of what defines a woman is very much on people’s lips right now, especially in the UK where the Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to appeal to biology. No matter that no actual biologists were consulted, or that members of the British Medical Association have described the ruling as “scientifically illiterate”; the concept of a “biological woman” has now apparently been enshrined in UK law (if not yet in the Equality Act, over-enthusiastic compliers in advance please note).
Much of the commentary around the issue also maintains that we (that is humans) have always known the difference between men and women. It also maintains that the definitive test for femininity is the possession of XX chromosomes, as opposed to XY for men. This is despite the fact that sex chromosomes have only been known to science since 1905, and that many humans are known to have chromosome patterns that are neither XX nor XY.
Of course if you are an historian who specializes in gender diversity (which I am) it is important to understand how people in the past understood sex and gender. There is no greater expert on such issues than Helen King. She’s a Classicist by training, and Professor Emerita at the Open University. Her particular specialty is the history of medicine, and her latest book, Immaculate Forms, takes her on a quest to understand how the female body was understood from ancient times until now.
King has structured the book in four main sections, each of which looks at four supposedly feminine body parts: the breasts, the hymen, the clitoris and the womb. I’ll follow her structure here.
Breasts are, of course, the most obvious signifier of womanhood, being both large and visible. It is significant, therefore, that the anti-trans movement has made it an article of faith that only cis women can have them. Trans women, they claim, can only gain breasts through having implants. King knows better. Breast tissue is common to both men and women, and with appropriate doses of hormones trans women not only grow breasts, but can lactate. I have been roundly ridiculed on social media by TERFs for stating this, so it is something of a pleasure to have support from Professor King.
Men are also deeply obsessed with breasts, for entirely different reasons. King does a fine job of showing how, down the centuries, male doctors found excuses to fondle women’s breasts, and even sample their milk, all in the name of ‘science’. The clergy have had a harder time of it. Did the Virgin Mary have breasts? If so, did she lactate, and did baby Jesus suckle? For some that was just too icky to contemplate.
Whereas breasts are famed for their visibility, the hymen may not exist at all. King refrains from coming down on either side of the debate, if only because hymen-replacement surgery for divorced women is now apparently big business in certain parts of America. If the hymen did not exist in the past, it certainly does now. And, whether or not it did exist, the concept of the hymen has had a massive influence on women’s lives through history.
In contrast, we can be certain that the clitoris exists now, because so many male doctors claim to have been the first person to discover it, rather in the manner that Columbus claimed to have discovered the Americas. Women, like the indigenous Americans, have known where it is all the time.
Of all the female organs, the womb is undoubtedly the most powerful. Not only is it responsible for nurturing new life, it has also been accused of being the source of all manner of female ailments down the years. Hysteria, anyone?
Well actually no. The ancients were big on how the womb might wander around the body, and how it might get hungry and angry if it were not made pregnant on a regular basis. However, the mental illness of hysteria, which we now associate solely with women, was once a more general condition.
King reveals that the term was coined as a mental illness in 18th Century France. Frightened aristocrats found that, if they were diagnosed with a mental illness and confined to a nursing home, they might be spared the guillotine. Hysteria only became a women-only condition after WWI because it was felt that diagnosing soldiers with such a term impugned their masculinity; so ‘shell-shock’ was coined as an alternative.
While a certain type of man only values women as long as he can make them pregnant, we now know that even possessing a womb is not a definitive indicator of womanhood. King notes:
Of course, not all women have a womb; some are born without one, others lose it to surgery, and others have transitioned to being women.
For those wanting more background, the intersex variation that results in a woman being born without a womb is called Mayer-Rotikansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. King notes that at least one such woman has successfully received a womb transplant and become pregnant using her own eggs.
So it is complicated. How one defines a ‘biological woman’ is open to debate, has changed regularly with changes in medical knowledge, and will always end up excluding some people who were assigned female at birth. King notes:
These modern methods of appealing to chromosomes and hormones, features of our embodiment that others can’t easily see and of which we are entirely unaware, can still prove far from conclusive in deciding whether someone is a man or a woman, and we rapidly revert to the evidence of our eyes. Culturally, we continue to crave binaries.
And yet…
Men and women have been set up as entirely different, with their bodies claimed as bearing clear witness to this. But one of the messages from studying bodies across history is that, while the dance between describing difference and acknowledging similarity has been going on for centuries, binaries simply don’t work.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Supreme Court and the government continue to refuse to listen, either to history or to science.
Title: Immaculate Forms
By: Helen King
Publisher: Wellcome Collection
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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