If biology and anatomy are the root of female oppression, and biology and anatomy cannot be changed (as many radical feminists argue) then we are left with a fairly nihilistic view of the hope for women’s liberation. If on the other hand, women’s oppression results not from women’s biology, but from a dialectical contradiction and resultant class struggle between men and women, then there is an obvious path forward: class war against men as a class.

Comme une classe sociale, qu'il faut abolir. Les gens qui font La Lutte Des Classes (au sens classique, donc contre le capitalisme) veulent-iels sauvagement et littéralement tuer / brûler les patrons ? Non, iels veulent mettre fin aux conditions matérielles qui rendent possible l'existence des patrons en tant que classe sociale. Les féministes (celles qui sont pour l'abolition du genre en tout cas, pas celles qui sont pour « l'égalité femmes/hommes ») aspirent à la même chose avec la classe des hommes.

C'est amusant d'ailleurs parce que les patrons se naturalisent aussi. Selon eux-mêmes ils sont naturellement déterminés, ils ont « du flair », « une intuition », ils sont bosseurs, énergiques, supérieurement intelligents, des capacités individuelles naturellement taillées pour avoir du succès en affaire et s'enrichir.

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Mais revenons à la biologie :

Simone De Beauvoir famously paints a vivid picture of the way that masculine myths use menstruation as a justification for isolating and oppressing women. Furthermore, feminist theorists have looked at the ways pregnancy is used as a means of controlling women by forcing reproductive labor on them, tying them to a nuclear family unit through familial obligation, and being a site of medical domination and intervention at the hands of male doctors. All of these experiences are real, a result of patriarchal oppression, and should not be denied.

The question we are left with, however, is simple: If a woman does not experience these forms of domination, is she a woman? Some women with polycistic ovary syndrome rarely menstruate or do not at all. Women with Mayer-Rokitansky syndrome also do not menstruate. Are these women still women? Do they still share the experience of female oppression even though they do not experience it around menstruation? To me, the answer seems obvious. Of course they are still women, they still are likely subjected to a host of other forms of patriarchal domination at the hands of men.

What about the countless women who are incapable of becoming pregnant? Does this disqualify them from counting as women? Are they now cast into the same group as trans women, consisting of people who face some misogynistic oppression but are not women? Of course not. Because again, we can recognize that they still experience life as women.

So it would seem that the idea that there are a universal set of experiences which women share which derive from their biology does not totally hold up, and that the cost of insisting on this theory is the exclusion of a significant number of cis women from the category of woman altogether.
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