What am I?

Love this

What you are is a person. Unfortunately some don't much like the idea of women being people.

Gender fans will try to tell you that you're not a woman because you're not feminine. That's a pile of self-serving bollocks and you should carry on ignoring it.

Captainproton, you are perfect, just as you are. ❤️

This is a bit borrowed from a comment on Posie's Facebook feed but a good poster campaign would be a montage of a wide variety of women all wearing the Adult Human Female t-shirts to demonstrate that we come in all shapes, sizes, colours, sexual orientations, we wear dresses, trousers, overalls, lab coats and leotards, we have thin eyebrows, bushy eyebrows, pubes, no pubes, babies or not, muscly arms or bingo wings, we enjoy science, space exploration, baking, taking cars to pieces, drinking real ale and also gin. Some of us like handbags but many couldn't give a crap.

I'm getting a bit long winded now but you get the idea. To show that womanhood or manhood (maybe we need a parallel campaign for the men) is not an outward presentation but it's an intrinsic part of who you are, it's in your DNA. There are as many ways of 'being a woman' as there are individual women but we all share the characteristics of the dictionary definition. We are of the class of human that can (but don't always) produce eggs and bear young.

That this has to be defended and reiterated in 2018 is quite staggering but it seems this is where we are.

I'm.sorry if you feel unsettled, OP.

Jelly
Transwomen sometimes say that they are 'widening the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman'. They are not. You are.
I sort of agree with you Jelly, however the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman has always been wide. It is society’s expectation of what is is to be a woman that needs broadening to encompass the whole of womankind. Just as the expectation of what it means to be a man needs expanding to encompass even the most feminine of men. That way it will be impossible to feel you are in the ‘wrong body’ as your biological label will cover all possibilities.
(I’m a short woman too who can rarely be arsed to perform femininity ‘properly’).

If you ask a genderist 'what am I' and describe yourself as 'of the sex that can gestate' they won't even have a name for that

As a taller, broader woman I always found advice about “wearing your husband’s shirts” when you are pregnant baffling. Um, OK - if you really think I should expose my bra and a 6” wide strip of my pregnant belly... There are far too many stereotypes and assumptions about what women are like.

If girls are growing up seeing 'non-girly' girls being encouraged to transition because they 'must really be boys', it's going to be even more difficult for them to just be themselves than it was when we were growing up.

Transwomen sometimes say that they are 'widening the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman'. They are not. You are.

You are a gender-non-conforming woman. You are a woman because of your biology.

Of course you are a woman! I am a woman too. Throughout my adult life I have been mistaken a lot for a lesbian (by straight and gay people) because I dress very much as you describe and wear I live (abroad) this "look" seems to be very much a lesbian look! It seems that as humans we are very keen to categorise others. I know I am not gay - but when I was younger I found this confusing and asked myself - could they really see something in me that I was unaware of? Was I kidding myself that I fancy men? I hate this pigeonholing of people according to stereotypes and it seems to be getting worse not better! (Yesterday at the dentist my dd was given a choice of toothbrushes and she chose blue over pink - the dentist kept on pointing out that pink is usually for girls!)

I see the small people are out in force this morning.

The more we tell girls and boys what we think they should like and want to do simply because of their sex the more people will think they are odd.

That oddness should be accepted rather than made into a special catagory of people.

I am a small woman. I wear clothes from the children's sections because they're cheaper. That makes me no more a child than you a man.

If I am going somewhere "fancy", I'll wear make up. If I'm not I won't.

I've always enjoyed the friendly company of men as well as women (although it's only now that I'm married in my thirties with children that women seem to have really accepted me. I was always considered odd before).

I'm not a man when I'm not in make up and joking around with the guys. I'm not a woman because I've got a dress on. I'm not a 12 year old because I've got a 12 year olds jumper on. For added confusion I sometimes buy boy children's clothing!

I am a very small person, quite competitive and mouthy. I am a mother. I breastfed.

All my life I’ve felt big and cumbersome around other women, despite actually being pocket sized. The company of women makes me feel different. I don’t feel extra feminine around men but whatever I feel about my body isn’t affected by being round men.

Now I’m middle aged I realise there are actually millions of women like me, we aren’t women like the ones you see in Cosmo. We like what we like and we act how we act. When I was younger I didn’t fit in because I’d not encountered enough of the world to see it clearly.

I e just woken up so this isn’t very well expressed.

Of course you are a woman. Do not doubt it for a second. I am pretty similar and I did go through a phase of wondering if I was "trans" till I concluded that obviously any idea of what it was like to "be a man" would only ever be my own subjective perceptions, and the only thing I could "be" is myself.

The breadth of experience of what it is to be a woman is exactly as broad as the breadth of experience of what it is to be human. The butch lesbian who works on a north sea oil rig is exactly as female as the glamour model on a magazine cover. Neither is doing "woman" more correctly. Femininity and "being a woman" are entirely different things.

The really heart breaking thing to me is that if you were a girl making those choices today, you'd quite probably be encouraged to bind your breasts and start on some medical process to transition. It really does break my heart to see gender stereotypes being reintroduced this way.

Do you actually have to ask?

Because you can wear clothing that isn’t made for women and be a woman. You can lack interest in physical appearance and be a woman.

I thought this was known.

It's a good question. I would say we are both women. I am a SAHM and I love steam trains and the smell and hum of machinery like you do (If you get a chance, Kew Bridge Steam Museum is brilliant)
I wear long skirts but shave nothing. I too have had children and breastfed them.

I am not afraid of getting my hands dirty. I don't take selfies, I hate mirrors and my hair is usually tied back in a ponytail.

What we are is people who are women. Not stereotypes but still adult human females.

Well, you sound like a woman to me. A woman who doesn't conform to gender stereotypes, like me. I'm very happy being a not-stereotypically feminine woman.

I was never a 'feminine' girl but I turned out to be a...feminist! Not a boy.