I know I am a woman when I sit there in a room full of men and watch it erupt in a wall of sound and postering and displays of dominance at the gentlest noise. I know I am a woman as I love my beauty and proudly display the gorgeous professional photos taken of me in my fine formal wear to one who has complimented it and said I am gorgeous and the very next day pretends he did no such thing and does everything he can to pretend I am some sort of creep, a predator, a freak who must be hunted and killed by the peers around us. I know I am a woman when I love myself, with all the love men think should belong to them. They think one passing compliment will sway my legs open when I could scrape them off my shoe and then I watch them turn and lie and call me the worst things they can think of because I simply do not care. They have favourite words. Bitch. Faggot. Freak. Pedo. Tranny. It washes off me like the rain. I disagree with them and they think I am attacking them. I disagree with them and they think I am ranting and raging and need to calm down. I am eloquent and firm and they believe that means I am angry. They do not understand anger, like you and I do. Like a woman does. I understand this now. When I am angry, the air begins to sizzle and burn and smoke. When I am angry, I am the sound and I am the fury. And they think that they, these pitiful creatures I have never met before nor cared about the existence of beyond a nebulous “people deserve rights” have seen me angry when I calmly, clearly and firmly assert “No, I think you’re incorrect about that.” It fascinates me how such an alien experience could bore me so utterly.
I understand, through my lived womanhood, that they believe women are angry when they disagree, because there is the deeply rooted belief that women are meek and soft and unchallenging. That sometimes women make themselves that way because it’s simply less exhausting and will make things move along more smoothly if they just ignore it. I understand that women can’t ignore the abuse forever and so, when it finally must come forth, it comes forth with fury unlike any that Hell could hope to muster. A fury that could’ve won the war in heaven. And so it is mythologized in saying and jeered at on the stage. Mocked. Made to sound like if they show it some pity-respect, if they pretend they are calm and “chill” that it washes away what they do to me. Make the monster of the scary bedtime story small and it won’t hurt you.
But I am not small. I was never taught to be small. Not by my parents and not by the world around me. I was a boy once, and boys are taught to be strong and to fight for what they believe in by the patriarchy, by the classroom, by the stories and mythologies of heroes. I do not know how to live and be small. I do not want to know that part of womanhood. That part is something the patriarchy said has to be part of womanhood. It is afraid of me because I lack the leash they hoped I’d put on myself like a good girl. It is afraid of me because of what is absent from me. It is afraid that I have no womb to bleed from in agony and use to dismiss my rage. It is afraid that I grew up as headstrong and righteous as its strongest men and then I tell the truth to the world that I still feel what women feel. I feel what men do to us. Because then the truth is that society cannot tell me what I or any of us should feel. It cannot tell us what women feel. The truth is that I learned womanhood from the way women loved me and the way men hated me; they hated and hated and hated me so deeply there are no words to describe how small and deranged they would become just for a drop of my blood. Women loved me. They listened to me and I listened to them and I loved them back as we embraced and saw that we felt the same terrible rage. We felt the same bittersweet love.
I know I am a woman because as women watched how I was treated, they called me daughter, sister, mother, and they loved me as their own. I know I am a woman because of how womanhood embraced me again and again, like baptism-by-sunrise, like moonlight that pulls on the heart.
I am a woman that is loved and feared, mythologized in praise and hushed, whispered slander, worshipped in black and orange kingdoms then quickly erased from the temple of browsing history. What else could even you call me but divine? I am a woman and it has made me immortal.
