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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

What am I?

96 replies

captainproton · 13/10/2018 06:16

I am female but I work in a traditionally male role. I don’t wear a wedding ring because it would get damaged. I am tall and wear men’s clothes because they fit on the arms better, and they have pockets for my pens/screwdrivers etc.

I decided long ago that I wanted to present androgynous at work/life so as not to be judged by a female appearance. Having grown up around males who never held me back I have emulated the way they operated through life. I wanted the opportunities males had and the fun life they had (if you like the smell and hum of machinery) and went for it. Yes I have come across sexism and been groped by dick heads. But not in over a decade (since I stopped being sexually attractive I suppose). Being tall I can look men in the eye or down on them if they are short. I have a quick wit and will use it against any man who thinks I do the cleaning at home and my husband the diy.

I don’t wear bras if I can help it, nor make-up or heels. My personal grooming mirrors that of men. If men are required by social standards to deplete their hair in that area then so do I. That basically just means I take care of facial hair and anything that might show when swimming.

I am a mother and I have breastfed and am proud of my body for these things. It’s about the only time I felt proud of my body. And believe me I have wished I was born male because it’s hard sometimes being the only female and facing really big hurdles to be accepted.

what am I in this modern world? I stand at the school gates and listen to a female world discussing hair, nails, makeup and now it seems eyebrows? I have never taken a selfie in my life. I find it all so vain and tbh pointless. And I am lost. I am more comfortable around men, and I don’t flirt with them. Although I did meet my husband at work but that was long ago and took 6 years to develop. Our discussions at work revolve around things like “are the lunar landings real”.

Btw if it’s relevant I am very concerned about safeguarding issues around self ID.

A female friend of mine said once that my small circle of mum friends found me endearing because I literally couldn’t give a shit about what I wore and looked like.

Because I consciously dress in men’s clothes and choose to follow the social rules that apply to men. Does it make me a trans man?

I am confused now and I wasn’t before. I feel like a rabbit hole has opened up, I thought I was part of the females trying to even the playing field, an example to my daughters but now I am no longer sure!

OP posts:
Belonger · 13/10/2018 06:30

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.

ISaySteadyOn · 13/10/2018 06:33

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.

continuallychargingmyphone · 13/10/2018 06:36

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.

Belonger · 13/10/2018 06:41

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.

tenorladybeaker · 13/10/2018 06:43

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.

Deliriumoftheendless · 13/10/2018 06:53

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.

rocketpocket · 13/10/2018 06:58

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!

Deliriumoftheendless · 13/10/2018 07:03

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

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.

Kewqueue · 13/10/2018 07:04

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!)

captainproton · 13/10/2018 07:05

I did spend a lot of my younger years wishing I was born a man. Not because I wanted a penis but because i would have fitted in better. My uni course only had 2 women in it. And yes this does worry me, what if I was a teenager now would I have declared myself transgender?

My son is the only boy at ballet. He is 5 and conflicted. He is told by the world (well not a home or by his dance teacher) that ballet is for girls, but he likes ballet but at same time is very passionate about hating girls and not wanting to be called a girl.

I knew I was a woman 15 years ago. But now Society has changed or is being changed, gender has a whole new meaning and importance when it was something I never gave 2 hoots about.

I am female who presents as a man, who once used to wish she was a man, became a mother and made piece with her body.

OP posts:
JellySlice · 13/10/2018 07:07

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.

Belonger · 13/10/2018 07:10

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.

boatyardblues · 13/10/2018 07:11

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.

Charliethefeminist · 13/10/2018 07:16

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

CircleofWillis · 13/10/2018 07:22

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’).

Belonger · 13/10/2018 07:28

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

captainproton · 13/10/2018 07:30

What is supposed to be the differences in genders then? If it’s not your anatomy or how you Present?

I gave my children gender neutral names only because I didn’t want them to be judged on their sex. I hate gender.

If it wasn’t for mumsnet I think I would feel extremely lonely and glad there are more women like me out there. Quietly just getting on with lives just being ourselves.

OP posts:
DuggeesWoggle · 13/10/2018 07:35

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.

OrdinaryGirl · 13/10/2018 07:37

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

AngryAttackKittens · 13/10/2018 07:39

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.

Belonger · 13/10/2018 07:40

Love this

What am I?
Belonger · 13/10/2018 07:41

Also this

What am I?
KataraJean · 13/10/2018 07:44

Yes, what belonger said. If you are questioning this as a mother who has given birth, breastfed and obviously knows the reality of female reproductive organs, what maelstrom must this open up to young women who want to reject feminine stereotypes and wear/dress/present as they like.

There are three things and they should be kept separate.

Sex - sometimes called gender by people too polite to refer to genitals - your sex makes you female (otherwise no babies would have come out). This is a simple biological fact.

Gender - this is the way society expects men and women to act. So going back to the 1950s, the idea that women should aspire to motherhood, be nurturing and caring of the family home and this was the correct way for a woman to be, if she was herself properly brought up (see the psychiatric and psychoanalysis literature of the period for an explanation of this)

Gender - also used by second wave feminists to highlight and challenge that ideas of gender are malleable and change over time and place. Hence, whether you are a woman or man does not affect what you should wear, be paid, be allowed to do etc. (Note: Second Wave feminists made a distinction between gender and sex, in so far as also campaigned for abortion rights, same sex refuges and so on, because women seem to be oppressed on the basis of their sex; the third wave I think argued that gender is performative and cannot be disentangled neatly from sex, nonetheless the idea remained that gender is an external presentation of masculine/feminine)

Gender identity - comes also in the first instance from psychiatry, and is the innate understanding we are said to have from age two about whether we are male or female. But again, a distinction used to be made between sex identity (where dysphoria was an outcome) and gender identity, where the biggest problem (in 1950s psychiatry, specifically psychoanalysis, eyes, not mine) was not behaving in ways becoming to a woman.

My question about this is - the concept of gender identity was born in the late 1950s/early 1960s before the push for greater women’s rights and freedoms of the 1970s. Why has it gained currency again? And why has it gone from niche psychiatry to mainstream? And even in the 1950s, gender identity and sex identity (re dysphoria) were not the same thing. So the other stepping stone is queer theory, which breaks down established categories including sex, gender and sexuality, in the early 1990s which I think is what has led us into the current mess.

But even then, queer theory does not make sense as an explanation, because gender identity and the idea of being trans presupposes rigid categories one can transition from and to.

So in short, one can spend hours trying to work it out, but in reality we know that women, taking sex as the signifier, are the group of people who have historically and culturally been distinguished by virtue of having female reproductive organs and discriminated against by all the baggage that brings. Women can not identify out of greater rates of poverty due to caring responsibilities, they cannot identify out of rape, sexual abuse and sexual objectification, they cannot identify out of the physical damage of menstruation, menopause, endometriosis, prolapse. These are things we know - and can accept without being heteronormative or imposing feminine dress code and working/domestic patterns on women.

In short, one should be able to be a woman (sexed body), present as one wishes (masculine/feminine/why not do away with such concepts altogether) and not be questioned as to whether one IS male or female. What other great things could you being doing if your mind was not taken up by this?

KataraJean · 13/10/2018 07:46

That took me ages to type and the thread has moved on, I had not read it all when I posted.

captainproton · 13/10/2018 07:47

I am not unsettled, I am confident in myself. I am captainproton, I have dealt with many things in life and lived a varied and happy existence as well as a lonely and awkward one when growing up.

But I think that in this brave new world teenage girls like I was are going to be encouraged to be transmen.

What would change if I told the world I am a man? One who doesn’t want a penis? Is that allowed? Will I be treated differently? Will I have to share male spaces? When I tick that box on the form should I go one step further and say, I look like man, I envy men and their privilege and lack of menstruation and childbirth experiences. I should tick M. I think I may even find it liberating on one level.

But then reality hits and I menstruate and no matter how much I hate it I bet they don’t have sanitary bins in the male loos.

OP posts:
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