imagine lemony snicket narrating your transition, though.
Rachel said, “I’m cis, but—” a phrase which here means ‘I have a very large surprise waiting for me later in life’.
“Perhaps you have been influenced by all the transtrenders,” opined Mrs Scorseby. ‘Transtrenders’ here refers to a small group of people who, for reasons quite beyond Mrs Scorseby, enjoy dressing up in particular sorts of specialized undergarments and avoiding various gristly and untimely demises at the hands of local gender authorities.’
Gender is a very complicated business for some people. Many people live their whole lives as the same gender they started with, in the same way many people are fortunate enough to remain in the same house in which they were born, a house which never burns down or goes into foreclosure or finds itself due to be invaded by mysterious operatives with nefarious purposes. But some rare and unlucky people wake up one day to an urgent and undeniable phone call, and after that there is simply nothing else to do but throw anything that comes to hand into a rucksack and take off for the Scottish highlands in a false beard.
My favourite thing about the whole ‘no man of woman born’ thing is that it applies to a very broad church.
For example:
People born via c-section (no man of woman born, meaning natural childbirth, aka, the Shakespeare approach)
Women (no man of woman born, aka, the Tolkein approach)
Non-binary types (see above)
Aliens (no man of woman born, with the meaning of man being in the ‘mankind’ sense)
Artificial intelligences (see above again)
Transmen (no man of woman born, the man-ness appears to come later as gender is a social construct. Arguably borderline, I know.)
People carried by a man (no man of woman born)
People grown in vats (no man of woman born)
Basically, anyone who isn’t a human cisgendered male delivered via natural childbirth by a woman could kill Macbeth. (Given the equipment via science!, the child of a transwoman born via natural childbirth would still count as unable to.)
It’s odd that you can divide mankind into ‘Macbeth killers’ and everyone else, even though everyone else is in the minority, especially if aliens are real and we create AIs capable of murdering Scottish kings.
there are two genders: macbeth killers and macbeth
Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
oh my fucking god, thank you for writing this. mom called to wish me a happy 8th of march this morning and i felt like a total fraud. on the other hand, women’s right to vote, to abortion, to contraception – in short, everything that concerns me as someone assigned female and with a ‘female’ on my ID still concerns me and will possibly concern me for a very long time.
that’s the problem you get if you generalise and scream how only women’s experiences are valid in feminism – what about people who get some of the women’s experiences because we are assigned female?
just moving along like everyone else 