What is the English word for a human with a naturally occurring vagina?

In My Humble Opinion
82

This is a false analogy. Nobody’s talking about pretending that gender doesn’t exist… an obvious impossibility, given that people still present as male and female, and want to be recognized according to their presentation. We’re talking about people insisting on using words that require a knowledge of that person’s anatomy and medical history that’s typically only relevant in a medical or intimate relationship.

For example… I don’t pretend “I don’t see color.” I do. It’s part of seeing the whole person. But I don’t see so much color that I tell people “here’s Bob, my Black friend. He doesn’t really look Black but he had one Black parent and he’s had his hair straightened, so that’s why. Hey Black Bob, come over here and meet my friend Yellow Kevin. We’re just a happy pack of rainbow crayons here aren’t we?”

That’s why this sounds so stupid to me. Unless you’re a physician or intimate with someone, you never have any need to talk about whether their genitalia are acquired or inherited.

83

Right. The only reason you’d need a socially acceptable way to announce that Bob is black even though he doesn’t look black is if you had an interest in making sure nobody was being ‘fooled’ by Bob’s sneaky presentation.

Likewise for our hypothetical word. Its primary value would be to signal that this is a real/pure woman as opposed to one of those devious fake ones.

Or are we pretending that a transwoman, who has had hundreds of medical appointments and consultations and probably knows more about female anatomy than 99% of laypeople, is going to be confused by a PSA about uterine cancer?

“Wait!” thinks Sharon. “Do I even have a uterus? If only this PSA was using language to signify whether or not it is addressing humans with naturally occurring vaginas!”

84

We noticed, and we simply deem it unimportant. Much like people who bewail the conflation of “literally” and “figuratively”. In a strictly prescriptive sense, those people may be correct, but in the sense of real-world humans using the language, we’ve discovered that it’s fine to infer it from context. Even preferable, because the harm of pointing out someone’s differences far outweighs the concerns of language ninnies who are selectively clutching their pearls over what might be in the 17th edition of the OED (but not the first through 16th).

Likewise, some people are going to go around asking “but where exactly did your vagina come from”… until reality smacks them in the face enough to teach them that they don’t actually need to know that.

85

Excellent post.

Exactly. We don’t need a word in the general vernacular for “a person with a naturally occurring vagina” because it’s almost never relevant in casual conversation.

86

There are other standards like modesty standards. Public nudity still means something different for different people. That goes to modesty. There are women that are going to be uncomfortable being lumped into a group of just people. #MeToo certainly signals to me that we aren’t ready to give up those sorts of distinctions, and frankly may never give them up.

87

My apologies then. But note that your included poster uses “female/woman/girl” to describe gender identity. And I think there’s a difference in context between your examples and the OPs “I met a nice X last night. We’re going out again.”
I could be wrong though. Would you be sex specific in that context? Would you want to be described sex specific in that context?

88

Firstly, the person I was replying to talked about sex and gender, not just genitalia. And secondly, too often these medical issues are also political issues: abortion, contraception, maternity leave, the ‘tampon tax’, infant and maternal mortality, surrogacy, the inclusion or not of biological females in medical trials, the historical neglect of female-specific ailments like endometriosis…

Who is personally affected by these issues? The people the OP is asking for a word for. And why are they so politicised? Probably because the (also now unnamed) set of people who know damn well they will never be affected by them have so much power in society.

And then there are the knock on effects. Why is Pat, who uses they/them pronouns and has a young child, discriminated against by their employer, while Alex, who also uses they/them pronouns and has a young child, isn’t? It’s because Pat is one of those ‘humans with a naturally occurring vagina’, had to take time off to recover after the birth, needed time and space for pumping after returning, and their employer assumes Pat will be the primary caregiver, and also may want to have another child, which the employer considers disruptive.

I think we’re talking about a different situation. Eg, Jorge and Enrique are both Hispanic, but they appear to be different races, and are treated differently by the people around them as a consequence. Should it be socially acceptable to point out why?

89

Not to interrupt a good smoke-blowing deflective rant, but how do you propose that these issues will be helped by having a specific word for a born-vagina-person?

Again… how do you suggest this situation is alleviated by having an exclusionary term? If the workplace discriminates against the need to breast-pump, then it’s wrong simply on the merits of denying a biological necessity, and it’s discriminatory because the burden doesn’t fall upon everyone. It’s not because that person happens to be a (whatever label).

90

Didn’t ask me — but: At my age and in my milieu, I would use X = whatever term THE PERSON uses to identify, and consider it rude to discuss anatomical details with third parties. Let the other person be responsible for the assumptions in absence of evidence they may make.

91

Perhaps we can blame the listener for making presumptions.

But we’re allowing the presenter to self assign the word. We’ve said that people can use self identification as the definition of the gendered words. A woman is whoever identifies as a woman. Anatomically and in presentation style they can resemble a man, but they are a woman.

The question does arise then, why describe them as a woman at all? Why not just use the word person? Because the word “woman” is no longer of externally descriptive use at all, it really doesn’t provide the listener with any useful information. It can only potentially mislead. So why not just drop it? Use person.

Perhaps this is why some dealing with these issues prefer they/them/their.

92

That probably says it about the best.

93

I have so much respect for male to female trans people. That surgery takes balls.

94

You’re wanting a word at a precise level of specificity: you want to tell me about the genitalia your date has, but you do NOT want to tell me about their gender expression.

If you wanted to tell me only about their gender expression, you could say, “guy” or “girl” or “man” or “woman.”

If you wanted to tell me about their genitalia (!) AND their gender expression, you could tell me you were going out with a cis-woman, or you could tell me you were going out with a trans-man.

But no: you think it’s important to tell me about their crotch and nothing else, and you want to do that with a single word.

That’s really freaking weird, and I don’t want you to do that. But if all that matters to you is the genitalia, just use that word: “I’m going out with a nice vagina tomorrow” will communicate both the information you want to communicate about your date, and the information I should probably have about your priorities.

95

This is not the best thread for an off color trans joke. Please don’t do it again.

96

Not just moderately trans. Severely trans. :stuck_out_tongue:

Good to know that if I find someone attractive, that entitles me to deeply personal information about what’s going on in their pants.

Yes.

97

Oops. There are risks to typing on my phone. That was supposed to say “several”, of course. Thanks for pointing out my error. I will go fix that now, with my awesome moderator powers.

98

Right, and if there is some unlikely necessity to be specific, why does it have to be a single word that’s not an acronym? Completely arbitrary nonsense. I mean, why not insist that it’s a word with no more than three vowels, no double letters or fricatives, and must be a palindrome? Makes just as much sense, which is to say, none.

99

Maybe someone who is so invested in having a word for people with certain genitals can invent new ones, something like how non-binary, or NB, became enby.

A fabby or fab: assigned female at birth
A mabby or mab: assigned male at birth

Just throwing that out there since OP didn’t like acronyms.

100

Over in the abortion thread, the topic of birth control has come up, and a few quips have been made about women in same-sex relationships having to explain their “birth control” to their doctors. Of course, it may be fair to point out that simply saying your birth control is having a girlfriend might not be enough for your doctor these days, because your girlfriend could have a fully-functioning penis and all the other parts necessary to knock you up.

Kind of reminds me of that old riddle about the father and son getting in an accident and the doctor saying “I can’t operate; this is my son.” Once upon a time, that was considered a head-scratcher because people assumed the doctor would be a man, and the father was in the accident too. Now, you don’t even need to assume the doctor is the kid’s mother, because the kid could have two dads.

Anyway, the answer here is easy. Doctor asks woman about birth control. Woman says her birth control is her girlfriend. Doctor asks if girlfriend is a cis woman. If the answer is yes, end of discussion. If the answer is no, doctor asks some follow-up questions to ascertain girlfriend’s ability or lack thereof to impregnate the patient. Perhaps it would be handy to have simple terms for “people who can get pregnant” (a smaller group, incidentally, than people with naturally-occurring vaginas, and perhaps someday not even limited to that group), and “people who can impregnate people” (again, not all males, nor all men, nor even all cis men, and perhaps someday not even limited to men). But I suspect that, even if such terms existed, doctors would still need to ask more questions–some people are mistaken about their own fertility–and nosy bystanders might still have to be satisfied with less information than they’d like.

I went to law school with a trans man who has since married another man and given birth. It’s none of my business how he got knocked up, but I assumed his husband is a cis man and they did it more or less the old-fashioned way. (I do know it was planned; he’s written about how he went off testosterone in order to get pregnant). Others in my circle who follow him on social media have assumed that his husband was also trans, or at least that they did IVF for whatever reason. Again, we’re not entitled to the details, but do you see how easy it is for us to speculate? We can imagine and describe any number of possibilities regarding the genitals of the parties involved without an undue burden despite not having a single word that means exactly, no more and no less, what everyone used to think “woman” means.

Part of our social progress is peeling back layers of assumptions. It may make some people uncomfortable, like hearing “para Español, oprima numero uno” on the phone, but frankly their discomfort is not as important as the people who have been harmed or excluded by those assumptions.

101

There is a lack of consensus within the LGBTQIA world, so we’re in no position to treat those outside of it as violators for not following our inconsistent recommendations.

There are trans women who consider themselves female as well as women, and trans men who designate themselves male as well as men. I’m not talking specifically of those who have sought and completed a medical transition, either. They’re using “male” and “female” to refer to identity. Perhaps more to the point, their allies and colleagues are leery of making any specification that could serve to make them feel misgendered, make them feel like their gender identity is any less valid. In a hypothetical world where everyone agreed that male people and female people can be women, and male people and female people can be men, that would not be a concern, but in this world, to tell a woman she is male because she has a male physical morphology, a male sex, is to make her feel invalidated.

I understand the reason. But I still find it important and necessary to have a word that does mean the physical morphology. So, incidentally, do a lot of intersex activists. They have their own problems trying to draw attention to invasive nonconsensual surgeries performed on children and infants, when people confuse them with nonbinary people who don’t consider themselves to be of either gender.