Non-binaryness, Transmasculinity, and the Battle with Modern Feminism
I am not sure how spiritual or magical this post is going to be, but it's important for me to express.
When I started writing this post, I had recently spoken to 3 fellow genderqueer people (while the Full Moon in Virgo was opposing Saturn and Mercury in Pisces because that was pretty relevant). All 4 of us fall under the increasingly and rightfully maligned "assigned female at birth" term. For clarity, we all consider ourselves relatively early in our gender journeys and therefore still figuring out quite a bit. I'm the only one out of the 4 of us who identify as particular genders while the others think they may be something closer to agender, but are either microdosing testosterone or otherwise experimenting with masculinity. As well-educated and thoughtful queers with certain shared physical features, we all keep coming up against this same challenge: battling to not hate womanhood because of the constant misgendering and assignment to it.
According to other genderqueer people who have been on this journey much longer, this is nothing new.
Throughout my 20s, I was a feminist. I read books on feminism, wrote and published under female-owned and -centered outlets, voted for Hilary Clinton while being unable to understand how problematic she was at the time given the desperate political climate, and rolled my eyes as Taylor Swift and Beyonce jumped on the label in order to further capitalize their already successful careers. I was very proudly feminist because I understood feminism as the intellectual and political movement that worked to bring me equality to men. I wanted to be an empowered and respected woman.
People keep rushing to tell me that of course I am still a feminist. And I believe feminism is appropriately named because its primary value as of right now is to elevate the importance and strength of femininity in our larger society, which continues to devalue and villainize any expression of it that isn't conservative and tradwife. However, feminism as a movement is currently being co-opted by TERFs, which is the most ridiculous thing of all because trans femmes are the ultimate proof that femininity isn't equivalent to the people-pleasing and servitude of which misogynists define womanhood.
Those trans femmes, like Gretchen Felker-Martin among others, are also the ones putting out the most interesting and thoughtful perspectives right now. Part of this is because the next wave of feminism is here and it isn't actually about women. It's about a much larger gender conversation.
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Modern feminism started with Betty Friedan's 1963 The Feminine Mystique and her terming "the problem that has no name." This problem was the dissatisfaction of suburban housewives with their having no careers. I don't really know how to square the fact that Friedan was Jewish like my own ancestors, who certainly did not have this problem. Both of my grandmothers worked, like my grandfathers. They had to because they were poor to lower middle class. They must have thought those rich housewives were crying over nothing!
My feelings about cis women now as an androgynous person are not dissimilar. One of the first things that caused me terror after my gender awakening was the sudden realization of the privilege I had lost, an experience that cannot possibly be described emotionally but can be stated factually. Cis women have predetermined roles that are securely fixed to the foundations of most modern day societies, including my own. Many of those roles may be steeped in traditional servitude to cis men, but cis women find ways to navigate it when they can't actively fight it. These roles come with specific expectations, known and shared language and concepts, understood struggles with ongoing brainstorming for solutions, many and well-funded programs that cater to women, and well-intended delusion by people who know misogyny is bad and don't want to be misogynists even if they're not actively doing the work to root misogyny out of their brains and lives. Basically, cis women's roles have daily and long-term scripts.
When I transitioned, I lost those scripts. My gender does not have any predefined role with comprehensible expectations. It inherently requires more work because I have to wake up every morning, be self-aware enough to understand where I'm at that day with my fluidity, and make a million little choices that are congruent with my inner self. I have to reinvent my clothes, my voice, my mannerisms, my vocabulary, my attitude, and my life. This involves undoing lifelong habits I picked up to survive as a cis woman, such as asking for things softly instead of directly, which is tactically disadvantageous as I am still perceived as a woman. It also includes having to repeatedly and firmly state my selfhood and pronouns when there is often no polite way of doing so, leading to soured relations or conversations and again making it more difficult to get what I need. And this is all while continuously getting barraged with the roles, expectations, and concepts that belong to women.
Even as I say I have womanhood as an androgynous person*, my womanhood is not cis. It can't be under the larger functions of my androgyny. A cis woman may wear men's clothes and cut her hair into a mullet, but she does not view her body as incomplete and in need of medical treatment to help it finish development. A cis woman also has not brushed up against a divine gender awakening and does not implicitly understand that masculinity isn't subjective or fake, but may indeed often come from testosterone. Multiple conversations I have had with cis women—particularly educated cis women who proudly self-identify as feminists—have proven that they especially do not understand that last detail. They have zero information and no personal experience as to how much hormones alter the very existence of a person as well as their gender presentation yet think their input is valid despite this. It is certainly their education and well-read feminism that helps them justify undermining my understanding of my own identity. Womansplaining, it turns out, exists as much as mansplaining does.
("That's not true!" Modern feminism cries, like a mother covering for her misbehaving teenaged son. "You just don't understand how power dynamics work!" Right, because trans and genderqueer people totally have more systemic power than cis women do. I imagine that day will actually come when we also have tokens in corporate boardrooms, as tragically prescribed by our capitalist society.)
Additionally, as has been pointed out by people before me, it tracks that Brianna Ghey and Nex Benedict were murdered by cis female classmates. A certain passé cis woman children's author, whose books cis women have unabashedly told me they spent their weekends rereading, is currently funding systemic transphobia in her own country. Cis women hate trans people as much as cis men do. Are we going to see any self-examination of this fact like cis women have been begging cis men to do about violence toward them for eons? Unlikely.
So... why should I be a feminist? In a world that infantilizes cis women, feminism has come up with plenty of intellectual excuses for why they're victims without yet effectively encouraging them to perform any self-reflection on why they oppress each other and people like me. And as I stated earlier, while modern day feminism should focus specifically on femininity, I find any association of femininity to me currently revolting.
Yet, while I would like to say that I am not a feminist, it's still not so easy. Not when cis men can get away with a rash of behaviors that no one of any other gender can. In a retail or non-profit setting, a cis man can serve you without a smile and with full disinterest, and that's considered his right. When I did that? I lost my job. Of course, cis women risk the same thing.
The truth is, most cis men are never going to hold themselves and others accountable for bad behavior to the points where they should. But it is contingent on self-proclaimed feminist women to do better than them because they know better. I am not saying anything much different than proponents of intersectional feminism, particularly black and brown feminists and feminists who are also disability activists, when I say feminism should no longer be about the uplifting and empowerment of solely cis women. It should be about the dismantling of hierarchy of gender, just as it should be about the dismantling of all toxic structures created by our capitalist, patriarchal system.
And if you think it's already about that, I would like to see you take it up more directly with the TERFs.
*The common usage of "androgynous" is for a ciswoman who dresses masculine (notably, never for a cis man who dresses feminine), but this is not the case for my gender. To clarify, my identity comes from the Greek word androgynos, which means combining of male and female. Androgynos is one of 6 genders acknowledged in Jewish texts.
