The girls who own womanhood
Published on 2025-05-26
Previously:
Recently I finished reading The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy which is a good book by a cool person. I've never been much of a young adult novel person but this one is very thoughtful and has a lot of themes I think esteemed readers of njms.ca would enjoy.
The Sapling Cage via The Feminist Press
In it, a young transgender woman stumbles into her transition by joining a convent of witches—witches who famously only admit women. I won't spoil it but I don't think it'd be a spoiler to say that while the book is about transgender women, the only transgender woman who gets a meaningful role is Lorel, our protagonist. The Sapling Cage is a story about a transgender woman interacting with cisgender people.
This is both common for books about transgender characters and realistic. Despite how it feels on the fediverse sometimes we transgender people make up a very small portion of the general population. Binary gender works just barely enough for most people that most people don't spend enough time interrogating it to come to any life-altering realizations. For most practical purposes, the story of my own life is a story of interacting with cisgender people, too.
In a story like this one, it's tempting to ask: who owns womanhood?
I certainly don't own womanhood. Nobody gave me womanhood. I had to take it. And this wasn't your typical pick-pocket scenario either; I had to capture it straight from the hands of sociogenic normativity, and hold it through a sort of protracted war of attrition—a war I'm still waging to this day. It's hard to say if there'll ever come a day where all or even most women will look at me and accept even basic things about my lived experience of womanhood.
Conversely, cisgender women don't own womanhood either. That's like, a core thesis of the movement for trans rights. This experience of having womanhood foisted on you, being dragged along for the ride with all the pink and dolls and pretty dresses that entails, while living as someone for whom that works enough to at least not feel the need to ask any questions, is a pretty narrow slice of what it's like to be a woman.
Truthfully, there are as many ways to be a woman as there are women. Even this flattening we often encounter when talking about people who've been "socialized" as women can be problematic. What do we really mean when we say "socialized?" Literally no matter what definition you give, I'm sure I can find plenty of examples of cis and trans women whose upbringing was wildly different.
This sort of thing comes up in a conversation that—surprisingly enough—I find myself having with trans women just as often if not more often than I do with cis women: Do transwomen have a "problem" with sexism? Nominally men have a problem with sexism, so does that "carry over"? The answer is: of course transwomen have a problem with sexism. Transwomen have about as much of a problem with sexism as cisgender women. Patriarchy affects everyone. Divide and conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the book. As soon as we start trying to single out any demographic it's game over.
So to answer the question I posed earlier, we're all out here building a tapestry of lived experience. One of the most radical things you can do is let others create their own patches, and have the humility to weave it in when the time comes.
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