In Sissy Diaries, nonbinary author Jacob Tobia explores their activist crushes, petty jealousies, innermost political musings, and anything else they deem appropriate to share in public. It's like Lizzie McGuire, but gayer.

Dear Diary,

This month is Women's History Month. From Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes, to the fervor of the #TimesUp movement, to Women’s Marches across the country and around the world, women’s power has been growing and spreading and amplifying like whoa. Which is, obviously, something I am thrilled about.

But amid all of this pussypower, I’ve found myself struggling to communicate with feminist allies, organizers, colleagues, and friends about something that’s been putting me off: the word “woman” itself.

I don’t want to be difficult or anything, but I’m just not sure that the word “woman” can hold all of the political weight that we need it to in 2018. Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that organizing solely around “womanhood” is also organizing solely around the gender binary. In an era when so many genderqueer and nonbinary young folks are throwing off the idea of manhood and womanhood altogether — the idea that people can be reduced to one of two gender categories in the first place — “woman” as a sole identity around which to organize feels, I dunno, retro? Counterproductive? A touch off-base?

When many of my organizer friends use the term "woman," I know that they don’t mean it in an exclusionary way. They use it as an abbreviation for a more complex, nuanced set of identities. In their minds, “woman” is just shorthand for “transgender women, cisgender women, and feminine-of-center gender nonconforming/nonbinary people.” But the trouble with this shorthand is that, in the public imagination, it can quickly feel like erasure.

Here’s the thing about abbreviation: You have to know what the letters stand for in order for it to work. Like a nosy parent trying to decipher a teenager’s text messages, you can totally miss the memo if you don’t understand the abbrevs. “I straight up told him I’m DTF. ROFL, I’m such a fucking thot. Smdh” loses all of its salacious meaning if you’re not up on the lingo.

Though contemporary, enlightened, intersectional feminists understand the term “woman” as a wide and all-inclusive net, that understanding gets lost more often than not. Most people don’t realize that the term “woman” could even be shorthand in the first place. We have to face the fact that, to most people, the term “woman” doesn’t paint a rainbow picture of all people on the feminine spectrum. When the average person hears “woman,” they hear only “person born with a vagina.” So when we say “woman,” they assume it means the same thing as “female.”

As much as folks want to claim an intersectional approach, organizing that occurs solely under the label of “woman” always feels to me — a genderqueer, male-assigned, feminine-of-center cutie with facial hair and a bold lip — like something of a fuck-you.

I look around a room full of Women’s March supporters and I wonder to myself, “Do they understand me as a woman? Do they really get how much I belong here? Or do they just think that I’m some sort of cute ally?” I look around a room full of celebs proclaiming time’s up and I wonder if they really see me in their movement. I listen to Oprah talking about “every woman who chooses to say, ‘Me too.’ And every man who chooses to listen” and I wonder: What does she mean by “woman” and “man”? How does she understand those terms? What do they mean to her?