What’s in a name?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. That well known Shakespearean quote shows that the bard had perhaps more wisdom than some people today. 

Trans excluders often say that a trans woman isn’t a woman. Well actually they mostly shout or scream it. (It’s mostly cis women who say it about trans women,  cis men don’t make much fuss about trans men. Exactly why is an issue for another post). 

They say the stuff about how a trans woman’s body has developed differently because of the testosterone during adolescence, and because their life experience is different growing up, and so on. 

Both of those things are true, but so what? 

There are lots of variations in people’s experience. Take little people, who are born with a genetic variation called achondroplasia. A little woman will have a very different life experience growing up and her hormonal development will affect her body in profound ways. But does that make  her “not a woman”? 

If you want to define the word “woman” purely according to something as abstruse as the presence or absence of a small piece of genetic material or on the basis that she’s a bit stronger because of her hormonal development, or even because her parents bought her blue dungarees growing up instead of a pink dress, then I won’t try to stop you. But personally I am a great believer in the duck test. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. 

Today Keir Starmer has been pushed into agreeing to change his view on the meaning of the word “woman” which is, I suppose, a minor victory for the trans deniers, but it’s irrelevant to the real point. 

At the end of the day “woman” is just a word. Whatever definition you want to use for the label “woman” and whatever label you want to attach to a trans female, it doesn’t alter the profound woman-ness in a trans woman’s psyche. Call her by whatever label you like, but to treat her differently, to exclude her from the company of cis women because of an arbitrary label isn’t logical. I can’t see that it serves any purpose. And more importantly, it’s simply cruel. 

She’s still a rose no matter what you call her.