So Jeniene, as ever, you raise an excellent question around what makes us female. And maybe the confusion for me always revolved around being feminine. Which I'm not. I carry the the sting of not being womanly enough from being asked in 3rd grade why I was in the girls line. This a result of a particularly heinous haircut by Louie the elderly family barber. In contrast to you, I wear my hair mostly long so as not to repeat that very incident.
What I can't decide is if having my boobs reconstructed wouldn't actually bother me more than having them taken. "If thy hand offends thee, cut it off." Putting on new ones feels stranger still. Especially the whole nipple reconstruction aspect (insert nauseated gasp here). But neither the extraction of or the addition of said boobs has any bearing on my sense of being female.
So what does, I wonder? How do transgender people know that they are in the wrong body? They report feeling uncomfortable in their own skin. Which for me defines the first 35 years of my life. It wasn't until after having my child that my body (which has significantly expanded) became comfortable. A definingly female moment.
You've both asked and answered excellent questions and shown how useless gender constructs can be other than to make people feel excluded. Also, how useful situations like this can be in encouraging such reflection; though I don't want to negate the seriousness of the matter at hand, unfortunately, it's often our nature not to recognize what we've got until it's gone. I've never been much of a "man": I'm not particularly athletic or big or strong or handy. Then again, I've spent the better part of my manhood trying to spin my lack of manliness to my advantage. I guess that's the advantage of stereotypes-there are usually so many negatives (especially for men), playing against type becomes a positive
ReplyDelete.Now that I'm even less of a man, I guess I can add that to my counted blessings.