Woman is a class to me, it’s not a body or a way of presenting or anything like that. Being a woman is being treated like a woman and knowing that it’s about me, that it’s not an accident I’m being treated this way, that the poisonous messages of patriarchy are meant for me. All my life. That’s it.

And then extending outward, it’s knowing that there is an incredibly long herstory of resilience, beauty, and struggle all around the world from the same class situation I describe (with variances based on class, race, ability, cis or trans, etc.)

That’s it. Women don’t have to fit into a binary to be women, the binary is bullshit so no one ACTUALLY does fit every part of it. Like I seriously am not a woman because “I don’t fit the man binary role.” I can be genderless and a woman. I’m a woman because when men say fucked up things about women I know they’re talking about me and I feel like it, and I always have. I’m a woman because my reality is shaped that way. I’m a woman because I know how other women feel and they know how I feel. Even the ones who refuse to recognize me as a woman…

That’s it. It’s not about appearance or performativity, or any of that. Woman is a class. I don’t really believe you can be “partially” a woman or “used to be a woman” in this culture. And some may call me binarist for that, but I’m not. I’m so far non-essentialist and non-binary that I believe womanhood is a socially-constructed lived experience shared by all women no matter how they look and all performativity is arbitrary compared to the fact of how one is treated+how one views that treatment (directed at your true self or not), and what messages one internalizes because of that.

…And I wouldn’t know all of that or how to say it without trans women of color. Who to this point don’t get credit for it.