Trans 101

what is womanhood

before I get to the meat of this:

I seem to have some cis straight men following me? Sure. That makes sense, because the way cis straight men seem to make decisions is by following whoever has the hottest take. Like Northernlion. He’s kind of a weird guy actually, but his entire brand is being a married dad and bagging on other weird guys and telling them to be normal, which enables men to claim a kind of superiority-by-proxy.

Mr Lion’s take on AI-generated pornography, for instance, is that it is morally corrupt because it has no soul. This is a perfect take for luring cisgender straight men, who like to believe that they can ethically consume pornography. It is internally consistent and produces surprising results that they can toss around (without necessarily endorsing) in characteristically masculine bids for attention. For instance: this implies that non-AI generated pornography has an intrinsic artisan appeal, and furthermore that certain kinds of pornography, which require more craft, are superior to others¹.

In a world where transgender women were prized as they deserve to be, I wouldn’t have to have so many men following me. Because my takes would not be as hot, as defined by their opposition to norms. I guess possibly my Umamusume takes would still attract an audience? But himedanshi aren’t really the demographic I’m talking to here… I guess there are some straight men who treat Oguri Cap like Goku.

Anyways. Cis straight men who aren’t dating transgender women, this one should fit you pretty well.

(trans men I know you want to be included. here.)

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TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN, our world proclaimed at the height of peak woke. Which was good. Transgender women are women; this is obvious to anybody who knows one well enough. But nobody actually explained what this meant to most of the populace, because nobody could really explain what a woman is.

You probably can’t either. Which is fine. Womanhood, like art, or sex, is something that most people just intuit based on what people around them do. For instance, a woman usually (but not always) has long hair, acts in feminine ways, is romantically interested in men, enjoys aesthetic curation, and prefers cooperation to competition.

But pattern-matching has its limits, and everybody knows it. Consider a Californian gay man who fulfills all these criteria: not a woman, and if you met him you wouldn’t assume he was. On the other hand, I am obviously a woman and only fill 2.5 of these criteria², though the pressure of not filling them all does obviously weigh on me.

So then we go to “identity”. It is transparently obvious that “identifying” as a woman is not enough to make somebody a woman, and it is transparently obvious when somebody is making that stupid attack helicopter joke³. What ‘identity’ is actually trying to get at is that if you ask somebody about their gender they will usually tell you, for the same reasons as people will tell you their names. People don’t like to lie about who they truly are⁴! Consider how men get if you tell them they’re acting like women, or how desperate some nonbinary people are to tell you about their genders. If nobody had any idea what a woman was I would also be regrettably like that.

Feminists used to conceive of womanhood as something that is done to people. This is a very powerful rhetorical tool for building solidarity and showing how ridiculous the world is: compare ‘women are expected to stay in the home and nurture children’, a familiar sentence, to ‘half of humanity is expected to stay in the home and nurture children’. The weakness of this framing, and the reason nobody uses it anymore, is that women by and large don’t want to be referred to as ‘half of humanity’ — we want to be understood to be women, heiresses to a complicated and fraught set of cultural legacies that we are not interested in sweeping under the table.

What nobody wants to say, because nobody but me⁵ is woke enough to say it, is that the actual nature of womanhood is an immutable spiritual essence, like a kind of ethereal light or glowing liquid, which is then expressed via culturally-modulated principles. This absolutely has some kind of biological correlate but the exact nature of that being proven isn’t something anybody would listen to anyways⁶.

“Gender isn’t real though!!!” It literally is though. This is how people work — it’s how you work. If gender isn’t real why do you do any of the things you do? Why do you like the things you like? Even in the ways you defy your gender you act according to it. Signs are (typically) arbitrarily assigned — does that mean words aren’t real? And yet you understand what I’m saying. Tangibility has nothing to do with reality; gender, like morality and numbers, is the most real kind of thing there is. You close your eyes to it at your own peril.

Womanhood is a quality that women have within ourselves, and that if properly attuned resonates with the womanhoods of others; the expression of which is governed by the ways the world pushes back on it. As somebody with this quality I can assure you that transgender women have it.

I understand that “it isn’t gay to love trans women” keeps many of you [trans women] safer. but for some of us, it is gay. @halimedemf

It’s true that many women (trans women included) don’t feel like transgender women are women. This is because they’re just pattern-matching. Transgender women aren’t raised as women and so they don’t express womanhood in the ways that being raised as a woman allows — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t women, just that their abilities to express their hearts have been damaged. If you are lucky enough to get to spend time with trans women; if you see how they treat each other, and you, and how they are treated — this beautiful inner light shines through. Maybe it shines through a bit differently, but diversity among women⁷ is always broader than everyone thinks and should be prized as a marker of a system’s resilience⁸.

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A parable. Let us define three women Alice, Bella, and Charlotte such that:

Alice is not transgender. But she is sterile, by an accident of genetics. She was raised by a single father with several older brothers. Her father wanted another son, and has made this very clear to her since she was young. She is comparatively tall and comparatively broad of shoulder and flat of chest, and she has been taught none of the feminine skills that would allow her to compensate; therefore she has come to hate her body⁹. She has an affinity for legible systems, rather than interpersonal communications, and her traumatic youth has caused her to retreat into the areas of her expertise. She is bisexual, and hates herself for being attracted to women. As an adult, she is naturally horrifically jealous of other women, and develops uncomfortable fetishes around being made to wear dresses and so forth.

Now: is Alice transgender? No, definitionally, even if she experiences the results of transmisogyny because people think she is. But is there compassion for her, in your heart? How is she different from you? How is she the same?

Bella has a supportive family — and most critically, a supportive mother. She is encouraged as a child to present and act as she pleases, and when she insists for over a year that she is a girl her mother believes her and takes her to a doctor, where steps are taken to ensure she can undergo the puberty that fits her best. She doesn’t have periods, but she does have supportive peer groups and adults in her life who care about her for who she is, and consequently developed “only” the normal body issues of a girl in her teens. She is bisexual, and normal about it, or as normal about it as anybody bisexual can be¹⁰. As an adult, she naturally feels more comfortable around other women, and has a fairly normal sex life, though she’s really into feet for some reason. It happens.

Now: is Bella transgender? Yes, definitionally, even if she doesn’t experience the results of transmisogyny because nobody knows she is. She happens to be transgender, but that mostly matters in bed; in fact, she plays it down a lot of the time as a matter of safety, shame, and awkwardness. (I’ve met girls like Bella. There are more out there than you think.) What pressures are acting on her? How is she lucky, or unlucky, to conform in such ways?

Charlotte has never gotten along with her family. She is forced to be a woman in the way her mother was forced to be a woman, and her mother before her. When she is seven she looks out a window and sees how free boys get to be and something ugly twists inside her. She is not a boy but she wants that freedom. She likes dresses, or at least she likes how people treat her when she wears them; she undergoes the pain of menarche and the bitterness of pretending that nothing in her body is hurting her, that nothing has happened; she is raised to be married to a man and have children because that’s what happened to her mother and so that’s what will happen to her. She is treated as a childbearing body; an object. She has a normal girl’s body, insofar as such a thing could be said to exist. Some parts of her are recognized as woman-befitting. The parts that are not bring her pain. She is bisexual but finds it easier to date men than women: there are many more of them and being “one of the boys” is easier for her than admitting that she doesn’t always get along with other women. As an adult she is bitter. One day, after a few drinks, she confesses to her friend Bella that she hates her coworker, a woman named Alice, because Alice is “obviously” a man pretending to be a woman. Bella is never quite as good of a friend to her, after that. She thinks this is because Bella has been corrupted by wokeness, and starts posting terribly online.

Now: while Charlotte is not transgender, there are many ways in which she is like a transgender woman. How much compassion do you feel she deserves? More or less than Alice? Than Bella? Than a transgender woman in her place? How is her case different from transgender infighting? How is it similar?

Yes, transgender women are often weird and offputting — weirder in many cases than non-trans women, who have often been raised in ways that make it clear that deviance from consensus will be punished; offputting because abuse doesn’t make victims nice to be around and transgender women are practically always child abused. There’s resentment on both sides: transgender women see non-trans women as having something they desperately want, and insufficiently-enlightened cisgender women see trans women as wanting something they have complicated gross feelings about.

Ultimately all I can say is that I myself am a woman who will not obey many of the strictures of womanhood but a woman nonetheless, and that trans women are, in my experience, the same. Or more even.

If a woman is somebody who struggles under the yoke of womanhood and does not shirk from it, trans women are the women of women.

1. a proposition which is only incidentally true.

2. a bob is short.

3. only one person has ever done anything worthwhile with that premise. isabel fall you deserved the world. peter watts supporting her is actually a really good example of the thing with straight men I was talking about earlier.

4. drag is always temporary. if you didn’t take it off it wouldn’t be drag; it would be who you were. or are. you would be lost up the sauce, of your own presenting, and you would experience the inevitable recoil result.

5. and simone de beauvoir, of course: “Woman is defined neither by her hormones nor by mysterious instincts but by the way she grasps, through foreign consciousness, her body and her relation to the world;” obviously the hormones are critical but what they do is reveal the woman-nature, not create it.

6. like how if scientists ever found a direct genetic cause for homosexuality, for instance, people would just plug their ears and say no they didn’t.

7. especially among non-transgender women. every single ‘guys’ thing has a surprising contingent of girls who do it and don’t really interact with guys about it, because guys get weird.

8. diversity isn’t just an intrinsic good, and I get very annoyed by people who claim it is. diversity promotes possibilities for growth and serves any system against highly-targeted attacks. that’s literally where sex comes from. you should already know this.

9. “gender dysphoria” is in character if not magnitude something nearly all women experience.

10. bisexual people often act out because of bisexual erasure, seeking visibility. this doesn’t make them not bisexual.