They really don't care.
Unaltered Selfie
(All my love to the guys and enbies out there, but this is a decidely transfemme post)
For the first forty-five years of my life, I was what you might call "aspirationally female." That is to say, I still identified as male, but I knew that I wanted to be a woman. I saw it as an unattainable goal, the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy, that some day an external force might come down from on high, extend a well-manicured hand, and transform me into the woman I wanted to be—the woman that, critically,
I wasn't.
There is safety in an unattainable goal, isn't there? You can want it all you like, but you don't actually have to
do anything to achieve it, because it's impossible. I worshipped femininity like a knight mooned after his courtly love, idolizing it, putting it up on a pedestal and pointing and saying see, that right there,
that has worth.
When I finally figured out I was trans, I learned that the unattainable goal was not quite so unattainable as I had thought. But no alien scientist or fairy godmother was going to just give it to me. I had to reach out to claim it. I had to go and get it myself. I had to... brace yourself...
work for it.
And so I did HRT, and worked on makeup, and did voice lessons, and thrift shopped until my nose bled. I changed my name and what documents the government would let me change. I came out to my family and friends and neighbors and coworkers. I endured the stares of nervous playground moms and nosy Publix boomers and the construction crew that for some reason liked to hang out in front of my primary care doctor's front door. But despite all the effort, I still felt nervous at the prospect of taking up room in women's spaces. And I don't just mean restrooms. What right did I have to the girls-only group chat in my friend circle? The women's professional group at my work? Even going into Ulta unescorted felt like an inappropriate violation of a space I had not yet earned the right to visit.
Shouldn't there be a test? An application process? Some sort of certification exam from an objective ruling body that could consider my application, check to ensure I'd completed enough coursework, and finally, reluctantly, issue me a Lady Card? I imagined that every woman in my life would see me as an interloper who had no right to presume to have that most treasured of all commodities—womanhood.
They don't care. Y'all. I'm going to say it again with little clap emoji in the middle so you know I'm serious. They
don't
care.
You see, for the vast majority of the female population, being a woman was never aspirational. It was not something they had to work for or something they had to earn. It is simply the natural state of existence, the default, the gender equivalent of the taste inside your mouth when you're not tasting anything at all. It's not a supercharged Corvette Stingray with air conditioned seats and LED underglow. It's a 2005 Kia Sorento with two previous owners and brakes that may pass the next inspection if you're lucky.
That isn't to say that women don't enjoy being women. Most do, despite the frustrations of misogyny and the hassles of cis female biology and a Souls-like difficulty curve in the workplace. And of those that don't enjoy it, most would not exchange it for being a man. (In fact, the ones that would are by definition not women at all, but rather trans men or non-binary.) But they are not out there gatekeeping femininity. By showing up in their lives and claiming to be a woman, I am not asking them to break open the bottle of champagne they've been saving for a special occasion. I'm asking them for a glass of water, and they're more than happy to just point me to the faucet and get on with their day.
Now you might be saying, "Okay Shannon, but they're not all like that. Some do value femininity as a precious gem that a trans woman like me could never attain." Yeah, hon. They're called TERFs. And they're wrong. You can't control the fact that they're wrong, and it can suck to deal with them, but we all know and acknowledge that they're wrong.
So don't feed the TERF inside your own head. Yeah, you've got one. We all do. It's the voice that says that as a trans woman, I am fundamentally different from a cis woman in a way that I can never overcome. It's the voice that says that, as a trans woman, I deserve women's spaces less than a cis woman. It's the part of you that still puts femininity up on a pedestal and worships it, the part that looks on with envy to any cis woman in your life, the part that looks in the mirror and still sees a man and believes that your body makes you somehow lesser. The call is coming from inside the house, my dears.
I call my head-TERF Brenda. (Apologies to any Brendas out there.) Brenda is a bitch, a stereotypical mean girl. She does not like the way I dress or the way I do my makeup. She knows exactly what parts of my body I'm self-conscious about and can say the rudest things about them. When I listen to Brenda, I start thinking that everyone else thinks like Brenda too. I start to worry that maybe she's right.
How would your life change, right now, if you were able to shut your own Brenda's mouth for just one minute? Take away her Twitter account and block her TikTok channel? Would you start listening to the other voices in your life, the ones from real women, who look at you in your dress and heels and see someone who is just dressed normally?
So in conclusion—they don't care. Be a woman, be proud of being a woman, but remember that it's not something you have to earn, even if you've had to work for it. It's something you always were, even if you're only just now able to acknowledge it. Take a moment to enjoy the fact that being a woman is one of the most mundane, boring, unexceptional, pedestrian,
normal things you can ever be.
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