Idk who needs to hear this but liking frogs or rats and having a unique hairstyle and doing your makeup “not for men but for [insert other group here] to think you’re cool,” wearing weird mismatched earrings, having an androgynous sense of style and being popular on tiktok for your videos about gender dysphoria and even having pronouns in your bio doesn’t make you an “enby sapphic/ he-him they-them dyke” or whatever you’re just a woman who has really cool interests but who has internalized the misogynist idea that women can’t be interesting. I feel like so many young women correctly identify certain forms of femininity as oppressive, but then instead of actually dealing with the root of it they just replicate another, more fashionable kind of femininity in the form of seeking male approval, competition with other women, shame at being women, while wearing big boots and a silk slip instead of high heels and a silk slip etc. it’s like these young women are so desperate to prove that they aren’t Cizz Women because “cis women” aren’t even considered human beings much less interesting or nuanced or complex. That desperation informs every facet of these women’s personalities to the point where they have to pathologize normal parts of their personalities as “queer” or “trans” in an effort to prove to themselves and others that there is something intrinsically different about them and the Other type of female human being, the type who is subhuman and identifies into it. please can we all stop with this mind numbing CONSTANT performance? Your best attempts at regaining your humanity by denying other women theirs will always fail you. No matter how hard you rail against the fact that you are female and therefore a woman, you won’t escape it. Nor do you need to— womanhood is not oppressive, men are. Being a woman doesn’t mean that you can’t be a fully realized individual— if you feel that way, it’s not because of dysphoria it’s because of internalized misogyny.
