Presumably it's a rhetorical question?
'This ‘minacious voice’ returns. It tells her, ‘You deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination.’ Later, however, ‘that fucking voice’ brings salvation: it reveals unto her the trans resurrection she must undergo to deliver herself from self-hatred. ‘You don’t have to feel this way’, it says.'
Heartbreaking.
'...women were innately sinful, in their bodies, whereas men were more likely to sin in the world, in their actions. Hence, holy women’s battles with evil took place entirely within the locus of their own flesh, whereas men’s occurred in the world of things and ideas and choices. Deprived of access to the earthly realms of priesthood and learning, women had little choice but to demonstrate their virtue in the one realm where they had control: their bodies.'
😔
'Ours is an era of female liberation, of ‘girl bosses’, of women being told that, if anything, they’re better than blokes at many social and political endeavours. And yet self-mortification has crept back in'
Hm. Perhaps there has been a time during which we tried to achieve equity and reparation for the many centuries of male domination by encouraging girls and women to consider the possibility of liberation; and perhaps the underlying woman-hatred and deeply entrenched power structures are not that easy to shift.