I Feel Like A Woman.

I feel like a woman when someone beats me. I don't know what the fuck that means, or what to do with that information, but it does mean something specific.

I struggle with defining my gender, I am not sure if I should even define it. For the longest time, I've said that womanhood is a purely political position to me, I am a woman because society deemed that I should be subject to discrimination for my gender. That is how I found out I was a woman. I mean, sure, the female sex was assigned to me at birth, but it was only when I noticed that my professional, legal and social status were impacted by the societal interpretation of what it means to present as female, that I realised the impact of gender. The oppression, the discrimination, the sexual violence and the systemic application of the patriarchy are why I know I am a woman, and they are also why it matters to me to identify as such (which is not to say it has to matter to you, your struggle does not have to borne from the same place as mine). To me, the entire point of womanhood, is to resist and respect the struggle. Fight. Protest. File endless complaints and appeals. Work in policy. Shed light on the issues. Initiate and manage legal action for those who cannot. Write on the issues. Teach. This is what it means to me to be a woman.

I am not tempted to define womanhood outside of those terms because I don't think it needs a definition outside of those terms, and certainly not from me. What is it to me if you have the same body parts as I do or not? It's none of my business. I don't have to wear a skirt to be a woman, so you certainly don't either. I don't have to have a baby to be a woman, so why should your womanhood be defined by whether you can or cannot? I think this is one of those things for which we can just leave it at self- identification. Your gender is what you say it is. I'm already learning people's names, birthdays, favorite foods all the time, what is the big deal in learning someone's pronouns? Why aren't we just happy to do it? I'm happy to learn how someone takes their coffee, so I don't have to ask them every time I make them coffee, somehow their identity is too extreme to cater to? A little bit of unlearning, just enough to make sure you don't determine someone's identity based on physical attributes alone, is too much unlearning? I don't get it. It seems like it shouldn't be so hard to let someone be a woman because that's how they identify, I don't even get how that's my decision.

The problem here never was how we identify, anyway. The problem was always how we are *identified*. Our treatment, the root of the discrimination, is not how we identify ourselves, but how society sees us. To me boobs have nothing to do with womanhood, but if seeing my boobs means womanhood to most people, and womanhood means oppression in the current social environment, I cannot opt out of the sexism or threats. Not being able to opt out of the sexism or fear is where the politics of womanhood lie for me, and again, you don't necessarily have to have boobs to be identified as *womanly* or having a gender identity that warrants discrimination, it can be anything, but the lived experience of oppression is not determined by my own identification, it's determined by the identification of my social, legal and political environment. I find this definition of womanhood personal, easy and comfortable, it's not meant to define the womanhood of another, just mine, and it is action-oriented, it asks of me to diagnose social imbalances and try to correct them. It doesn't ask of me to point to the part of my body that I think makes me a woman.

Outside of this, it is hard. I don't know that any of my behaviour is womanly. I wear clothes that are designed for women, sometimes, but I mostly wear pants and shirts. I just like clothes that are designed for my body, everybody does. I put on makeup, sometimes, but mostly not. I wear jewellery, but it's not aesthetic, it's symbolic of specific things in my life. And most importantly, those things seem the result of gender identification, not the cause of them. I've lived in this world for 30-years, I've seen gender stereotypes play out, and I embody them in some ways when I buy a skirt and lipstick. I don't think I need to do that as a woman, but I cannot discouvnt that I may have been taught to do it because I am a woman. I don't think there's gender-definition to be had in symbols like these. I don't know where it is to be had, but I do know I cannot finish the sentence "women should..." and that tells me something.

I do feel a temptation to tip-toe around issues of gender, though. Maybe that's for the best, a little caution is not a bad thing when it indicates that you're worried if you are being inclusive and we can all agree that enough people have been hurt by the arbitrary positions on gender we've taken through the years. I tip-toe because I don't want to, in any way, make anyone feel unwelcome or invalidated in their gender identity. I think that's a good reason, but sometimes, certain subjects become so fraught, we can no longer honestly discuss them.

And honestly, I feel like a woman when someone is beating me.

I don't know exactly what it is, but it is a feeling. An awareness of my gender that is erotic and not sex-based, it is not biologically-rooted. I don't feel it because of cunt and tits, as far as my body is concerned my sexuality is very fluid. Sometimes I think of my clit as a dick, I don't use it to fuck anyone, but I like the humiliation of my tiny dick. I think of my cunt as hole to be use, my biological features have no bearing on what I want from sex, I want to feel be hurt and used. It's not in those things that I feel like a woman. It's in specific mistreatment. I feel it because of the treatment. I feel like a woman when someone hits me in the face or beats me with a belt. I feel like when they're sexually cruel to me, when I'm being sexually forced. I feel it when they break my will to fight back; when I'm compelled to behave exactly as they demand because I am afraid. All of my gendered aestheticism lies in extremely problematic things. In the same oppression that defines my political leanings. A part of it is because of how the women around me were treated when I was growing up, it sowed the idea of a womanhood that was violently under attack at all times, and a romance that was built upon the oppression. The people who loved the women around me, beat them, and at some point in my development, I committed that idea to my sexuality.

But that is the idea within which I enjoy my gender the most.

The space in which I am comfortable and happy to be mistreated, where the toxic idea that women are meant to be abused and beaten is an acceptable ideology. Within my sexuality, I am enjoy an ornamental version of my gender, it's a startling ornament, almost ugly, borne from centuries of terrible tradition but it makes me feel some kind of gender affirmation, and some kind of beauty. It's not pain that makes me feel like a woman, it's violence. If you stick a needle in me, I'm a masochist, if you throw me against a wall, I am a woman.

I don't know what to do with that.