#terfs #transmisogyny #slurs #transmisogynistic slurs #suicide #misgendering
Alright, so, a trans exclusionary radical feminist wants to know what I think a woman is. So here’s my answer.
It’s long, so it’s going under the read more. eh n/m here it is check it out.yes-no-idea @un-sweet-tea
The short answer is, a woman is a person who experiences womanhood, and a person who experiences womanhood is whatever she chooses to be.
Sounds like a crock of bullshit, right? That’s because you need context. So this is the long version.
I mean it’s easy to tell you what I was told a woman is, right? I was told that a woman is a person with a vagina and breasts who has a period and can have babies, and then as I got older I picked up some stuff about estrogen and about chromosomes to shore up the borders of gender-categories. In any case, aside from the fact that those rules don’t always work, and that there are always edge-cases to any set of rules, it was pretty clear. I was told I was a boy. Girls were what-I-am-not. That was my first concept of what a woman is. My parents told me this, my grandparents told me this, my cousins and aunts and uncles all confirmed it. So, naturally, I believed them.
And that was fine. I didn’t really care. The only way that gender was expressed among children was in what our parents told us to wear and what toys we were bought and then, in turn, taught to want. Well that all worked okay for me, because all I really wanted to do was wear clothes that wouldn’t upset my sensory integration issues (a consequence of autism, I’d much later understand), and read books intended for people twice my age, and occasionally make things with legos. Later, I had a computer. And everyone was fine with that too. After all, those are all Perfectly Normal Boy Things. So they thought I was a Perfectly Normal Little Boy. And I did too.
I’m telling you this because it becomes relevant later on. It’s an essential part of a schism that begins for me after puberty starts to take hold. I’m sure you and I can both agree that boys and girls are taught very different behaviors. Boys are given free reign to be raging imposing little fuckers who take up all the space and all the time they like, and are praised as go-getters and assertive. Girls are scolded for the same behaviors, and expected to make themselves small and quiet and obedient. This is the process of etching gendered norms upon gendered bodies. It’s essential, here, to point out that this process is entirely contingent upon where you sit intersectionally, and in what social context you are placed. For example, white women are hit with very different social expectations than black women, and are treated differently accordingly.
Well the thing here is that while I accepted the narrative that I was a boy, and liked activities and pastimes that my family and peers accepted as sufficiently boyish, under the surface I was internalizing other messages. This is the schism, between what I was directly told I was, and what behaviors and ideas about myself I was subconsciously internalizing. For those of you reading out there who have a big thing about female socialization, this part is very relevant for you.
The slow, quiet process of that programming didn’t start to manifest until puberty. That’s when things started to get… weird. When I reentered school in the 8th grade after a two year period of homeschooling (thanks, mom, you’re a lifesaver) I was just broaching into puberty and having a lot of Feelings about girls.
All the boys I knew were into girls. They wanted to get girlfriends and make out and have sex or whatever, that was pretty clear. But I didn’t really. Mostly when I saw the girls in my class, I was so starstruck that I wanted to hide myself. And something about this made me feel wrong. As if I was wanting something I wasn’t supposed to want. Simultaneously, I quickly grew uncomfortable with the way that “other boys” sexualized them. These norms of discourse about the so-called opposite sex combined with the images I received through media painted a picture of male sexuality that repulsed me.
I was already withdrawn, so it went more or less unnoticed that I was gradually withdrawing further into myself socially, whilst all along developing deeper and strong repressed desires. I was attracted to girls. So what? That’s normal, right? That’s normal for A Young Man.
But it’s pretty not normal to feel like there’s something wrong with you for it, right? I mean, isn’t that usually how lesbians are taught to feel about it? Not that I was thinking about that at the time, or even knew. I just knew that I felt Wrong.
And that just kept getting worse when it began to dawn on me that the only images of sexuality that I responded to were images of lesbian sexuality. Now I felt really disgusting. I thought, this is some kind of sick fetish thing, right? It’s wrong for me to like this, this isn’t any of my business, I shouldn’t be objectifying lesbians like this. But in images of heterosexuality, I felt nothing. Because I couldn’t put myself in either role. But still I wasn’t connecting those dots, so I just felt listless, and hopeless. Meanwhile, I’m feeling worse and worse about my body as time goes on.
Everyone tells me I look good — or at least that I would if I took better care of myself. But I can’t think of any reason to. I feel like a hairy lumpy frumpy disaster. The further along puberty gets, the worse I feel. But, again, I’m not making the connection. It all feels utterly abstract, like I’m just miserable all the time for no reason at all! The fact that I inhered my mom’s anxiety disorders and I have my autism diagnosis makes enough sense for me to not think about it. To my mind, I’m just broken.
If you’re looking for the “autogynephilia” angle to dismiss my feelings and experiences you’re gonna love this paragraph. ‘Cause this is the one where I talk about femboys and futa. I mean, I already thought i was messed. But now the first suggestion of queerness finally comes into play in my thick, insulated brainpan. ‘Cause suddenly, here’s a nominally male depiction of sexuality that I actually feel a connection to! Effeminate boys! Holy fucking shit!!!
But I barely have time to register that before self-loathing creeps up right behind, ‘cause watch out, the overt, in-my-face reality of having to navigate my life as a supposed dude says that if anyone finds out about this I will instantly be branded gay.
And… I mean, I thought to myself, maybe I am? Maybe I’m, what’s the word, bisexual. But I was uncomfortable calling myself this, it didn’t seem to parse, because I was only attracted to men if they were so androgynous that they could easily be taken for women. Still, incidentally, the only male-identifying people I have even the slightest twang of interest in are hella effeminate.
So now I feel disgusting about my body, I feel disgusting about how I’m attracted to women, and I feel paralyzed with fear about the notion that anyone could find out that I want to feel feminine. That’s right, I want to feel feminine! I did. And then I promptly looked in the mirror and thought, well, that’s impossible. I never can. So I better get used to feeling ugly and awful.
They say that when a person genuinely desires something, and they are made to feel shame and embarrassment for those desires, that’s when it catalyzes and metamorphosizes into curious complexes in the mind. It can lead people to manifest their self-loathing into loathing for those who are not ashamed of feeling the same things, or it can lead to it being parsed as a shameful fetish, or it can become the thing you thought was impossible that in time becomes the marker of self-liberation.
What women are denied by the patriarchy, that which they are taught they can’t be and are taught they can’t want or which they’re taught to be ashamed for wanting, becomes the conduit along which they come to realize that they can be anything, do anything, want what they want, no matter what any man or what any male-dominated power structure thinks of her. And what these things are depends upon what class of woman you are. A white women is not denied the same things as a black woman or a latina woman or an asian woman or an indiginous woman, and their respective liberations do not look the same. A straight woman is not denied the same things as a lesbian woman or a bisexual woman, and their liberations do not look the same. An able-bodied and able-minded woman is not denied the same things as a disabled woman, and a thin woman is not denied the same things as a fat woman, and a cis woman is not denied the same expressions and desires that a trans woman is denied.
It was made very clear to me that if I ever expressed a desire for femininity, I was going to instantly be the butt of every joke. From the time that I was an infant, the TV told me this, the magazines and comics told me this, even my own parents taught me this in their own way. Because a man in a dress is a joke, and a woman who was “really a man” is so disgusting, so vile, so sickening, that men vomit at the very sight of us, and women want nothing to do with us.
I learned these things from the time I was barely able to speak. I want you to sit with that idea for a moment, and consider what an effect that must have had over my life. Really suss out all the vast network of little consequences.
So when I realized that I wanted to be feminine, you know what I did? I repressed the shit out of it. I lived in denial of that desire for years, only permitting myself an exorcism in the dead of night in some dingy ERP chatroom, always worrying that someday someone might look on my computer.
I lived like this through high school. I grew a big bushy beard so that I wouldn’t have to look at my face, I let my hair grow long so that I could feel different from the other assholes around me, but still I lived with that nameless self-loathing. And I even fell in love with someone. We dated for the better part of a year, practically inseparable. And in time, I pushed her away, because being near to her made me think about shit that was so terrifying that it made me panic and withdraw at the very suggestion that I might begin to think about it. Because when I was with her, I had this kind of vicarious experience of womanhood. Because the feel of her hands and the softness of her body, and the way that she carried herself and dressed and cared for herself all struck me with a deep and dire longing.
And for years after that, even, I persisted. And all this time I couldn’t grow as a person. I was trapped in a suffocating concept of self that I’d outgrown half a lifetime ago but couldn’t step out of because of the terrible consequences I feared. I tried to go to college on my horrifying high school transcript and dropped out after two terms. I tried to get a job and burned out so bad I attempted suicide after nine months.
And it was only at that point, at the end of my ability to press on suffering and denying myself, that I finally met the first person I ever knew who was like me. Her name was Gwen. And she was transgender.
If you think that’s the end, you’re being way too optimistic. Because I fought the very suggestion that I was transgender. She had a sense about that, you see. But I denied vehemently.
I told her, my brother is transgender, and he allllways knew. And that’s true, from the time my little bro was tiny he was absolutely adamant about being a boy. But I had no concept of trans womanhood, and you just don’t grow up learning the same shit about trans guys. They’re kind of a niche thing, right? But “transvestites” and “men in dresses” and “chicks with dicks” were this universal fucking laughingstock that I was taught to laugh about from the time I was a toddler.
And I tell her well it’s about hating your junk, right? I don’t hate my junk, can’t be a trans, sorry, try the next blog. But she said nah, doesn’t really matter, it’s about how you parse yourself, about how you feel comfortable presenting yourself. And I say oh, okay. well I’m still not trans.
And the conversations go on like this. She talks about the concept of queerness and how that is a deliberately undefined quantity, about people who were neither men nor women, and it was all so utterly in the face of everything I’d ever learned about gender that I choked on it. I stubbornly refused to recognize how much what she was saying was lining up with how i felt and what I’d lived and what I wanted. It was too terrifying. Too horrible to consider.
It was only months on, when we had a big stinking fight, that she finally snapped at me about how she was wrong and I was a man.
And it was only at that juncture, that I realized what I was feeling in response, only made sense if I wasn’t one. Because I wasn’t rolling my eyes. I wasn’t frustrated with the suggestion that my maleness was bad. I was hurt by the insistence that I was male. And I had been hurting myself with that insistence for years, cramming myself into a dead cardboard cutout of an identity formed based on a grade school child’s interpretation of her parent’s wishes for her.
I seriously considered just killing myself that night. Never told anyone that before. I mean, there was a path forward, one raggedy ass deer track of a path, and I knew that if I went down it I was going to get turned on by so many people. They would be disgusted by me. They would refuse to talk to me. Some of them might throw me out or even assault me. It felt almost as bad as dying, thinking about that.
But I did it. Slowly, very slowly. I’d drive to a big box store and try to psyche myself up to go in and pick out something nice that I’d feel good about wearing and then chicken out at the door, or round the edge of the womens section not daring to even look at anyone or anything, before picking up a game and running back to my car to have a panic attack.
This is not the behavior of a man looking to play dress-up, incidentally.
Nor was the way I was so afraid I’d be throw out when I went to the hairdresser and showed them a picture of a girl and told them to cut my hair like that, that I stood outside the place in the rain for three hours, body clenched and terrified.
Boys will just have a laugh about femininity. It’s practically a genre unto itself on youtube. Wigs and cheap cardigans and mockery behind their eyes.
Even when I tried everything I could think of to get comfortable in my body and decided it was time to try hormones, I thought
Am I doing the right thing? Is this really for real? I must be wrong about this. There must be some other explaination. I was constantly looking for anything that would let me off the hook for this, a way that I could just wake up and realize that I could really be just fine and go back to my old clothes that I only wore outside and be a happy perfectly normal guy like anyone else.
I asked myself that question every single day. “Am I sure I’m doing the right thing?” And whether or not I was able to do what I needed to do any given day, I always came to the same conclusion.
It was a few months on into second puberty, my skin softening, my body hair receding, that my body mass started to redistribute. My arms and shoulders, the area of my body over which i’d felt the worst of my dysphoria, began to thin, and narrow. For about two weeks, I couldn’t think of a name for what I was feeling. It felt distantly familiar, but I couldn’t quite get a fix.
It was the absence of anxiety. I felt it like warm sunlight in my chest. I thought I’d turn into breeze and float away, I was so happy. And it all came together for me: I hadn’t asked myself in days. That was when I knew that I was doing it right.
when I looked in the mirror, I no longer saw some vague haphazard assemblage of human body parts. I was no longer dissociated from my own physical body. I was seeing my face, my eyes and my cheeks and my little summer freckles.
When I say that a woman is someone who experiences womanhood, this is what I’m talking about. I can’t give you a papertrail for my life story, I can’t give you a doctor’s note to corroborate my progression of complex emotional states. At the end of the day, the bridge which you must cross is to take me at my word that I am not manipulating you or manufacturing lies to take from you something which I covet but lack.
I am a woman, because I have experienced what it is like to deny my own womanhood, and found that the only choice was to let it out, to set it free, and in doing so to make myself free. I would surely rather die than ever put myself back in that tiny little fiction of false maleness ever again, but the beautiful thing is that I will not have to. I may have a marginal existance, due to a combination of disabilities and the trauma in my past that I am still overcoming, but I can live. And I don’t need your permission or anyone else’s permission to be me. I bonded to women, identified with women above anyone else, saw the world through a woman’s eyes, and now I am making that truth about me known every day and to every eye and to every ear. They want any excuse, any leverage they can find to pry me from my liberation and back into the subjugation of their interpretations, their ideas about what gender I’m supposed to be, about what I’m good for and what I deserve. But I refuse to yield.
My name is Katherine. I am 23 years old. And I am as much woman as any other.
Hey a lot of people are asking so I want to make it explicit that it’s totally okay to reblog this. Thanks for all your love and support, you’re all totally rad.
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