“Growing up, what messages did you hear about your body?”

One day at the eating disorder treatment center I attended, we were asked this question in group therapy, given some time to journal. What was shared really struck me.

Despite our different backgrounds, different weights, and different disordered behaviors, we had surprisingly much in common. As one fellow patient put it, we were raised to believe “hating your body was part of being a woman.”

Years ago, anyone would have agreed on what that meant. Being born with a certain body meant you were born into a set of body standards, measured against others with that kind of body. I was not judged as “short” for being 5'4.5", as a man would; this was considered a fine height for me when I stopped growing. I did not feel proud when my armpits started to sprout hair; I felt disgusted and was told to shave. Because I was raised female, I was made conscious of my breasts, my hips, my shape, and in particular, my weight.

With the rise of the transgender movement, “woman” has taken a new meaning — someone who identifies as a woman. This isn’t just a matter of courtesy for a minority. Redefining this top-10 noun to include transwomen means redefining it for all.

If a transwoman says “I am a woman” to mean “I feel a certain way,” and I say “I am a woman” to mean “I belong to a certain biological category,” we are not conveying the same thing. For this word to have value, individuals and institutions must stick to one or the other. Increasingly, they are now siding with the “identity” definition.

Under this, we at the treatment center would all be called cisgender women. We didn’t claim to have some non-female gender identity; therefore, we are “in alignment” with womanhood. If we didn’t feel like women, we wouldn’t be women, the gender progressives say, but since we do say we are women, that must mean we have a deep-seated feeling of womanhood shared with transwomen.

If we were raised to believe “hating your body was part of being a woman,” yet we are women because we choose to call ourselves women, that implies that body hatred is something we identify with, rather than something we were born and raised into. Do you see the issue with this?

Put it this way — say forms asked, “What nationality do you identify as?” Someone who disapproves of this nation’s history and current affairs could easily say she is American, if the US is where she’s lived her whole life. It’s a simple statement of reality; there’s no better answer. But to say it’s what she identifies as would feel jarring.

Maybe she doesn’t feel any sense of American identity. Maybe she wishes she were born somewhere else, such as Finland or Japan; maybe she feels more like a “global citizen” in this interconnected world. Calling her someone who “identifies as American” would not reflect this. It would be mistaking an intended statement of fact for a statement of how she feels. (Even if she moved to a country she liked better, she could call herself American to indicate her upbringing. This still would not indicate how she feels about her nation.)

I don’t know what it means to feel like a woman. Why do I call myself a woman instead of “non-binary” or “agender”? I believe woman has meaning. It means I have a body with certain features, certain needs, certain abilities, certain risks. It means I am in the half of humanity that’s globally more likely to serve a “nurturing” role and less likely to commit violence. It means I was raised into particular messages, including ones that put me at risk for an eating disorder.

That’s not to say there aren’t, say, violent women, or men with eating disorders. What it means is that in terms of the trends, the categories of “man” and “woman” have predictive power. Only once we recognize the general trends can we recognize how violent women and men with eating disorders are anomalies. (Indeed, they categorically tend to present differently and have different causes than their typical-gendered counterparts.)

On the other hand, non-binary gender labels don’t predict much. They indicate that someone is more likely to prefer a neutral pronoun (e.g. “they”), adopt an androgynous physical appearance, and hold socially progressive views.

Many of the things that “man” and “woman” usefully predict have nothing to do with some nebulous, undefinable internal “identity,” though. They are results of how one is born and raised. In my country, an average woman’s height is 5'4", and an average man’s height is 5'9" — what’s the average height of a non-binary person? The distribution probably falls into two clusters, one centered around 5'4" and one centered around 5'9".

Social progressives criticize situations that only provide “man” and “woman” categories, but clearly this is for a reason. Imagine that a global survey gave participants the option to identify out of their nationality; Americans who don’t feel an “American identity” may pick the nationality that they like best, or put themselves in a “global citizen” category. For a question like “Have you ever worried about affording healthcare?”, Americans would likely say yes, and Europeans would likely say no. But foreigners who “identify” as American despite never living in the US would likely say no, and Americans who identify as belonging to a nation with universal healthcare would say yes, while self-identified “global citizens” could be all over the map. This wouldn’t help us understand the relationship between nationality and feeling secure about affording healthcare.

If I say transwomen aren’t women, I’m not denying their lived experience. They feel like they identify with womanhood, whatever that means. Perhaps it’s due to sex dysphoria; perhaps it’s a matter of relating to femininity. These feelings are real. I also validate the experience of the American who doesn’t feel like an American, but it’s still accurate to call her American.

Saying I “identify” as a woman, though, is misrepresenting my experience. I don’t claim to have any such feeling. Surely the vast majority of women in the world don’t either.