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Originally Posted by Esme nha Maire
It's a damnably tricky topic, and I don't wish to cause upset, nor do I feel there's much, if any, merit in 'more-than/less-than' arguments here, but I have myself encountered transwomen who, visually presenting as femme, nevertheless came across to me as rather blokey in behaviour. Which raises all sorts of questions like - were they really an MTF butch, but felt constrained by societal pressure (or that of the gender clinics) to present as femme? Or were they simply poorly socialised as women? Something else?
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This is a great topic, and I"m glad you brought it up. I consider myself somewhat truscummy, and a bit of a "third way heretic" in the trans community. I don't know, maybe my views aren't that out of alignment with the majority, but somedays, it feels that way. While I think TERFs take shit way too far, with the way they used to attack transwomen in the 1970s with guns and death threats, and how Janice Raymond has trans blood on her hands for what happened after she published "The Transsexual Empire" in 1980 and got healthcare taken away from trans women, and how the modern TERF movement is WAY too close to the alt-right, and engage in the worst sort of anti-antisemitism (I swear, if I see another TERF post something from The Federalist while complaining about George Soros and The Jewish bankers pushing "trans agenda"...) they also have some legit points, in terms of this Cotton Ceiling BS, and how too many trans women will engage in "magical thinking" to ignore the fact that we are cursed with male biology, and need to deal with that unpleasant issue.
To begin, let me start off by saying the first and foremost thing I tell anyone and everyone who will listen when they start transitioning MTF is that it's not enough to transition your body, you have to also transition your MIND.
We are all, all of us, who have been forced to socialize as male, been scarred and traumatized by the experience. I could tell as early as 4 or 5 that something was going "wrong", that I wasn't "meant to be with" the boys group, I would be better placed with the girls group, but I didn't know how to say it, and in Reagan's America in the 1980s in the midwest, I would have been physically and mentally abused for speaking up more firmly for it.
So I am constantly checking myself mindfully for ways that I "behave male" because yes, I've been socialized male. I've also benefited from male privilege growing up, even as I suffered horribly from the dysphoria that being forced to socialize male caused me.
This is one of several key areas in which transwomen and biologically born females are different. We will never "grok in fullness" what it was like to be raised as girls and then women from day one. We will never understand the pain and shame forced upon biological females vis a vis menstruation, or the million and one daily aggression that the Patriarchy forced upon them in our most malleable and receptive years as children.
Yes, we suffer sexism after we transition, we suffer discrimination, we suffer violence, and bigotry. But we are still socialized as males, and to not work on that, to not be mindful of that, to simply refuse to acknowledge it flies in the face of everything rational and logical, at least to me. It's not enough to look like a woman. You need to start working on THINKING like a woman, and not in a stereotypical fashion either.
I always half-joke that I am a victim of testosterone poisoning and Patriarchal brainwashing. It will always bite hard into my soul that I never got the life I wanted, to be raised as a biological women with all my other Sisters. But that is life. Life isn't fair. The best we do is take the bad hand life dealt us, cope, adapt, and try to make it a little bit better for those who come after us.
TL;DR: Of course transwomen are women, but they are not exactly the same as women-born-women. There's no shame in acknowledging the dividing line and the difference, even as it causes we as transwomen frustration and heartache.