Is It Possible To Appropriate Womanhood? Who’s Defining It?
I’d argue ALL women, cis or trans, are FORCED to transition into cis men’s definition of womanhood.
So the new ‘documentarian’ Matt Walsh recently made a sweaty speech at some conservative conference, saying in part:
They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling or thought or taste or preference. So if gender is an artificial construct, and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as man or woman, then what the hell is a woman anyway?
A woman in that case would not be defined by her feelings, her thoughts, her ideas, her preferences, her body, her reproductive organs, her DNA, her chromosomes-
What is she defined by?
You’d think she’d be defined by herself.
But is she?
At an event at the University of Buffalo, Michael Knowles said:
Feminism which sits at the origin of the gender debate because it was the feminists who insisted men and women are pretty much exactly the same. It wasn’t the transvestites, it wasn’t the homosexuals, it was the feminists. The feminists who said a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
The feminists who burned their bras, who loosened divorce laws, who weakened the families the fundamental political institution.
Awful as this is, he hits on one basic point, feminism DID cause this. It caused it by challenging the definition of womanhood that was made at the time.
But instead of challenging WHAT a woman is, they fought more about WHO gets to make that definition.
I mean, I don’t think feminism ever tried to give a fixed definition of women; they tried to give women the freedom to work that out for themselves.
And cis men find that threatening.
Trans men and trans masc people, or just people who just sign out of womanhood, threaten cis men’s control. If cis men can’t define womanhood, can’t say who is and isn’t a woman, that’s a threat to their power.
Trans women would seem to uphold the definitions given, but are we?
I’d argue ALL women, cis or trans, are FORCED to transition into cis men’s definition of womanhood. We just question when trans women do it because you don’t really get to see cis women do it in real-time. You don’t get to see that contrast and define exactly what the transition entails.
But, again, cis women are constantly forced to transition into the patriarchy’s definition of womanhood.
It presses further into surgery.
Cis women get boob jobs and BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) to satisfy the patriarchy’s ever vague and fluid definition of the ideal female body shape. They even get vaginoplasty because theirs doesn’t look like what a vagina is ‘supposed’ to look like.
Cis women get surgery on their face like nose jobs or cheek fillers just like trans women do. They try to look younger like older trans women do to try to pass more easily.
And that sounds different but it really isn’t.
A trans woman has to try to look younger because women by definition have cuter, softer looks, right?
That’s why we keep mocking buccal fat removal. It’s not what women SHOULD want, right?
It defines you, defines your interactions, and determines if you’re taken seriously or if you’re wanted. But once you get it, no one respects you as anything more than the trophy they pressured you to become.
Like trans women, though, it’s not wrong to get it, but it’s sickening how you can’t tell anymore what decisions were yours and which were theirs. Did you REALLY do it for you or did you do it because you want acceptance?
So how can trans women appropriate a definition that cis women themselves can never live up to and never really got the chance to define?
