Q: What does it mean to be a woman? Answer: I don’t give a shit
When I was little, I knew I was a girl. There was no questioning the idea. The sky is blue, puppies are cute and I am a girl. My gender was handed to me along with a brochure for being a human around the time I was born, I guess.
Sometime around age 10, I decided I hated being a girl. In the most dramatic way possible, I yanked all the skirts and dresses from my cupboard (including this adorable green skirt with sparkles on it) and declared I would only wear pants henceforth. This was around the time I gained unrestricted access to the internet and came across many trans men online. At the time, it felt like the solution to my feelings of ‘I don’t want to be a girl’. I toyed with the idea of possibly being trans for months, looking up binders and packing underwear (sorry mumma). I eventually arrived at the conclusion that while I did not want to be a girl, I did not want to be a boy either, and moved on.
As an infinitely wiser 20 year old today, I can say that my rejection of womanhood came from a place of internalized misogyny. You’re telling me that all I get for being a girl are painful periods and sexism? No thank you. The model of womanhood that was presented to me was very narrow; it revolved around motherhood and being objectified, neither of which I wanted. I lashed out at my female peers who were traditionally feminine because my brain had cemented the equation being feminine = being stupid, weak and vain, and I did not want to be stupid, weak and vain. I wanted to be strong and smart and be taken seriously, but it seemed like only boys had a monopoly over these things. I was bestowed with the title of ‘you are like one of boys’ by a group of sweaty 13 year old guys, and I wore that badge with honour. It isn’t actually the compliment I thought it was, because my worth was being based on the fact that I emulated traditionally male behaviour. The downside of being ‘one of the boys’ was that you were put in the unfuckable category because boys do not fuck one of the boys. And as a teenage girl looking to collect morsels of male attention and validation, this was annoying, and simply furthered my dislike for the other girls because they got showered with plenty of it. I spent most of my teenage years see-sawing between wanting to be a girl so that boys would like me, and not wanting to be a girl because I felt like I did not fit into the mould of what a girl should be.
When I turned 17, the same unrestricted internet usage taught me about internalized misogyny, and it helped me understand a lot of my feelings and behaviours. This also catapulted me into wanting to reclaim my womanhood from the degrading and limited stereotypes that society had laid down. For my 18th birthday I bought lots of makeup, and I began to wear short dresses and high heels. It was my way of forcing myself to unlearn those negative stereotypes. It was my way of declaring to the world, and myself, ‘Look, I can paint my nails and solve this complicated integral!’ It was nice at first, until it got tiring. The message also carried an unpleasant and self defeating undertone of ‘I can do all these smart and complicated things in spite of being a feminine woman’. It was exhausting to have to go out of my way to counterbalance each feminine trait with something that screamed about how I was a complete, three-dimensional person. So while this exercise was fun (I do a killer winged liner now), it still left me where I started.
Towards the end of my teenage years, every few months or so, I would have a long conversation with myself about what exactly it meant to be a woman, or what makes a woman a woman. Occasionally, I would subject someone else to these garbled thoughts, name-dropping Judith Butler in order to seem well-read (I have only read her Wikipedia page). I thought I was a very clever person to have these long winding internal monologues. Even as a 10 year old, I knew that having a uterus was not the defining feature of womanhood (which in fact, does make me cleverer than the average transphobe). I was aware that wearing dresses or having long hair were also not the defining characteristics of womanhood either because appearances aren’t gendered; a man doesn’t become less of a man if he wears pink. Plus, it is reductive to state that being a woman simply entails presenting a certain physical appearance. At the same time I was going through my ‘being hyper feminine as an act of reclamation’ I thought that being empathetic, nurturing and kind is what made me a woman, but that is just sexist because (a) these stereotypes are derived from the image of the motherly woman, and are used to justify the stance of woman being destined for domestic and social servitude, and (b) no gender has a monopoly over being empathetic or nice. This simply left the option that being a woman was just a ‘feeling’, but what the hell does that even mean?
Dear Shania Twain,
In your 1999 hit song ‘Man, I feel like a woman’, you state that you ‘feel like a woman’, but how does one know what it feels like to be a woman, if one does not know what a woman is? I eagerly await your answer.
Every iteration of my gender-themed soliloquy left me successively more frustrated and confused. What does it mean to be a woman? Quite frankly, I no longer give a shit. I no longer see the value in intellectualizing and over-analyzing my experience. I don’t know where my gender came from or why it’s here or what it means, and I don’t care. Toddler me was more interested in riding a tricycle than spending hours going in circles thinking about gender and womanhood, and she was doing it right.
Perhaps somewhere down the line, divine inspiration will come to me, and I will finally understand what it means to be a woman, but until then, I am done trying to figure it out. ‘I am a woman’ is a whole sentence with no follow-ups or justifications or explanations, because I don’t know them. And I don’t care.
