batmanisagatewaydrug-deactivate:

hey, I’m glad you decided to come talk about it! 

to be clear up front, I can only offer my personal views here; I’m not speaking for or on behalf of anyone. we all have different thoughts and experiences, and that’s… kind of the point.

I don’t define what a woman is, because I don’t believe that’s possible to do. there is no universal experience of womanhood - not one! even sexism and misogyny have looked different for every woman in the history of the world based on a trillion other variables - race, class, sexual orientation, location, religion, and so on. you could ask every self-identified woman on earth to define what being a woman means to them and get a different answer from every one of them.

and that’s because womanhood and assigned genders as a whole are… kind of fake. they’re only real because we gave them social power and act as if they mean something, because that’s how social constructions work. money doesn’t innately mean anything, but we’ve all agreed to act like it does, so capitalism happens. the genitals we’re born with mean things for our health and reproductive potential, sure, but they don’t come with innate personality traits. we made up gender roles and spent centuries reinforcing them; that’s all that gender is. you want to get gender critical? there’s your gender critical. there’s literally no reason why someone who isn’t born with a vagina shouldn’t be a woman, because “woman” is a category with no ground in physical reality.

being a woman is something that happens in the mind, or the heart, or the soul or whatever word works for you. you can debate the ~philosophical implications~ all day if you want, but I draw my line at acting like philosophy is more important than real lives. all I need to know is that there are women out there, thousands of them, whose lives are better and happier and more whole for being recognized as women. these women are willingly signing up to spend every day for the rest of their lives risking disrespect and violence just to be understood in a way that feels right; who the fuck am I to tell them they’re not really women? they’re working a hell of a lot harder for it than I am; I just happened to be born with a vagina and get the “woman” sticker slapped on me by default.

that got a little off track, but to me it basically comes down to a matter of recognizing that gender is a social construct that sucks and should be undermined at every opportunity - which means letting people define and question gender on their own terms - and having empathy for women whose experience is different than mine - which, again, is all women. I don’t need to personally relate to or even understand all of their experiences or issues to accept and support them. 

and, if I may cite a little anecdotal evidence, have you ever hung out with trans women? because it is literally impossible to spend time with any of the lovely trans women I’ve known and go “oh, that’s a man” unless you have the most shallow possible definition of womanhood.

anyway. that’s my spiel. it’s not very academic, and I’m not sorry about that.