Do women exist?

Or are we a product of male imagination

Something unusual has been happening to the concept of women in Canadian arts, culture and social service organizations and even certain branches of government. Woman appears to have become an insufficiently broad idea -- & one dependent on self-declaration and not material reality – & also one of secondary importance to something else that’s much more pressing. The concept of women, the word we used for the category of adult humans of female sex, has become, if the comm copy from many of these organizations is to be believed, outdated.

The good news of the Tapestry Opera’s recent announcement of the Women in Musical Leadership training program was dampened by a release which was not referring to women as much as to female-identifying people. I have been writing about women in the conducting profession for at least 8 years, and it’s mostly been solitary work. Now that the world is noticing the problem, it’s deciding to abandon the vocabulary in which the problem can be clearly stated for something that is confusing and presumes being a woman is a situation one can identify with or not, and come in and out of at will.  Has the scarce presence of women in the conducting and opera directing professions been because they’ve made a foolish choice of identifying as female? Choosing ‘female-identifying’ shows to what degree the problem is not understood. Like hires like, and male homosocial solidarity and man-to-man mentorship in the conducting profession and in the arts in general is something that should be highlighted and understood. Women always ending up in highly practical, support role tiers and people-skills positions like assistant director, assistant coach and choral conductor without ever being given a chance to author their own large-scale works is another issue to look at. Women’s bodies and stereotyping around women’s bodies was also hugely important. They can only be credible in small scale stuff in classical orchestras, or the French rep (as Jorma Panula said out loud) and their sexiness distracts male orchestra musicians (according to Vasily Petrenko). Then there’s the matter of taking time off to have children: we know that’s one of the main reasons for the gender pay gap in any profession, and why the top leadership professions are still male-dominated in just about any sector. Women cannot self-identify out of being the bodies who give birth. If they can delegate it to their male partners, I’m sure some woman would have thought of that by now.

So: the physicality of being female matters. It leads to the stereotyping, homosocial exclusion. We tend to be smaller, our voices weaker, and when they get louder to be heard they get higher too. Women in leadership position telling men what they can and cannot do tend to remind men of their mothers, consciously or not – and often face irrational resistance for that very reason.

None of this matters apparently – as much as it matters signalling that transwomen too and anybody who identifies as non-binary is welcome to apply to this Women in Leadership Program. On the absurdity of the non-binary loophole another time: is there a significant number of trans women who are trying to build a career in conducting? Have you met a single one, have you asked her about the obstacles? I bet many of those obstacles are sui generis. If the program managers believe that trans women are women, no questions asked, why not keep women as a general category, and if you encounter a transwoman applicant, you treat them as any other applicant? (There is a good recent example of the way to go about it on the NextUp comedy website which released the Funny Women 2019 competition finals recording early in the 2020 lockdown: there was one trans woman in the finals. Nobody felt the need to change the entire category into Funny Female-Identifying People 2019. The transwoman even made some excellent jokes about the way she’s different from the rest of the finalists.)

The ‘female-identifying’ also puts all women in a category that they apparently belong to by an act of self-identification. How would this ever make sense? I don’t identify as a woman; I happen to be one. There is no extra step required. The problem is what the society (philosophy, history of science and medicine, visual arts, history of classical music and opera, Hollywood, internet porn, etc etc) thinks having this body means and ought to mean.

The F-I construction also shows lack of knowledge about the state of women’s rights anywhere else in the world that’s not wealthy and Anglophone and university-educated. I’ve said this elsewhere before and will continue saying it: I grew up in the part of the world where there is a deficit of female births due to selective abortions. Did those fetuses ~ identify ~ as female or was there a simple genetic test that decided what sex the baby was going to be? A friend tells me he used to work in a country where he would notice menstrual huts in back yards of houses – dirty shacks where menstruating women would be put away due to their filthiness. I follow Hibo Wardere on Twitter, an anti-FGM activist and survivor, and none of the problem she’s raising awareness about has anything to do with how women identify. How about Malala? Maybe she could have screamed at her shooter, My gender today is non-binary unicorn, so jog on? How about Tapestry’s own opera about sexual slavery? Could Oxana G just have said, Buddy, listen, you got it all wrong, I’m non-binary, you see, you can give me my passport back.

But the female-identifying and its variants appear to be taking in Canadian cultural life. The Mary Margaret Webb Fund for Women Composers page on Soundstreams also adopts the F-I. The Musique 3 Femmes uses a variant: woman-identifying. The new Carol Shields Prize for Women in its announcement release used “women and non-binary authors” (opening itself up to future pranks) but the current site shows that the copy writers sobered up about the mandate and use the category women consistently. (Women can’t have their own things? It always has to be women and somebody else?, I wondered when the prize was announced. Look at how ecstatically the CBC grabbed on to the non-binary part, more than any other media company.) I think I first saw the F-I in a major arts organization in Canada on the Tiff website some years ago. I went back today, and it appears that in the intervening years Tiff has thought better of it: Share Her Journey and the supporting pages do indeed now refer to women in the film industry.

I’ve been noticing the avoidance of the words women and female in various public health campaigns too – pap smear awareness campaigns, for example – and that’s particularly odd to notice in organizations that are supposed to centre women and their bodies. All the period poverty organizations have abandoned the word women and replaced it with the ugliness that is the menstruators. (Talk about reducing women to bodily functions! Shall we call men jizzinators in the prostate cancer awareness campaigns?) Period Purse talks about marginalized menstruators; Period Packs is here for all the menstruators and Ottawa community members. Bleed the North supports all the menstruators in need. The 2019 Nova Scotia Period Poverty Summit tackled “barriers many people face when it comes to accessing monthly menstrual products” and advocated for “non-menstruators” to also be educated on what periods are. The media are beginning to ape this vocabulary: Global News and the Toronto Star are perfectly fine with referring to “people who menstruate”.

Statistics Canada has recently opened up consultations about the terminology it intends to use in the next demographic census. From what I could see, it completely abandons the word sex (biological sex) and it intends to use the word female gender, male gender and non-binary. A person of “female gender” is somebody whose “gender was reported as female. This includes cisgender and transgender persons whose current gender was reported as female.” It adopts the highly contested terms like “cisgender”, “sex assigned at birth” and “gender identity”. There is no consensus about either of these concepts in the Canadian society, nor is there a consensus in the life sciences, developmental psychology and psychotherapy as to what they mean and whether they should be widely used. They also require some college education, probably a BA, and excellent English-language literacy. All the same, the Statistics Canada, that once temple of precision, is willing to adopt them in national surveys. Particularly strange is the presumption that sex is assigned and not observed. There is a committee assigning sex at birth? My parents should have been better negotiators then.

I suspect that all this is happening because we as a wealthy society, highly digitized and narcissistic, are continuing to believe that we can fantasize – think -- our way out of having a body. Bodies are sexed, and mortal. And we don’t like to be reminded. Only some philosophers have looked the death part in the face – and even fewer have contemplated the sexed bodies. Our life in the Big Tech Anthropocene remains in many ways on that same and very ancient continuum. 

Happy International Female-Identifying Day, Female-Identifyers! Thank you for reading the very first edition of Long Play; I owe you a more cheerful one next time.

x LP