This Whole “Are Trans Women Real Women?” Thing is Gross

The question is not whether trans women are “real,” but what is the real motivation behind defining some women as “real?”

One of my facebook friends posted some article on how to be an ally to trans people. Something about the article rubbed me the wrong way, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what — so I asked my friend why she’d posted the article. Did you find this article helpful when interacting with the trans people in your life?

She told me she didn’t know any trans people, but wanted to make clear that she was a safe person to talk to about trans issues. As it happened, she actually did know a trans person, she just didn’t know that person was trans. Apparently her method of broadcasting her “trans-safety” via facebook shares was not effective. This friend has always to me represented, like, something that is deeply wrong with liberal culture. The desire to be open minded simply for the sake of being open minded, not because you have come up against a situation that requires it, seems fairly toxic. Additionally, the belief that by dealing with something in the abstract, that by reading enough articles about it, you’ll be equipped to deal with it in real life, seems woefully misguided.

I have a few trans friends, and at times I have behaved problematically towards them. I’m not proud of it; I’m just trying to be honest. You can’t learn how to interact with people via facebook articles. You can’t get to the point where you’re this flawless ally without being a fucked up ally first. And, to get real with you, I try to be a good ally, but I still got trans women on the internet telling me how transmisogynist my writing is, so clearly I still got some shit to work on.

But, despite my problematic bigotry, a surprising number of trans people have forgiven me my issues and opened up to me about their feelings and thoughts on gender. Which, is actually a little weird in some ways.

Truth be told, early on some of my feelings on trans issues were a little TERFish. I remember talking to one of my old friends about feminism, and she said something like “a lot of feminists want to abolish gender, and I really, really don’t want to abolish gender.” She was a trans woman, and she didn’t want to abolish gender because she liked being a woman.

But… I was sort of one of those feminists who wanted to abolish gender! I was into math and science, the sports I liked were fighting sports (wrestling and jiu jitsu) and I had just suffered for a long, long time to do the things I wanted to do as a woman. And, for some chick to be like “omg, all this girly shit IS GREAT — LET’S KEEP DOING GIRLY SHIT” was very threatening to me initially. It triggered an almost instinctual panic: is some of my autonomy going to get lost if I fully embrace the trans movement?

Yet, despite my fears, I liked my friend and I saw how important this was to her, so I just rolled with it. I certainly fucked up a few times, but whenever I did, it was always accidental. Nowadays, I fuck up less because I just think of her as a woman. A quirky woman, possibly a morally questionable woman, definitely a loud woman, but mostly just a woman who is not substantially different from my other female friends.

And that place of acceptance wasn’t very scary. In fact, just the opposite, I think my friendship with her has greatly enriched my life. When I was younger, perhaps part of me wished we could abolish gender, but now I think the problem is that we value masculinity more than femininity. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a woman; it was that I had to suffer so much indignity because I was one. We assume women who wear makeup aren’t smart, or that caring, nurturing work is less valuable than technical work. It wasn’t until befriending trans women and reading the writings of trans women that I began to really see how much I had internalized the societal belief that femininity is worse than masculinity.

When I talk with trans women, I find a lot of similarities in our experiences. Often, they talk about a type of interior struggle to realize that it’s ok to like feminine things, and it doesn’t make you worse to embody feminine traits. This is absolutely something I have been struggling with my whole life. Men also project their sexual desire onto our bodies — both the trans bodies and the cis bodies of women — without consideration for our consent or autonomy.

Yet, finally — and, this is somewhat politically incorrect to say, but I’ll just say it — often talking to a trans woman just feels like talking to a cis woman. The way they listen and engage with me is very similar to how my cis female friends listen and engage with me. And, this is non-PC because who am I to legitimize someone’s gender? If a trans woman didn’t feel like a cis woman to me, would she not be a woman? To which I’d say: no, she’d still be a woman. However, honest truth, it would be harder for me to not microaggression against her. I’d have to exert a lot more mental energy getting her pronouns right. And I’m sorry if that hurts, but I’m not going to deny that how I unconsciously read someone’s gender is not always the same as the gender they wish to be read as.

The problem of how we unconsciously read gender is one that is constantly overlooked by both trans activists and trans opponents, but also one that comes up a lot when you’re interacting with trans people in the real world.

Often, the question around trans people — especially trans women — is phrased as are they “real.” Is a trans woman “a real woman?” So… what the fuck is a “real” woman anyway? A woman who can give birth? Are infertile women not real women? Is a real woman someone with two x chromosomes? Then, what is someone with 3 x chromosomes? What is someone with xy chromosomes, but testosterone insensitivity, so they develop breasts and a vagina? Because, society sure as hell treats all these people like they’re real women. They are raised as women and socialized as women. Straight men and gay women will be attracted to them, gay men and straight women will not. So… why are trans women not “real?”

As far as I can tell, the only common trait that differentiates “real” women from “fake” women is that all the “real” women had their gender imposed upon them by society. They had no autonomy when it came to their gender. All other things — external physical anatomy, hormone levels, chromosomes, appearance — are things that many trans women could share with certain cis women. So. Effectively, in our society, to be a “real” woman, somebody else has to declare you a woman.

Uh… yay feminism.

We need to stop saying trans women are “real” women, because we need to stop fucking talking about real women. It’s just something that’s going to make a whole bunch of women — trans and cis — feel like shit. Women who get hysterectomies are going to start worrying they’re not “real” women. Women with small tits are going to worry they’re not “real” women. Hell, at many times in my life, I’ve worried that I’m not a “real” woman because I’m too tomboyish. It’s gross, it’s exclusive, and it’s not helping.

And, even more troublingly, it is part of how we enforce gender conformity in women. Check out these “real women” memes: