"What is a woman?" asked the smug, unctuous politician. The question had no bearing on the day's legislative agenda. He just wanted to score points with transphobes in his base. Sure enough, within minutes, he was checking his social media feed for reactions.
Obvious to all but the oblivious, the answer is, "That's way too complicated to answer in a tweet." There are biological, hormonal, emotional, social, age, sartorial, and sexual components to gender identity. What you were labelled at birth is not the end of the story.
But, the next time someone asks, here's the sound-bity response: Read Kristan' Higgins' Out of the Clear Blue Sky.
In Higgins' 22nd novel, we meet all sorts of women: lesbian, straight, married, divorced, parents, grandparents, teenagers; family spanning three generations.
As Lillie Silva struggles with her son's leaving for college, her husband Brad (I know, right?) announces he's leaving to find "his joy." Predictably, said joy is in the form of an independently wealthy trophy wife. Lillie sets her sights on revenge. And, damn, her ideas about justice are wonderful!
Lillie's first person chapters are interspersed with 3rd person insights into Melissa, "the other woman." Of course, we're poised to boo and hiss. She is a supreme manipulator: vapid and unaware of any needs save her own.
Lillie is secure in who she's always been, a daughter in a Cape Cod family of Portuguese fishermen. Melissa, however, is decidedly not who she was at birth. In her first chapter, we learn that Appalachian-born Missy Jolene Cumbo (pause to savor the Dolly Parton reference!) fought her way out of poverty and a dysfunctional family by using her God-given assets. "Men. So easily managed."
My favorite bits in this book were Lillie's attempts at processing the loss, not of her idiot husband, but of her son. Higgins writes with such love. Any parent knows, "If you do your parenting job right, you're guaranteed heartbreak."
Along the way, we get to know Lillie's sister, mother, her mother's wife, Melissa's sister, and her niece. All very different; all very much women.
The transphobia of those who disingenuously ask, "What is a woman?" is misogyny in sheep's clothing. They mean to say, "I'm a man. I'll decide what is and isn't woman. I'll tell you what you can and can't do with your body. Your desirability depends on my assessment."
There is misogyny to be found in this book. Both Lillie and Melissa are shaped by past trauma. They come to terms with it differently, but that's the point. "Woman" is not a monolithic experience. There is room for diversity.
I'd write more, but I'm going out into the yard to find a skunk. Thanks for the idea, Lillie!
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