I went to the Bans Off Our Bodies march alone. I guess no one is really “alone” at a protest march. There were lots of other people there, but I felt alone, even being surrounded by so many people. A stage had been constructed on Constitution at the east end of the National Mall. I sat by myself in the grass with the Washington Monument to my back. We all had our backs to the monument—the massive phallus jabbing into the sky—as we listened to the women on stage tell stories about their lives.
A middle aged woman told us about when she decided to abort a pregnancy—a child they had wanted—in order to spare the rest of her family. The child would have been born with a heart condition that would not have allowed him to live very long, and the child would have required constant and expensive care until he died. Caring for the child would have consumed all of the family’s time and wealth. Her 7 year old son would have been left to fend for himself for years as the adults busied themselves watching his little brother waste away. The family would have gone broke. The speaker would have had to quit her career. Had she birthed the child, the family’s well being and future would have been sacrificed so that a baby could be born, suffer for a few years, and die without understanding why he suffered so much. Her abortion prevented all of that suffering.
Another, younger woman told about how she barely slid in under the deadline for an abortion and how that allowed her to finish her schooling and start building a career that makes her happy and allows her to give back to the community that fostered her.
Women from different religions and ethnicities, one by one, took the mic and explained for any in the crowd that might not see the full picture how abortion rights are connected to social justice, racial equality, and fundamental right of bodily autonomy. They also told us how to save those rights. Marching and shouting wasn’t really going to make a difference. The march was a ritual to galvanize us and express our solidarity. After the march we would need to organize, motivate voters, and give what we could to fund those that are fighting the good fight. After that reality check, the fun started. Music blared, and the crowd proceeded down Constitution, flanked on all sides by edifices dedicated to art and rationality, as we marched towards a hall inhabited by madness.
I still could not help feeling alone.
Most of the people at the march were women. Most of the people at the march had to or will at some point in their lives consider an abortion. I have never and will never have to consider that possibility for myself. That fact felt like a barrier between me and everyone else in the crowd.
The chant was a call, Bans Off, and a response, Our Bodies, and it was a chant I didn’t feel comfortable participating in. It wasn’t my body. I can’t understand the horror a person must face when their body, unbidden, becomes not-their-own, inhabited and changed by another living creature, knowing that the government will use violence against them to stop them from taking their body back. I didn’t want the ban, but it wasn’t my body they were talking about. Not my chant.
There was also the fact that it was beautiful to hear a chorus of angry female voices screaming that message. I couldn’t bring myself to shout in my rougher, masculine voice.
I couldn’t help but wonder in what way am I like these women? I have never been in a protest crowd for which the issues were so personal. I have been to economic protests and war protests, but they were nothing like this. People felt strongly about the issues at those protests, but their causes were remote or abstract for many of the participants. The women at the Bans Off Our Bodies protest live with the “issue” in their bodies. The government and its relationship to their flesh will change next month.
Not for me though. I am a woman, but I am a trans woman. My guts are profoundly less interesting to the religious right in this country. While I am thankful for that disinterest, the sense of separateness from other women that the march created in me was palpable in a way that I had not experienced heretofore. Because of that sense of separateness, I wondered, “How could I call myself a woman? What does it even mean to be a woman?”
It is a question my wife and I have talked through on several occasions. When you live as one gender your entire life and then decide to switch teams, it is hard not to ask questions like that. What does it mean to be a woman? Am I becoming a woman or am I already a woman? Was I a man before I realized that I’m trans? If I wasn’t, then what on earth is a man?
Beyond the philosophical import, for a transgender person these questions have a practical side to them. If a person is going to undergo a gender transition, what does that transition mean to them? What do they need to do to feel more like the gender they identify as? No one wants to just blindly inhabit a gender as determined by popular culture. Generally, one has a personal idea of what gender means, or else a gender transition forces one to develop and refine such a notion.
My wife an I talked a lot about these questions, because I wanted to explore what womanhood meant to me, and she wanted to figure out what the heck this person she married is scheming to do. We never landed on a good definition of woman. Despite feeling separate from the women at the march because I have no uterus, I know you can’t define a woman by her ability to bear children. Some women are infertile. Some have no uterus at all. Genetics as a basis for a definition is fraught because of chromosomal and intersex conditions. Any definition you supply that is related to biology has a commonly accepted counter example. (That is, even a religious, right-wing person would accept such a counter example.) Behavior and appearance are also useless. All sane people have discarded the notion that there are set rules for how men and women dress and behave, and cross-culture gender conventions make a complete hash of any attempt to define man and woman by behavior or presentation.
If biology and behavior are off the table, then what’s left? What is left is the definition commonly used by the Left-- self identification into womanhood. OK. I, a trans woman, am 100% on board with defining any given person’s gender based solely on their internal sense of gender. I think this is exactly the right answer for determining the gender of an individual: ask, and whatever comes out of their mouth is the right answer no matter what that answer is.
But what if the person says, I’m a woman? Now I know she’s a woman (thanks for telling me, lady), but what information has that given me other than how to address and refer to her? She might like dresses, but she might not. She might have a vagina, and she might not. She might like rom-coms, and she might not. She might subscribe to O magazine, and she might not have any idea what that magazine is. If I am being consistent in my agnosticism towards gender roles and stereotypes, I have absolutely no information about this woman.
This bothers me. I am not upset because I think that there should be a well defined way to be a woman. I am not upset because I can’t ascribe attributes to a woman based on her gender. I am upset because I want to fit in. I want to be a part of womanhood (whatever that means), and I don’t want to have to construct it with my own two hands, one brick at a time. I might chip my nail polish.
I want a satisfying answer to “what is a woman?” so that I can explain myself to people in a way that they understand and accept. I have been asked in good faith, “So you want to be a woman? What does that mean?” They ask because they want to help and to support me in whatever that means to me. The question makes me want to run out of the room screaming.
What am I supposed to say? I feel superficial saying that I like dresses and feel better when I look in a mirror and see long hair and no beard. I feel like I’m just reinforcing stereotypes when I say that I like cooking for the family and being engaged with my child and the household. I feel like I’m co-opting something when I say that identifying as a woman makes all these parts of my life feel more coherent and consistent.
If want dresses, makeup, and a nurturing demeanor, couldn’t I just be a feminine man? Why upend everything and go after medical interventions? Men can wear makeup and dresses. Men can take care of a household and volunteer at school. Why can’t I just do what I want to do but just be a man while I do it? The honest answer is that I would rather jump off a fucking bridge than be any sort of man.
I don’t have to solve this puzzle. It feels like I do sometimes, like at the march when the people around me neatly fit into a cultural ideal of womanhood, and I am so clearly excluded from that ideal. At times like that, if feels like I need to be able to explain womanhood in order to justify my existence. But, even setting trans issues aside, that is an absurd expectation to have of oneself. There is no woman that can give a coherent definition of womanhood that stands up to counter examples. Gender is complicated, and while there is a biological or neurological basis for it, how gender manifests and is experienced is a cultural epiphenomenon. It is the product of millions of people creating themselves anew every day and talking to each other about it. Woman and man are just terms they use to label moments in that dynamic process. What is accepted as womanly depends on time, space, and culture. Who is accepted by society as a woman depends on time, space, and culture.
That’s a big ole’ non-answer.
I struggled with that uncertainty all through the march, all the way to the Supreme Court. When we reached it, a fence surrounded the entire block. No one could even get on the steps. No one was in the court to hear us shout. No one was walking in or out of the building. It didn’t feel like there was much to do there. I flipped off the building, and I headed back to the metro to go home. On the way, a truck with an LED billboard mounted to the side drove by. The billboard flashed the question, “What is a woman?” Shit. They can read my mind. I stared in shock at the sign driving by, trying to figure out where the closest aluminum foil would be. The LED billboard refreshed and the question was replaced with another: “If you can’t answer that, how can you have a woman’s march?”
That was a relief. I don’t need an aluminum hat after all. The truck wasn’t picking up on my brainwaves. It was a sad attempt at trolling us, perpetrated by by a far right-wing commentator. I found out later that he footed the bill for a handful of these trucks to drive around the march route. The point he was trying to make is that the left is so confused about very basic truths that they should not be listened to at all. The “What is a woman?” question is the new shibboleth for the religious right. If your answer isn’t, “that bitch that cooks my dinner,” then you’re probably a socialist—or a child molester.
That sign and the messaging around it really hurts. Not because of the argument the troll was trying to make, but because that’s my question, damnit. My own need to fit in and figure out my place in culture is being used as a weapon. Thanks, asshole.
I can see why the left simply says that a woman is anyone that identifies as a woman. As far as politics and policy goes, that’s where the definition should end. Any other definition allow religious maniacs to start assigning rights to people out according to some bronze age bullshit. However, the politically expedient answer isn’t enough for me. I would venture to say that it’s not a good personal answer for anyone. We mean something else when we say, “I am a woman”, and I think we want that recognized. It is not just a pronoun and a form of address. I did not risk the stability of my family, my relationship with my relatives and friends, and my job for a pronoun change. Stopping at, “a woman is someone who says she’s a woman”, is insulting. It means more. It means more to me. I wish we could give a different answer without having that answer weaponized against us.
The way out of this garbage heap is to admit that it just means different things to different people, and that culture kind of ties those different definitions together loosely in some sort of chaotic web. That’s fine. We actually do that with a lot of other words and concepts. They mean different things to different people and they’re used differently in different contexts—adulthood, happiness, home. We’re OK with ambiguity there. But when it comes to gender, we have, as a culture, hung way to much on those pegs. Admitting that they’re unstable and can shift from day to day means admitting that we’re a mess. Society is not as orderly as it seems, and a lot of our conventions and institutions are absurd. Admitting that is a lot harder than some weak-ass trolling of women at a protest.
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