6/15/2021 But how can you be born in the wrong body if there isn’t a woman essence that we all have in the same way? Where does that live? Where God does?Read Now In my Women’s Studies classes, we learned that gender is a social construct, and that while even biological sex isn’t always binary (but we meant intersex people or heterogeneous chromosome pairs; trans issues were barely a thing in Women’s Studies depts as recently as 2008), there is no inherent “woman” essence because the idea of what a “woman” does and means is a function of language and interaction, not anything (personality/psyche wise) inherently “feminine” in our minds. Like, you couldn’t “feel like” a woman because, if “woman” is an embodied concept, a woman is whatever people who are called women do, and people who are called women are as different from each other as we are from men.’ But the distinction still matters because it affects our material reality. One of my old professors tells me that, now, they teach the “born in the wrong body” line. But how can you be born in the wrong body if there isn’t a woman essence that we all have in the same way? Where does that live? Where God does? In our made-up hearts? Like, if “woman” is a linguistic concept that still organizes the world, how can you even be nonbinary? You only affirm the existence of the binary when you step outside of it. There is no embodied experience that exists outside gender discourse. Like, I’m not a “girly girl” and never was, but I always knew I was a girl even if I didn’t feel the exact way “a girl” or woman is supposed to feel (say, not giving a shit about babies or lacking a fondness for pink) because, to everyone who sees or otherwise interacts with me, I’m a woman (maybe outside some online spaces). It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m a woman either way because we live and create meaning in a society. I have no idea how this got past feminist and especially queer theorists. I think they were all too afraid or, if they tried to write something rigorous that’s also not exclusive in a cruel way, no one would publish it because they wouldn’t want to get canceled (because that’s who actually gets canceled: women. Men apologize, and trans people cry oppression). No one’s keeping anyone from being a masculine woman. Why the need to make it your whole identity if gender is a social construct, and we should all be cool with the thing a minority of people want us to “center” now?
I have no problem respecting trans and non-binary people and using their pronouns and all that, but they’re a sliver of the population, including in queer spaces, and we’ve all had to deal with pedantic silliness that holds back women’s activism because we couldn’t talk about periods without acknowledging that not all women get them. But before trans ideology took over, all women still didn’t get periods (hell, some large percent of adult females doesn’t get a period after menopause but sure lives a while like that and is still considered a woman). It doesn’t mean that periods aren’t a huge part of womanhood and especially girlhood. Girlhood, always a maligned state, is totally dismissed in favor of ideas about trans womanhood. But girlhood is an important component of what a woman experiences. The kind of girlhood you had really shapes you. Sure, trans people can say the same thing—that their “girlhood” was fucked up because they were in a boy body—but they didn’t have a choice, and people treated them like boys. They got called on in class, not cat-called, all that. And now you want to say you’re as much a woman as I am? Because if gender is a social and linguistic concept grounded in and constitutive of experience, you’re not a woman the way I am, and it makes total sense to separate trans and cis women in activism or bars or groups or dating and sex. It doesn’t even pass humanities rigor. How did we all just get stampeded by less than one percent of the population? Comments are closed.
|
Details
Archives
May 2023
Categories |