# So I guess I'm gender-critical now

published: 2019-05-23

I am biologically female.

That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared for the time being. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.

At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me (which I don't want to elaborate on), I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.

Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.

As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. All the men I've ever been attracted to have been fictional, far out of my social standing, or held power over me in some capacity. Either they had no capacity to actually hurt me, or they did, and my subconscous mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could ever blossom into a healthy relationship.

Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.

An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine woman's presentation will always have that undertone of womanness underneath it, which makes it special, what I'm attracted to, different from a masculine man or any other kind of man. (And there's a whole discourse on biological men who identify as female and are attracted to women and how lesbians should feel about that, and how trans activist rhetoric can get kind of rapey at times concerning this... but that's a post for another day.)

And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has been historically used to oppress gender-non-conforming people, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I can barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they're supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you really think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.

Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I have a male body. But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being taken seriously. And despite whatever book titles I use, I've never been great at the whole duality of spirit thing, so my brain took my mental reality and tried to apply it to my physical reality as well. And then, as a result, dysphoria.

This isn't to say that I'm a radfem now. A lot of radical feminist rhetoric centers around women and men being two different social classes, collectivizing everyone and their experiences based on their biological sex. There are times when this is greatly useful, like examining religion's misogynistic influence on culture. But I believe in individual rights over all. They are extremely rare, few and far between, but there are genuinely good men in this world. And innocent individuals, no matter if they're male or female, should not have to suffer for the sins of the larger group that they did not personally commit.

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