I don’t talk about this aspect of my feminism very often, but understanding this aspect of male-female dynamics was foundational to my personal healing from the way gender identity-based understanding harmed me and coping with the effects of patriarchy on my life– historically and presently. Without this ground I think it’s difficult to compassionately and clearly understand the female experience, regardless of sexuality, presentation, beliefs about the self, or otherwise.
It sounds conspiratorial. It’s not– it’s the key to understanding why there are male and female at all, rather than just organisms that bud off, to replicate themselves forever.
I find those gender critters who want to discuss “biological reality” aren’t too enthusiastic about digging into the real implications of this for either men or women. It is alternately heartbreaking and liberating to know the full parameters– that this is beyond socialization, yet includes quite a bit of it, that it’s not about brains or junk or hormones per se but the dynamics of reproductive resource investment, that our lives are forever constrained by this dance but that the female role in it is not placid submission.
I strongly believe my dysphoria was a kind of grappling with this reality; a form of building a way of being beyond what is constructed in language, thought, and society to keep the arms race going in favor of men. At some point my dysphoria held me back from this project and my well-being; I needed to see with clarity what being female *was* in relation to men to know how to get beyond it.
I still do not fully understand my own sexuality, desires, goal-directedness, or how to interface with society in a lesbian specific way. The dark part of this evolutionary dynamic is that the female-centered narrative– the truthful narrative on women’s behalf– while not submissive, passive, or fulfilled in being abused, is one rooted in being trapped. It is one crucial, through continuing to cope with the demands of male reproduction, to the development of even more clever and terrifying male strategies. It is the shadow side of female sexuality and motherhood; rabbits eating their young, the toad releasing its eggs before being drowned by the male, the goat gone blank with the hand inside her during artificial insemination. A feminist call to power is often a call to recognize the female shadow. It is often not a call to recognize one’s ability to leave the cave altogether and stand in a different sun.
The flip side of “political lesbianism” (whether literal or merely an alternate narrative of witnessing a genuine, long-lived attraction to women) is that feminism often does not appeal to lesbians. After watching bitter arguing between both factions for years, I ultimately believe both sides believe what they do for the same reason. There is no way to be a lesbian, authentically, in a world where being female is participating– with agency or without– in the predator-prey, parasite-host dynamic. Politicized lesbians recognize this and believe that there is a kind of feminism that will get them beyond it. Apolitical lesbians recognize this and believe that feminism, as a kind of shadow-female, is merely a form of female participation, even collaboration, with the dynamic.
I do not think you can genuinely talk to dysphoric women– particularly dysphoric lesbians– if you do not understand that this is the genesis of sexual dimorphism and sexual reproduction. Existential terror– felt in the body itself in all of its myriad ways– is an appropriate response to witnessing this dynamic. No amount of “female empowerment” can convince a woman who understands the parameters to enjoy them or be at peace. It is often not a dysphoric woman’s role in the dance but the fact that the dance exists whatsoever– has built her body from her mother’s blood and bone, and formed it into the shape it exists in, with the eyes and stakes of an arms race upon it– that is what makes her life unbearable in the way that it does.
