Before the Cage: How "Woman" Was a Social Location — and How Biological Essentialism Stole It

Tracing the Global Histories of Fluidity, the Rise of Control, and the Ongoing Fight to Reclaim Human Becoming.

Before empire and conquest, “woman” was a shifting, relational life-path — not a biological fate. This piece traces how that freedom was stolen, and why reclaiming it is essential for all who seek to belong.

Introduction

There was a time when even the notion of “woman” was unknown. A time when our ancestors, had they heard the debates and declarations we now endure, would have laughed — not in cruelty, but in the simple knowledge that such boundaries were absurd. Life moved in cycles then, not in cages. People were known by their relationships, by their seasons of being, not by fixed and oppositional categories. Across the world, long before conquest and empire carved division into the earth, what we now call “women’s lives” were shaped through countless relations: through kinship, through age, through care and contribution. To be was enough. To move, to change, to become — these were understood as the natural currents of living, not disruptions to be explained or justified.

This remembrance comes at a cost. It comes because there are those, even now, who sit as gatekeepers and declare that I, an autistic trans woman, have no claim to womanhood at all. They deny not only my life, but the deeper histories that once allowed so many ways of moving through the world. As much as it pains me to engage with such banalities — to answer questions that ought never to have been asked — I write this as a long digital gestalt, a gathering of memory and knowing, first for myself, and perhaps, if it finds its way to others, for them as well. It is a reaching back beyond the fracture, beyond the lie, toward the wholeness that once was and might yet be.

For the cage of biological essentialism — the cruel reduction of “woman” to womb, to bearer, to lesser — did not fall from the sky. It was built, slowly and deliberately, in service to power. It was constructed to seize control over bodies, to bind labour to hearth and home, to protect inheritance lines, to reproduce a world where ownership passed cleanly from father to son. Biological essentialism was never a simple recognition of reality; it was a weapon sharpened against those who once moved freely through life’s many phases. It was a narrowing of possibility, a violent claiming of life’s cycles by those who would profit from its containment.

The history of “woman” is not the history of bodies alone. It is the history of a social location — a dynamic, living place within the human family — and of the systematic shrinking of that space into a biological cage. The consequences have been profound, not only for those forced into the category of “woman,” but for all of humanity, whose freedom to move, to become, and to belong has been bound by chains that were never necessary, and never natural.

A World Before the Cage — Examples of Fluidity

Before the cage was built, before “woman” was narrowed into a biological fate, there were many ways of living, many ways of becoming. Across the world, people moved through life not as fixed categories, but as part of living, breathing networks of kinship, spirit, and relation. To speak of “womanhood” in these times was not to speak of anatomy, but of a shifting place within the cycles of life — a role one might enter, leave, and return to as time unfolded.

What follows is not an exhaustive account, for the fullness of human ways of being cannot be contained in any list. It is a glimpse — a tracing of some of the ways in which lives we might now call “women’s lives” once flowed freely, without the bars of essentialism to confine them. It is a reminder that the rigid structures we are told are natural were, in fact, an imposition — and that once, across many lands, there were other ways.

Indigenous North America

Long before European colonisers arrived with their rigid binaries and anatomical fixations, many Indigenous nations across North America understood gender as a fluid and relational aspect of life, not as a fixed biological fact. Among the Diné (Navajo) people, for example, the existence of nádleehi — individuals whose roles and identities moved across what Western systems would later define as male and female — was an accepted, respected part of the community. A nádleehi might be assigned male at birth yet take on roles, clothing, and responsibilities often associated with women, or may move between roles depending on circumstance, ceremony, or calling.

What defined a person was not the shape of their body, but their relational and spiritual place within the web of life. Gender was not simply a classification, but a state of being in connection with others, with the land, and with the sacred stories of the people. To be a caregiver, a healer, a weaver of memory — these were honours bestowed through lived relation, not dictated by anatomy. Reproductive capacity was not treated as destiny; it was one part of life’s many unfolding gifts, neither more sacred nor more binding than any other.

In this world, to be recognised was to be seen as a whole being — a constellation of relations, transformations, and contributions. The arrival of European settlers, with their laws, their churches, and their brutal enforcement of male/female hierarchies, was not a correction of chaos but a profound rupture. The imposition of biological essentialism shattered older ways of understanding, severing the fluid ties that had once allowed people to move through life without having to stand trial for their existence.

Precolonial West Africa

In the societies of precolonial West Africa, gender was a dynamic thread woven into a much larger fabric of lineage, seniority, and contribution. Among the Yoruba, for instance, a person’s standing within the community was defined far more by their age, their familial connections, and their achievements than by any simple anatomical category. Fertility was honoured, but it was understood as one phase of a person’s life — not the sole or defining measure of their worth.

Women, far from being restricted to domestic or secondary roles, wielded considerable political, spiritual, and economic power. They ran vast market associations that controlled trade and goods; they held positions within religious institutions as priestesses and spiritual leaders; they could become titled chiefs, rulers in their own right, with authority that rivalled or surpassed that of their male counterparts. An iyalode, for example, served as the political voice of women in Yoruba society — an office of negotiation, leadership, and wisdom. In some kingdoms, women even ascended to the highest forms of rule, standing as oba or queen regents in their own right.

Here, to live as a “woman” was not to be confined to reproduction or dependence, but to occupy a shifting space of potential: to lead, to trade, to prophesy, to raise crops and children, to engage in the fullness of life. Biology alone did not anchor a person’s destiny. The colonial encounter — with its Christianised gender binaries and Victorian moral codes — would later seek to erase this complexity, casting African societies as “primitive” precisely because their gender systems did not mirror Europe’s narrow divisions. In truth, it was not primitiveness but richness they sought to destroy.

Classical and Medieval Japan

In classical and medieval Japan, the shaping of lives was marked more by duty, lineage, and circumstance than by rigid biological scripts. Among the samurai class, onna-bugeisha — female warriors — fought alongside their male counterparts, wielding naginata and bow with deadly precision. These women were not anomalies, nor spectacles; they were members of families who expected them to defend their homes, their clans, and their honour. The capacity to protect, to lead, to die with courage, was not limited by the shape of one’s body, but by the needs of the time and the bonds of loyalty that held communities together.

Gender, whilst present in courtly life and poetic tradition, was contextual rather than absolute. Womanhood did not preclude political cunning, martial skill, or literary brilliance. Figures like Tomoe Gozen, immortalised in the Heike Monogatari, embodied strength and strategy, not as contradictions to their sex, but as fulfilments of their roles. Meanwhile, within the layered hierarchies of Buddhist monasteries and aristocratic households, the lines between roles shifted constantly, depending on age, status, marriage alliances, and political necessity.

It was the later imposition of Neo-Confucian ideals — particularly under the Tokugawa shogunate — that hardened these fluidities into stricter gender hierarchies. The movement from possibility to confinement was not natural; it was policy, economy, ideology. And as the country opened to Western powers in the nineteenth century, further binary reinforcement arrived alongside guns and treaties. Yet before these pressures, womanhood in Japan was as much an art of timing, relation, and necessity as it was a matter of body. It was a role entered and exited with grace — not a cage into which one was thrown at birth.

Indigenous Australia

Across the ancient lands of Australia, where kinship mapped both the living and the dreaming, identities moved with the flow of story and responsibility rather than along fixed anatomical lines. Among the many Aboriginal nations, gender roles existed, but they were intertwined with spiritual obligation, age-grade systems, and intricate networks of kinship law. A person’s role could shift across their lifetime, as they accrued knowledge, fulfilled ceremonial duties, and moved through the social world shaped by the Dreaming — the ancestral order that connected all beings across time.

There were women’s ceremonies and men’s ceremonies, but the lines were not drawn solely at birth. What mattered was the role one was prepared for, the teachings one received, the custodianship one could carry. Some individuals were recognised as embodying a balance of roles; some were known to walk between the pathways traditionally marked for different genders. In these spaces, relationality to land, to ancestors, and to kin held greater meaning than the simplistic biological markers that Europeans would later impose.

With colonisation came the attempted annihilation of these fluid orders. Missionaries, in particular, sought to erase Aboriginal gender structures, enforcing European marriage models, binary schooling, and legal categories that had no place in the ancient kin systems. Yet in the stories that survive, and in the custodians who still walk the songlines, we see glimpses of a world where identity was a movement, a responsibility, a sacred task — not a sentence pronounced at birth. Here too, "woman" was not a biological enclosure but a way of being within a living world.

Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Even within the very continent that would later export the most aggressive forms of gender essentialism, traces remain of a different understanding. In medieval and early modern Europe, “woman” was not a simple biological designation, but a stratified social location, layered with meaning far beyond the body itself. To be a wife, a mother, a widow, a nun — each carried distinct legal and spiritual identities, each conferring different rights, responsibilities, and social standing.

Nuns, for instance, lived outside the expectation of marriage and childbirth, devoting their lives to prayer, scholarship, governance, and in some cases considerable political influence. Within the convent walls, women could write, teach, and lead — not as inferior reflections of men, but as complete beings within their own sphere. Widows, too, often gained rights denied to wives: the ability to own property, to represent themselves in court, to conduct business in their own names. Their status shifted not simply with the body, but with the tides of life, death, and fortune.

These distinctions reveal that even here, before the full codification of Victorian domestic ideals, gendered life was less about static biological roles and more about social function, timing, and relation. It was only with the tightening grip of Protestant moralism, colonial ambition, and the emerging capitalist state that womanhood began to harden into the narrow, reproductive destiny that would later be taught as natural law. Even in the heart of Europe, the story of “woman” was once broader, more complex, and more human than the cage it would become.

Summary

Across many societies, before conquest and colonisation narrowed the meaning of life itself, to be known as a woman was not a simple matter of flesh. It was a position held within intricate webs of kinship, spirit, economy, and time — a role that could shift and deepen as a person moved through the seasons of their life. Biology was a thread, but never the whole tapestry. Across the Navajo lands, in the markets of Yoruba cities, on the battlefields of medieval Japan, along the dreaming tracks of ancient Australia, and even within the stratified ranks of medieval Europe, “woman” was not fixed, not anatomical, not inevitable. It was a becoming. It was a way of standing within the world, of holding relation and responsibility in forms that moved as life itself moved. It is the forgetting of this truth — and the deliberate erasure of it — that made the building of the cage possible.

When and Why Biological Essentialism Took Hold

The tightening of gender roles into biological cages did not happen by accident. In early modern Europe, as the forces of capitalism began their long ascent, and as the Protestant Reformation reshaped the spiritual landscape, new demands were placed upon human bodies — especially those of women. The growth of commerce, empire, and industrial production required a more disciplined, more predictable population. Labour needed to be ordered. Inheritance needed to be secured. States needed to raise armies, and families needed to produce obedient workers.

In this crucible, women’s lives were increasingly reframed not as complex journeys through relation and community, but as national property — their primary role recast as reproducers of future citizens. Scientific discourse, once fluid with medieval uncertainties, hardened into new certainties under the banner of the Enlightenment. Philosophers and physicians alike declared that women were not fully autonomous beings but “incomplete men,” their bodies biologically designed for domesticity, passivity, and childbearing. Anatomy was seized upon as destiny; difference, once social and spiritual, was reduced to a matter of flesh and function.

This was not a flowering of knowledge, but a narrowing — a violent reordering of human potential to serve the needs of an emerging capitalist and Protestant world. The freedom to move through life in multiple roles, to transform with time and circumstance, was recast as deviance. Womanhood was redefined not as a social location within a web of relations, but as a permanent biological condition — one that justified confinement to the home, submission to husbands, and exclusion from the public sphere.

Colonialism: Exporting Binary Gender

As Europe expanded its reach across the globe, it carried with it not only armies and merchants, but a rigid new world order of gender. Colonisers brought their binary models into societies where fluidity, transformation, and relational identities had long shaped life. Across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, Indigenous gender systems — rich, diverse, often spiritual in nature — were declared savage, unnatural, or immoral. In their place, European powers imposed a narrow binary: male and female, ruler and ruled, dominator and dominated.

The British Empire, in particular, took pains to criminalise and erase Indigenous gender roles that could not be neatly slotted into its hierarchical structures. In India, hijra communities — long recognised and revered for their sacred roles — were subjected to policing and legal erasure. In Africa, matrilineal societies were broken down, and women’s political and economic powers were suppressed under the guise of “civilisation.” In the Americas, Two-Spirit traditions were attacked as heretical and sinful, severing ancient ways of belonging that had held communities together for millennia.

Gender policing became a tool of imperial control, as vital as any musket or missionary. It was easier to govern a people stripped of their own categories of meaning and forced into the narrow definitions imposed by colonial power. Essentialism — the lie that body alone determines destiny — was not a discovery. It was a weapon, sharpened to cleave apart the intricate social and spiritual tapestries that once made human life richly diverse.

Legal Codification

With the body newly declared destiny, the next step was to enshrine that belief into law. Across Europe, and throughout the territories colonised under its rule, gender was frozen into legal categories — fixed, surveilled, enforced. Inheritance laws declared that property should pass through male lines, preserving wealth and power within a narrow, patriarchal elite. Marriage laws subsumed the legal existence of women under that of their husbands, rendering wives as extensions of their spouses rather than full persons in their own right. Under the doctrine of coverture in English common law, a married woman ceased to exist as a legal entity: she could not own property, enter contracts, or seek redress on her own.

Citizenship itself — who belonged to the nation, who had rights, who could vote, who could hold office — became bound to a binary conception of gender, justified by appeals to biology and natural law. Those who could bear children were seen not as full participants in civic life, but as vessels for the reproduction of the state. The old fluidities of relation and responsibility were swept aside, replaced with rigid scripts backed by force.

The law did not merely reflect biological essentialism; it actively produced it. It turned ideology into structure, belief into binding decree. What had once been a matter of custom and shifting relation became a matter of surveillance, punishment, and exclusion — all in the name of order, property, and power.

Summary

Biological essentialism rose not from the soil of nature, but from the machinery of empire, capital, and control. It was never an innocent description of difference. It was a tool — a brutal and efficient one — for reshaping human life into forms that served the demands of wealth, war, and patriarchy. In service to these systems, the fluidity of life was narrowed into the rigidity of category. A world of becoming was frozen into a world of confinement, and the consequences have echoed across the centuries, fracturing lives, stealing futures, and teaching generations to mistake chains for nature.

Consequences of Biological Essentialism

The imposition of biological essentialism did not merely confine individual lives; it dismantled entire ways of being. For women, the consequences were immediate and devastating. Roles that had once been flexible — warrior, merchant, healer, spiritual guide — were stripped away or made conditional upon male permission. The spaces where women once led, once taught, once commanded the rhythms of life and death, were closed off. What remained was a narrowing: a life increasingly defined by reproductive capacity, by the expectation of motherhood, by the measure of worth in bodies rather than in deeds. Those who did not conform — those who were barren, those who loved differently, those who refused the roles assigned — found themselves punished, whether through legal exclusion, social exile, or violent correction.

The very understanding of the body itself was reworked under this regime. What had once been the natural unfolding of life — the mysteries of birth, the arts of healing, the cycles of growth and death — became territories for management, for medicalisation, for control. Traditional midwives were pushed aside by the rise of obstetrics, a field dominated by men who approached childbirth as a pathological event to be conquered rather than a communal rite to be supported. Childbirth, menstruation, menopause — all became sites of intervention, of institutional surveillance. The female body was no longer a bearer of life within a community web; it was a problem to be solved, an object to be regulated, a vessel to be managed according to the needs of the state, the church, and the marketplace.

Yet the harm did not stop with women alone. Entire societies were reshaped in the image of rigidity and surveillance. People were taught to police one another’s conformity to narrow biological and gender norms, to fear deviation, to treat variance as contagion. Ancient ways of knowing — those that embraced fluidity, transformation, and relational identity — were systematically destroyed, severing communities from the wisdoms that had once sustained them across generations. The loss was profound, not merely cultural but existential: a diminishing of the human capacity to imagine, to become, to live outside the narrow prescriptions of power.

Economically, too, the damage was immense. Women’s unpaid labour — in raising children, maintaining homes, tending the sick and elderly — became the invisible foundation upon which capitalist economies were built. Their work, essential yet unacknowledged, allowed the public world of commerce and governance to flourish, while those who performed it were dismissed as secondary, as incidental, as naturally suited to servitude.

And still, the echoes of this theft shape our struggles today. Those who carry the living memory of fluidity — trans people, nonbinary people, intersex people — are treated as threats to a fragile order that must, at all costs, maintain its illusion of inevitability. The question “What is a woman?” is wielded like a weapon, not to seek understanding but to enforce conformity, to lock us once more into the colonial essentialism that demands bodies tell only one story, that demands life itself be bent into submission. Yet the very existence of those who live beyond these confines is proof that the lie was never complete — that the old ways, though buried, were never wholly erased.

Final thoughts …

I stand between worlds, still holding the fracture in my hands. I know now what I have always suspected in my bones: that “woman” was never purely biological, never a simple function of flesh. Across the deep span of human history, to be known as a woman was to be woven into complex, relational, and spiritual tapestries — to hold roles, responsibilities, and powers that shifted with the seasons of life. It was to live in connection, to move through phases of being, to belong to a web far older and more enduring than the cages built by empire.

The reduction of womanhood to biology was not a recognition of truth; it was an act of theft. It was a strategy of control, sharpened and wielded across centuries, designed to bind bodies to labour, to lock futures to inheritance lines, to crush the wild and generative fluidity of life into forms that could be governed and profited from. It was never nature that demanded this narrowing. It was power. It was fear. It was the desperate grasp of those who could not bear the abundance of human becoming.

To reclaim the full dignity of womanhood — and to build the next world — we must refuse to inherit the lie. We must remember that our bodies, while sacred, are not cages; that our souls, our selves, our movements through life, cannot be measured by the narrow scripts imposed upon us. We are not accidents. We are not deviations. We are not anomalies. We are part of a deeper rhythm that no colonial logic, no essentialist decree, can truly erase.

There was a time before gender, and there will be a time after it. Perhaps our task — heavy though it may be — is to walk the bridge between them. To carry memory forward through the wreckage. To carve, with each step, a path for those who will one day be born free of these chains. To refuse, even in grief, even in exile, to forget what it is to belong to a world where becoming is not a battle, but a birthright.