Am I a self-defined woman?

[iisme]

A woman's group I am a member of is now stating that it is for 'self-defined women'. I appreciate that this is about inclusivity and I don't have a problem with trans-women joining the group. But I feel uncomfortable about the idea of being a self-defined woman. Firstly, I don't feel like I define myself as a woman. I am a woman and I'm fine with being a women (though pissed off with all the crap that comes with it) but it doesn't define who I am. I also don't feel, even if I am defined as a woman, that I am self-defined. I recognise my female biology and this is part of what makes me feel like a woman, and I experience life as a woman in a male-dominated world, and this is the other part of what makes me feel like a woman. But most of what I feel it is to be a woman is defined for me by society - something that is put on me because I am female bodied, and not something that I am choosing or defining myself.

Another woman's group I was looking at is for 'self-identified women'. This feels less problematic for me but I'm still not sure about it. I do identify as a woman in the ways I described above, but I again, I feel like most of the issues around being a woman are about external identification - because I am identified as a woman by others. My own internal identification - the core of who I feel who I am - is non-gendered.

Anyway, I'm trying to work through my thoughts and think about whether these phrases really are an issue and whether this is something I should address in the group. I'd be really glad to hear other opinions on this.

Whenshewas, but that isn't what you have said at all!

You have said that you experience gender identity as being on a spectrum and I have asked you if you can describe that spectrum.

And that is basically it. For posts and posts.

If you are only really comfortable talking about your gender experience, then please go ahead and talk about it! That is what I have been asking you to do!

What do you mean when you say that you experience gender identity as a spectrum?

Do you mean that you are a specific gender identity, gender queer for example, and that genderqueerness is on its own spectrum. If so, what is at each end of the genderqueer spectrum in your experience?

Or are you saying that all the gender identities are on one big gender identity spectrum in your experience? If so, in your experience, where on the spectrum is your gender identity in relation to the others and what is at the ends of the spectrum?

welsh

I'll fully admit I find it really hard to express. To me it's something I feel most when I don't feel quite right or quite myself.

For example I naturally sa

Oops posted too soon.

I naturally have a small waist, after I had my kids my waist was not as small. I didn't like it and it made me feel less feminine, so I tried to lose some weight and exercise more.
I still have a bit to go, but my waist is back to looking more feminine, just more like me and I feel comfortable again.

Slugs, I have seen numerous different images of the gender spectrum, as people mean different things.

I think that X, Y, Z is an excellent diagram of how people experience gender personality traits and expression.

That's a great link, thanks slugs

Whenshewas, does that link help you to explain how you experience gender identity as a spectrum?

Or do you not want to explain?

Or do you not want to explain

I will explain (can't now as have to drive somewhere but will be back later).
If I'm honest explaining makes me nervous as it will probably involve gender stereotypes and that could well anger people.

Thanks, Whenshewas. Hopefully people will not get angry!

Thanks almond. I have no idea if this will make sense to anyone.

Purely thinking about how I feel about my body is quite interesting using that grid. I've not gone into cultural stuff as just the body was complicated enough.

Body shape - 6
I'm very pear shaped, small waist big hips. If I see my silhouette it's clearly a woman's and I quite like that.
Height - 3
I'm 5 foot 7, so short for a man but tall for a woman. I know shorter friends who say they do feel feminine being small but I have no experience of this.
Strenght - 3 I used to like weight training so I'm pretty strong for a woman, a bit stronger than some male friends but not many.
Being pregnant - 0
I can't explain this one, pregnancy at best made me feel asexual. Didn't feel feminine, I just felt ill and was in pain most of the time. I'm sure pregnancy makes some women feel great but I felt awful.
Skin - 5
My skin is very soft, it's not like dh's skin.

So if you put all that together I score about 4/5 on the female axis and 1/2 ish on the male. So how I feel about my body is that it's pretty feminine.

As I mentioned in a different post at one time my waist was thicker. I didn't like this, it made me feel less feminine and less attractive. It just didn't feel quite right for me.

I am also far less physically strong than I used to be (no time to go the the gym). But this didn't make me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. Occasionally I would try and shift something and it would occur to me that pre children I could have shifted a lot more easily. But being less strong didn't bother me in the same way as losing my waist did.

I wouldn't be able to join that group. I don't identify as any gender. When pushed, I say "no gender, but biologically female". As part of that biology, I face society's expectations and limitations and I can't challenge that, in the same way that someone who was born biologically male receives the inherent privilege that comes with being male, and can't challenge that, regardless of what they later identify as.

It is really not easy to keep a feminist group going and try to find a form of words that doesn't exclude half your potential membership. Maybe a little bit of compromise might be worth considering?

Those diagrams make zero sense to me as they have no explanations. Graphical depictions of concepts are supposed to make things clearer! Pictures speak 1000 words and all of that. To me the only thing (and perhaps this is a truth of itself) the pictures make me think is that they are the product of fuzzy thinking. Axes need to be described - what does x, y and z represent? What is the 1-6 scale on 'male' and 'female'? To me these are purely biological terms. How can you have a 1-6 scale of something that you generally are or aren't anyway? Is it truly possible to be male and female at the same time or to have no sex at all?

WhenSheWasBeingHorrid I've done a few gender tests (granted internet type ones so not very valid no doubt) and they appeared to me to be about gender stereotypes. Weirdly enough I came out of both of them being told I was in fact biologically a man. This seemed to be because I picked some options that were much more stereotypically masculine than feminine (and apparently this overrode my statement that I was biologically female). So I think I indicated that I was quite aggressive and that appearance wasn't very important to me for example.

I do understand how you in your head have a scale about how feminine you feel. Personally I very rarely feel feminine, but I don't feel masculine either. I do have characteristics that fit into gender stereotype boxes though (clearly not always the 'right' ones), and I have obvious female characteristics like most women. I'm the same height as an average man, and like you have done weight training in the past. When I was fit and muscly I didn't feel any less masculine and more feminine though, I just felt/looked great!

Is that 'gender spectrum' a joke??

Its a primary school blob painting with 3 axes drawn on it! It explains nothing. Well, then again, there is nothing to explain

Yoy and me both - I was told I was "cis male" by one of those surveys despite having ticked the box to say I was biologically female.

I suppose for me it comes back to my earlier post about how for me gender has never been self-defined, it's always been something forced on me from outside. So (when I was young) my body was very straight up and down -small breasts, narrow-ish hips, broad back, not much of a waist (due to the broad back). I was also very muscular. Now I liked my body but was very aware that it was the sort of body to which society attached labels like "androgynous" and "boyish" - wrongly IMO. (I had an interesting compare and contrast session with some male climbing friends on arse size, occasioned by three of us being jammed into the back of a small car. It dawned on us that because men's hips are effectively the same size as their waists, it wasn't just that I had bigger hips in proportion to my body - at 5'3" and 36" hips - a slim build for a woman - my hips were bigger in absolute terms than theirs - and they were 6". That's biological dimorphism driven by selection - my "boyish" hips were still in actual fact noticeably female).

nooka that's fine if you don't feel feminine or masculine I imagine they don't make much sense.

I would probably struggle just as hard to get over a sense of feeling British accross to someone who didn't experience it.

I wonder how much of this is language, Shewas (finding your posts v interesting). I unquestionablyffeel female - I bleed every month, I've been pregnant (like you I was a bit meh about that experience - I didn't "bloom" or "glow", and largely saw it as a rather uncomfortable albeit interesting means to an end). But I suppose for me "feminine" is a very artificial state. I've gone through phases of "performing feminity" and enjoyed doing so, but it's always felt like a stage performance to me, a costume I take on or put off at will (or sometimes adopt as a disguise because society expects it of me). The only piece of femininity to be deep seated enough to be permanent oddly enough is my hair which I've always worn long largely because as a very plain woman I would look "mannish" if I cut it, and I don't want to look like a man.

But a bit of me wonders whether what I call "femaleness" you call "femininity" or whether we genuinely see the world differently. I'm not sure how we'd know.

I feel very much the same way Lurcio. I might not feel feminine (or be judged that way) but I know I am a woman and have no problems with that now (although periods are still a bugger!).

However I didn't feel that way as a teen, which is probably one of the reasons I worry about all this trans/gender stuff, my teen self would have been very worried by it and if social media had been around I might have been pulled into some problematic thinking. Instead I was just quite angry and abrasive, but I got through that, found myself and became much more confident in my skin partly from dating a very tall guy which stopped me feeling incredibly unfeminine (too tall and too awkward).

I really worry that some gender non conforming children instead of being encouraged to think that the stereotypes and boxes are wrong think instead that they are wrong. This doesn't seem to lead to good outcomes. Surgery and hormones, concerns about passing, worries about finding love, loss of fertility, and possibly ongoing identity issues too. It just doesn't seem like something to celebrate to me.

I wonder how much of this is language

a bit of me wonders whether what I call "femaleness" you call "femininity" or whether we genuinely see the world differently. I'm not sure how we'd know

I'm sure we don't see the world in exactly the same way but it sounds like there are a lot of similarities.

Whether you feel feminine or masculine, neither or both has precisely no bearing on whether you are male or female/man or woman

YY nooka.

The problem with basing it on "feelings" is that it's too subjective. And anyway, how is a feeling so important? You could talk about mental illness, but depression isn't only a feeling, there are biological markers which show in people with depression.

Perhaps it's like religion? Religion feels totally, tangibly real to those with faith. And for those without it seems insubstantial.

I would never profess to tell somebody that they don't feel a certain way or that they should feel differently to how they do. But I'm struggling with

You are correct that "Feeling British" is a somewhat made up thing. We've only had nation states in the last 2-4 centuries, they didn't always exist, and they gained importance mainly because of Napoleon waving his willy around. Perhaps more arbitrary for countries which have land barriers, rather than sea, but still. One can change their citizenship (can you change nationality?) if they spend time living in another country and learn enough about the language, history and culture. This is what we as humans have decided denotes citizenship. But it's a set legal process - I don't get to say you know what, I've been thinking about this for a long time and I'm French now. I really love baguette and I'm totally chic. I was drinking wine when I was five, this is proof of my ultimate Frenchness. Please call me Madame Botts from now on.

Perhaps it's like that? We made up nationality. You can supposedly do a test to figure out where your ancestors came from, but in fact there are no hard genetic markers between (esp. neighbouring) countries, and mostly it matters where you were born and your parents' citizenships as to which you inherit when you are born. So we made up gender as well. No biological markers - only for sex, and we tend to broadly assume that gender correlates to sex which is why we decided (inconveniently) to use the exact same terminology in male, female, man, woman, girl, boy, and pronouns.

I don't know that there is a spectrum for nationality, but certainly many people consider themselves to be part X and part Y. Dual citizenship is a thing. My DS is born British to British parents but being brought up German, and I expect he'll identify with both of these.

Is it helpful to make a parallel like this? I am finding it a little bit so. Certainly I can relate to identifying as a national, or a citizen, even though I can intellectually understand that there is nothing which inherently differentiates me from a person of a different nationality. There might be broad similarities or differences in appearance and ethnicity, but there are plenty of British nationals who have a non-Caucasian appearance.

But I don't know - at the same time, I feel like my nationality is such a small part of who I am. My citizenship affords me the right to vote in my home country. It restricts where I can and cannot travel without the correct documents, which seems bizarre when you think too much about it, and because my chosen citizenship matches my birth citizenship I have all of the culture and language of being brought up in Britain.

I don't really know what it means. I think I'll have to think about it some more. Would love to hear others' thoughts on the topic, though.

I think it does make sense in terms of self defined/self identified.

I'm not self defined British. I was born British and my Britishness was defined by my place of birth and my parents' Britishness. It's not something I chose.

But I do self identify as British (or English). I accept that default option which was given to me. I don't feel an overriding need to question or redefine it, it just is.

The problem with basing it on "feelings" is that it's too subjective. And anyway, how is a feeling so important? You could talk about mental illness, but depression isn't only a feeling, there are biological markers which show in people with depression

So if it was possible to diagnose gender disphoria using biological markers that would be OK?

I agree, OP. Would 'people who identify as women' work better?

Both 'self' and 'definition' are full of so many problems, aren't they?!

You don't self identify as a nationality though. You can self identify as French all you want but if the French Government disagree, then you are not actually French.

Whenshewas, I think what you are describing in your post is a mixture of wanting to express femininity and living in a female body.

I don't want to get to the stage where people feel they have to declare, 'well I breastfed but it meant nothing to me!' or 'the norm for my sex is to have a small waist compared to my hips but that is nothing to do with me' Of course people should experience the world within the body they have. We have sexed bodies.

Femininity is about personality traits, clothing etc and anyone can have those. But men don't have the shared experience of living as female bodied because they are in no way female bodied.

So I think lots of women go through pregnancy and experience ambivalence about it. But they are the only people who do. And it is only women who are supposed to have those particular relative waist and hip sizes. The healthy waist range for men is higher than that for women.

I don't think what you have written is a stereotype. It isn't a stereotype to compare yourself to the height, physical size and strength and pregnancy experience of other women. That is part of the feminist act of not seeing the male body and male experience as the human default experience.

What I don't see is what this has to do with gender identity. Gender identity is a different thing to you being aware that you have a female sexed body. If anything, it is the opposite. If you really believed in gender identity, then your explanation would be transphobic, wouldn't it? Because there is no physical difference between men and women, according to the theory of gender identity.

Shortcut, I think the image of the spectrum is useful (the Xyz one, not the one with numbers, which represents something different) because it potentially shows masculinity, femininity and non gendered experiences as being on different axes. So being more masculine does not make you less feminine. I think that is an improvement on putting masculinity and femininity on the same axis.

Whether any of these charts illustrates gender identity I don't know, because what is gender identity?