Fembot received a problematic question from a reader asking, “What does it mean when men say that they ‘feel like’ women?” We asked our community to weigh in and speak to the issue that this reader was suggesting trans women are not women. Writer Emma Harmon answers.

Go to a cisgender woman whose ovaries do not work, and ask her, “What makes you a woman? You cannot give birth, your ovaries do not produce eggs. You have to take estrogen in order to develop your female secondary sex characteristics.” It’s absurd to make that claim, right? We can accept her womanhood, despite her body not doing what most cisgender women take for granted. We do this because culturally, socially, in every way she meets what we consider womanhood to be, even if she wouldn’t have been able to experience a female puberty without hormone replacement therapy, even if she were unable to experience childbirth, even if a thousand other exceptions to the rule.

Women are women because we know ourselves to be women. That’s the shortest answer that I can give you. I don’t know too many women who have had a karyotype test to prove to themselves what their DNA says. I don’t know too many infertile women who, at the first sign of their infertility, stop considering themselves to be women.

Transgender women are not given the latitude to know ourselves, and the fundamental core of this question is that our self-knowledge is something that can be and should be questioned. We are not given the trust to be right about our experiences of our own lives. We are subject to scrutiny; our lives are to be judged. If we have suffered enough, we are allowed to be correct; we are granted entry into the hallowed halls of womanhood. If we can only prove our suffering to you, if we can only prove that we have achieved something akin to the suffering of cisgender womanhood, maybe we can be worthy of your consideration.

But that’s never going to work. I can’t prove my womanhood to you, no more than any woman can prove that she is worthy of dignity. It should be a given fact that my experiences of my life, my identity, and who I am are worthy of consideration. But for some reason, mostly because people refuse to listen to anything we have to say about our own lives, we have to keep offering proof of our pain in order to prove that we deserve a place in our society, moreover, to even prove that we have a place in feminism. I’m done with it.

And to be honest, this is something I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ve tried all of the other ways of arguing my way into womanhood – to talk about my dysphoria, to talk about the sense of needing to be a girl most of my life, to talk about how running on female hormones and having my body develop in certain ways has helped me feel like a whole human being. I have a lot of reasons to transition and to call myself a woman. But no matter what I say, it doesn’t matter. People will just literally tell me that my emotions, my experience of my self, my identity and my place in this society *does not matter*.

I’m tired of making excuses for that behavior, when the core of this question is literally: your experience of yourself does not matter to me. The fact that you were born a certain way is the only determinant of who you are. Despite the fact that most cisgender women would NEVER want that logic applied to them. I only ask that people offer me the same agency over my life that they would like to have over theirs. I wish that I had the medical agency to have the body that cisgender women are born with, but I don’t – just as I’m sure that many hypothetical cisgender women whose bodies don’t work in the ways they would like them to would like to have normative bodies too. We just can’t magically make that happen.

We work with what we have, and we shouldn’t have to meet normative standards and stories in order to have agency over our own narrative. It’s so absurd. I don’t need to win an argument to be a woman. I simply am.

My name is Emma Harmon. I am my mother’s daughter, I am my father’s daughter. I was assigned male at birth, and I am a woman. I do not have to prove anything to you in order for that to be the truth.