'Do you feel an immediate sense of distress at your conclusion that you are female? Does it feel like the logical conclusion? Feel fine with it? No jarring sensation? No profound feeling even from the age of 3 or 4 that something is definitely wrong with you being categorised as female? No?'
Well, yes.
That's why I've been a feminist since before I knew the word.
Yes I get a jarring sense. Always have and will. When I'm going about being a PERSON and something happens to remind me that no, I'm a girl. I'm a woman.
God how much I hate that stuff. Always noticed it, always pissed me off.
Why are the experiences, the feelings of so many women and girls ignored in all this. Why are we TOLD we must be cis? Comfy and at home with it all. To thick to know our own minds and realise that yes we don't feel like we have an internal gender ID because we are totally comfy.
No. No no no. I am a feminist because I have always noticed, felt. Yes since very small. The discomfort and dislike of being treated as a girl/ woman. When I am a PERSON.
Of course women who feel this way will not be heard. The things we say will not be listened to. Even though so many of us absolutely understand the. Anger. Discomfort. Helplessness. At being treated as something we are not.
Why on earth this natural allyship was not leveraged is just beyond me. It's not down to women that it wasn't though.
And so yes. Don't tell me who I am. Don't 'assume my gender'. I am a grown up intelligent woman who has spent nearly 50 years with this massive discomfort inside.
I have spent my time talking and supporting and agitating etc for woman and girls (and men and boys) to be seen as PEOPLE first.
Somehow all this makes me a, well a host of weird stuff. A Russian bot, a right wing American Christian, someone who wants people to die (!), homophobic, racist, etc etc etc.
It doesn't really land as I know who I am. And more than that, I know I'm a person first. So please, if you are so keen on respecting how people feel. Then respect me and others like me. And listen to what we say, don't put us in these new boxes (same as the old boxes) and dismiss us. Each time you do, well everyone learns something don't they. Bottom line. Women and girls must be who others say they are. And if they disagree they are wrong, bad and don't know their own minds.
You forget this is the position we've been in for ? thousands of years and we've really had enough now.