This week, I have picked up a question which may seem like a very simple one. Which could have been a good option for the very first edition of this newsletter. Before getting into complex issues, it would have been a good first step, to narrate a story of the person behind these words.
Honestly, I did think of it, but after this interview, and while writing this welcome post, I was a bit tired of speaking about myself. I just wanted to jump headlong into some of the topics. However, in the last one month or so, as I have opened up more on various social media, I have come across many more well-meaning questions, about the experiences of cis women and trans women at different stages of life, about various forms of privilege, about skills and emotions and abilities and personalities and how they might differ by gender. And engaging with these questions has helped me understand and articulate myself better.
To be clear, the question for today is 'why I say I am a woman', and not 'why I am a woman'. The answer to the latter is much simpler – I just know that I am a woman. There's nothing more needed than that. And there's a difference between being a woman, and saying that you are a woman, because saying it makes you more visible. It becomes 'real', whatever real means. It becomes political. It becomes a call to others. It means you are no longer going to remain silent and hidden.
One is not born a woman, but rather becomes a woman
Paraphrasing these famous words by Simone de Beauvoir, womanhood is something one grows into, not what one is born with. So what if the paths into this growth differ from one woman to another?
For a long time, I assumed a very limited meaning of this idea. That it referred to how children who are seen as female by everyone, are raised into womanhood. Even after I came to know of those who went through a gender transition (or a 'sex change' as it was known at that time), I expanded that meaning just a little bit. That those who had always known themselves, who had rejected their assigned gender completely, who could not find any way of continuing as their assigned gender – they were finding their own paths into or out of womanhood.
But it didn't apply to me. How could it, when I had suppressed myself so deeply that I had even stopped questioning it? How could it, when my solution to all the childhood fears and questions had been to just shut up, imitate the boys around me, and try to avoid raising any doubts?
How could I possibly know what it is to be a woman?
How could I know what being a girl, or later, being a woman was like, when I had not faced the same kinds of restrictions that I knew other girls and women did? When my body, my orientation, my family and friends, and all of society – everything and everyone pointed in just one direction, which said that 'everything was fine'? Which said that what I had suppressed was just a 'paraphilia' (to use a somewhat mild word), and not an 'identity'?
So what if I had also faced body shaming not just in childhood but well into adulthood? There were others who were far more effeminate and had it worse, right? So what if I was considered hopeless (with or without basis) in most tasks which were seen as 'masculine'? I had still been 'allowed to study science' and allowed to build an independent life for myself, right? So what if I had been creeped out by some of my peers, a teacher, a family friend, some strangers, and so on... again not just through childhood but well into adulthood? Again, many others faced worse, right?
The only way in which I was able to finally solve the jigsaw puzzle in my head, was to accept my gender identity and orientation at the same time. That I was trans and lesbian. But how could any of that have made sense for all those decades, when all the lesbian stereotypes and portrayals and representation around didn't (and often still doesn't) account for someone like me? Nor did trans representation, for that matter.
The following image represents what gender dysphoria felt like at the time that the paragraphs around it refer to
Laughter is the best medicine, or is it?
Laughter was an easy solution for a long time. When I saw some kids in school being bullied. When I saw some other kids in school, and later, guys in my hostel being dressed up as women for some plays or dances. When I saw most famous male actors doing 'drag' for some role or the other. When I saw friends in college being given nicknames which implied some kind of femininity. Or even when, once in a while, some of these jokes were directed at me.
Or when laughing along or being an accomplice felt wrong, then the solution was to just be a silent bystander, to look away, to ignore. Or to wonder. Was that guy in school looking at my legs? Were those comments that I overheard directed towards me? When could I grow my hair out without fearing anyone in the hostel? What would have happened if I didn't have my height and voice to shield me? Was it 'safe' to wear a t-shirt of this colour? Why did a friend, on seeing my long hair cut short again, joke that I looked like Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry? Not a cis guy, but an actress playing a trans guy? Of course, back then, I didn't have 'cisgender' in my vocabulary.
And why were some of these jokes going on even when I was nearly 26, when the people making those jokes also knew that I had a girlfriend?
December 2012
I was 29. Married to a cis woman – the 'girlfriend' from the previous paragraph. Both of us had our careers. At work, I had seen some women, and a gay man, talking about what had happened to a young woman in Delhi. The shock and fear and anger and even cynicism was palpable. I had begun to realise, not just in that conversation but through many others in a world changing around us, that these visceral fears about safety were common to not just all women as I had internalized since childhood, but also people of all genders on the queer spectrum. But I wasn't one of them, was I?
I picked up my spouse in the evening after work, as usual. We were driving home. I asked if she had heard about what had happened in Delhi. She had heard that it was a 'gang rape', but not all the graphic details. She had been busy at work. She hadn't heard about... the iron rod. I told her. Stone-faced, in a carefully measured voice. Because this news was really serious, and my usual casual voice had disappeared. But also because I couldn't let my own fears come up to the surface, at any cost. I kept my eyes on the road, but I could sense her shock and fear and anger. We had lived in Delhi until the first half of 2012. We had faced at least one incident in just a few months there, where we felt terribly unsafe even at 7 PM. But my fears were only on her behalf, and not my own. Or were they?
The following image represents what gender dysphoria felt like at the time that the paragraphs around it refer to
Epilogue
It was another two years before I finally came out, even to myself. A lot has changed since then. Whatever I had internalized about womanhood since a young age (not exactly second-hand information) has been reinforced many times over and much more directly in the last seven years. I had been prepared to lose a lot in this journey, but I have gained much more. It's become much easier to look at myself in the mirror. To make sense of the world around – even as rising bigotry keeps making much of it more incomprehensible. To find a sense of community – even in the face of disillusionment in some spaces. To be able to relate to others. To see my own life as inherently valuable, and not just a checklist of tasks to be completed.
The person who I referred to as my girlfriend and then my spouse in previous paragraphs, is now my ex. We have a child. Her three moms – my ex, my partner and me – know that being an 'all girl family' is not easy in this country or even this world, but we are committed to providing her a different and better experience of childhood – and of womanhood if she so chooses – compared to what any of us ever got.
All of us who identify as women, grow into womanhood in our own ways. A girl who is forced to work outside the home from a young age because her family needs the money, has a different journey from someone who is never allowed to work outside the home at all. A woman who grows up in a matrilineal society may experience the world a little differently from the rest of us. (aside: I say 'matrilineal' and not 'matriarchal', because I don't think any matriarchy exists in any human society which is as oppressive as the patriarchy that we all know)
And as these achingly beautiful stories reminded us yesterday, when combined with another form of marginalization, experiences of womanhood become far more oppressive.
Similarly, those of us who flee our assigned genders and come into womanhood as refugees, bring with us our own journeys. Just as our transmasculine counterparts who flee womanhood and go in the other direction, carry their own experiences with them.
The experiences of cis women, trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people, are shaped by internalizing in different ways the oppression of womanhood, femaleness and femininity, whether or not it is directed at us, compared to most of our cis male peers who seem to be largely oblivious of it.
That's why I believe that the womanhood of every woman is valid, no matter what her journey has been like. And that's why I say that I am a woman.
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