today i saw a photo of a woman with a tattoo on her abdomen: the skeleton of a baby, stretched across from hip to hip, reminiscent of a water color painting.
upon seeing it, i felt sorrow, as it looked like a memorial tattoo. (the photo came with no context, so i can only assume.)
the original poster accused it of being grotesque and creepy. in the comments below, someone chimed in that they wanted a tattoo of their own inspired by it, but for different reasons: as a transgender woman, their tattoo would symbolize never being able to have kids of their own.
at this, the original poster acquiesced: “oh, i guess there is one not grotesque interpretation.”
instantly, i felt furious. here were people picking apart the grief of a woman they never met, yet when a transgender woman said they wanted it, suddenly it was acceptable.
this is part of why i do not believe that transgender women will ever be able to understand the struggle of womanhood, no matter how fervently they claim to.
i see constant displays of their ignorance: the suggestion that they, too, feel ‘period pain’ and female hormonal cycles, or their insistence upon breastfeeding while swollen with artificial hormones, or the lamentation of their status as “infertile women” - as if the consequences of choosing to transition could possibly be compared to infertility through accident or unstoppable medical conditions.
it feels like watching children playing pretend, fueled by their imaginations into thinking they’re dinosaurs or pirates or fairies. but these are grown adults, believing that if they do X or do Y, that they can know what it is to be a woman as if they had been swaddled in pink from the day they were born.
what a luxury it would be, to arrive to womanhood so late in the game.
as biological women, we are haunted by our physical forms from the moment we take our first breaths: groomed to become broodmares and damned when we deviate for any reason (regardless of whether it was our choice or not), our bodies are the battleground we wage wars on, fighting desperately to protect our own autonomy.
we are not public property, though we are raised to believe the opposite. every inch of our flesh is considered an open forum where heated debate takes place; whether it’s about what we look like or what we do with ourselves, there is nowhere we can turn where people respect that our bodies are not vessels, but us, wholly and completely - and that we are the ultimate keepers of these temples.
there’s never a day that goes by that i forget that i’m female; not in the strangely fetishistic way that a man might describe me (such as my chest bouncing as i go down the stairs), but in that i am reminded of the limitations set upon me because of my sex. listing all the ways people consider being female a dead-end to anything but procreation would take too long.
even now as i write this, i have learned a new facet of my existence: if i were to memorialize the loss of my child, there would be people who might mock me for it - but only because i’m female. as it turns out, my birth sex is the difference between honorable suffering and being considered “cringey.”
yet here we are, with an entire subset of people on the outside, looking at the trauma and agony we inherit from our mothers and pass on to our daughters, looking at the cruelty strangers will levy at us even in our darkest moments, and saying: oh, i know what that’s like.
i respect the debilitating condition that is dysphoria, but this is not an excuse to piggyback off of the pain that we go through because of our bodies, or (god forbid) covet and envy us for it.
what’s worse? to say that you understand our lives better than we do, or to see our scars and trace your fingers across them while wishing they were yours?
it strikes me as voyeuristic and sadistic, to mourn a suffering you can never be exposed to - and it only ever seems to be out of desire to legitimize their own idea of womanhood, rather than coming from a place of attempted empathy.
i’m sure that seems a little cold, but i have no warmth for someone who sees a symbol of a woman’s agony and only focuses on how they could take it from her and fit it to their own life, regardless of how personal it was to her.
a symbol, i will state again, that was described as grotesque. this adjective was only revoked when the idea was applied to a transgender woman, as if this anonymous woman’s inherent female status made the original concept disgusting.
how could you see this obvious double standard and still think that our experiences are remotely equivalent? how could you not see the way that being female is such a crucial piece of this puzzle? how could you tell yourself that you could ever know what our lives are like?
our tears are not yours, our blood is not yours, our traumas and our heartaches and our struggles are not yours. no amount of wishful thinking or reframing things to resemble our experiences will ever make our lives yours.
the female experience is a distinctive one, and it shouldn’t be considered heresy to state this.
and it’s maddening to know that it’s such a shallow jealousy, an envy of our parts rather than our whole selves; wishing for our breasts and our wombs and our bodies while blithely ignorant to the realities we face because of them.
when i think of what womanhood looks like from the outside, i could see how one might want it, especially if you chop it up into bite-sized pieces with only the prettiest ones on display. if you never bother to look behind the curtain, it seems a lot nicer than it is.
you covet our breasts, but don’t understand the pain that comes from having innocent body parts hyper-sexualized and banned from public spaces.
you covet our wombs, but don’t understand that we aren’t trusted to know what to do with them.
you covet our bodies, but don’t understand that we’re only ever seen as chattel and property because of them.
you covet our lives, but you don’t understand what we live through.
how’s that for grotesque?
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