Become a man, or change what it means to be a woman?

Bionic Baby Mamma recently dropped by to say:

I’d love to hear you talk more about your thoughts on transitioning vs. creating out a butcher version of femininity, as the tension there (please forgive ineloquence — new baby, no sleep. and now it turns out ineloquence isn’t a word.) is something I struggle with. I don’t mean to deny the existence of trans people or say people shouldn’t transition, but sometimes, as a fairly femme lesbian who still doesn’t like the “traditional” boundaries of womanhood all that much,  it can feel like being abandoned — particularly in the case of those who transition and seem to immediately get drunk on access to male privilege.  I don’t mean to say that it IS abandonment or that those people are wrong to follow what it in their hearts, mind you, only that it can feel that way.

I think that this is an interesting point. It’s a variation on the common question of ‘why not just act like a masculine woman’ which is something that trans people are asked a lot.  Society has roles set down for men and women to act in, the roles that say that women stay home and raise children and that men go out to work. But these days there is nothing at all stopping women going out to work,  and men stopping staying at home and raising children. There is nothing stopping men wearing women’s clothes, and women wearing men’s clothes.

My answer is that there’s a difference between what you do and what you are. When I was at woman at first I tried to act like other women, I wore skirts, and tried to do the things other women did, played rubbish games like netball instead of proper games like football. I quickly established that being a woman was shit and I didn’t like it. I realised that just because I had the misfortune to be a woman I didn’t actually have to do anything just because I was a woman. I made a conscious effort to act completely like a man, but still being a woman.So I stopped playing netball, I stopped wearing skirts and make-up, I got my hair cut in a man’s style, I started having sex with women.

In fact it got to a stage where every activity in my life was the same thing that a man would do, I would walk home through a dangerous area at 2am because that’s what a man would do. When I was 17, and rather drunk, a unfortunate boy offered to walk me home and I punched him in the face to prove that I didn’t need walking home,  he refused to hit me back, so I punched him again. He kept saying that he wouldn’t hit a woman, and I got more and more angry with him.  I forget how it ended, but I remember walking home with a group of straight girls who tried to explain to me that it wasn’t sexist to refuse to hit a woman. By the time I got home I was really really upset, and I cried and told my parents about something awful a boy had done to me,  no, not rape, but refusing to fight back because I was a girl.  When I was 18 I went travelling around Europe on my own, I remember my Dad saying ‘Well I would have thought I’d be really worried if my  daughter did that, but I’m fairly sure that if you got into any trouble you’d be able to get out of it physically’.

But once I was effectively doing everything that a man would do in life I was still miserable. I was miserable because blood kept dripping out of my body where it shouldn’t, I was miserable because I had weird lumps of flesh growing out of the front of my body. I was miserable because however masculine I looked people kept treating me as a woman. I was miserable because of the bizarre rollar coaster of hormones that is the menstrual cycle. Acting like a man didn’t make me happy about being a woman, in fact it almost made being a woman worse, because it drew attention to the way that I just couldn’t change.

Could I have stayed as a masculine woman? Yes, I could have done, would I have been miserable? Yes. Is by transitioning harming women? I see that many people who would have been masculine women in the past are now transitioning, that may mean that there are less I too worry that some of them are doing it too soon, without really exploring whether they could be comfortable as a masculine woman. That worries me a bit.

Would I want to be continually suicidal to keep other people happy? No.