The transgender community and liberal feminists CAUSED my dysphoria.

I’ve always been gender non-conforming. My home was a very blasé one—no one really bothered me about it. My mom would occasionally encourage me to wear make-up and dresses, but I resisted, and she dropped it. Never once did I question whether or not I was a girl.

I went to college, and apparently, gender was not related to biology—it was a “feeling.” And I ran with the liberal crowd, and knew many transgender people, and they all said the same.

I became confused. My trans woman friend was super feminine, so in touch with her “womanhood,” but I could not relate to her experience at all. If being a woman is a “feeling,” then surely this feeling would have to be universal—but I didn’t feel it. But I couldn’t deny that this feeling existed—after all, that would be to deny someone’s “true lived experience,” right? So I couldn’t be a woman. But I didn’t feel like a man, either.

I considered that I might be agender. Yes, that would explain why I’d never felt comfortable with the idea of what a woman was—it was because I wasn’t one at all! And my demeanor, my eccentricities, my lack of femininity but also not extreme masculinity all must have meant that I was neither a man nor a woman.

And I became extremely estranged from my body. I avoided the mirror across from the shower when I stepped out because the body I saw was so foreign. Did that body really reflect anything about who I was? I started to bind my chest. I wanted to be an amorphous blob, essentially. I wanted to be so androgynous that nobody could tell what my sex was when they looked at me, so they would have no preconceived notions about who I was—to be perceived by others as female made me shudder. Female pronouns felt like shards of glass.

It was only when I discovered that I was lesbian that everything started to fit into place. No, I wasn’t agender—I was butch. And I started to love my body, and connect with my body, in a way that I never had. Growing up I’d always been estranged from it to some extent, likely because it was giving me signals that I was homosexual and I was subconsciously telling it to shut up. And then, in believing I couldn’t be a woman because I did not experience some intangible, unnameable (read: feminine) feeling, I had been cut off from my womanhood altogether.

But I LOVE being a woman. I didn’t hate being seen as a woman—I hated when MEN saw me as (their idea of) a woman, with the way they would sexualize and disrespect me because of it. I didn’t hate female pronouns—I hated when MEN used them, with a tone that dripped with misogyny. Gender dysphoria does not come from within—it comes from without. It comes from your sense of self clashing with what society presumes of you based on your genitalia. Your genitalia is not the problem—society is.

When thinking of myself, and looking at myself, as a woman amongst women, I feel totally comfortable. This body that I used to try to hide, I now want to flaunt—not sexually, not in a feminine way, I’m just proud of it and want it to look good—for women. Women aren’t the ones sexually objectifying me or reducing me to a two-dimensional bitch and/or slut. “She” and “her” are music to my ears.

Being a woman is not a “feeling.” Definitionally, I agree that a woman is “an adult human female,” but that doesn’t convey or capture the essence—the essence of this shared womanhood, this shared experience, this shared understanding, that we all have because of how this society has treated us from the moment we were born. If that is ever obscured, it’s because of patriarchy and liberal feminism cutting us off from it. It’s a community, it’s a sisterhood, and I am beyond livid that liberal feminism tried to take that away from me.

When you demand that everyone accept your definition of woman, which you’ve reduced to a “feeling” that no one can name, you’ve erased EVERYTHING about “woman” that has ANY meaning. You erase our history, our community bonds, the medical reality and implications of our anatomy, our sexualities. You trivialize sex-based oppression and female-exclusive sisterly and romantic bonds. You desperately want to be part of this, but you just can’t have it, and in trying to take it, you’re destroying everything you want to access.

Worst of all, you’re cutting women off from their womanhood. Every girl who isn’t enthralled to wear a dress, and who comes in contact with liberal feminism, starts questioning whether or not she really is a woman. And girls start identifying as non-binary or genderqueer, and taking on “they/them” pronouns, which effectively shuts them off from the community they’ve had a right to from birth—and all because you think your femininity makes you a woman.

There’s nothing wrong with who trans people are—stop confusing your personality, that others label as “feminine” or “masculine,” with which sex you think that corresponds to. It’s all a great big lie. Men and women can be “feminine” and “masculine” or anywhere in between, and none of that corresponds to genitalia. Being a woman is a shared life experience that comes from being born with a vagina. That’s really all that can be said of every single woman—we have vaginas and have been treated a certain way because of them. But pointing that out does not reduce womanhood to genitalia—sex is just the prerequisite for this life experience.

Your definition of “woman” excludes and cuts me off from my womanhood. My definition keeps my womanhood intact, but excludes trans women. At the end of the day, we’re always invalidating SOMEONE’S identity. Which one of us do you think should be invalidated?