i've always found the socialization argument transphobes so love to wield particularly ridiculous, because, like... i'm a woman. well, i identify as fuck-all, but i was born a woman, i've got the two x chromosomes, i've got the most standard production of estrogen and have never gone on hrt, i've got the ovaries and uterus and regular periods, on the dot, every 28 days — i'm practically a walking calendar.
and i was not socialized as a woman/girl. i'm not even entirely sure what that means. i was raised in a very non-traditional, atheistic household. the topic of gender roles never even came up in my childhood, at least not until i was a teenager and realized other families really cared about gender roles. i was raised the same way as my male cousins. sure, i'm smaller than all of them, but i'm also ridiculously small even for the average woman, so, whatever. i get my periods, sure, and i knew that was something my male cousins didn't get, but i also have cis woman friends who don't get periods, or get them so irregularly that it really has no bearing on their lives. my mom was already in menopause by the time i was a teenager. i grew up around older women. they did not get periods, so obviously that couldn't be what defined their womanhood.
but beyond biology, i was just never socialized as a "girl," the way the people around me often defined it. i was not brought up with the expectation of one day getting married to a man. there was never any talk of me having children or getting pregnant, certainly not as a given — i had phases where i felt i really wanted to be a mom and phases where i really didn't, and both were met with the same level of acceptance. i wasn't socialized to cater to male relatives. i wasn't socialized to watch my language, or act "ladylike". i wasn't even taught to shave. i've never shaved my legs or arms to this day. i've had boyfriends that shaved more than me. i wasn't taught domestic labor beyond the basic "just help out and do your part where you can." i can't cook. i loved haircare and makeup and sewing and i spent my middle school years going hiking and to shooting ranges with my dad. my first love was a girl. my best friends were boys and girls both. like, even writing this i feel like i'm missing something that's so obvious to others, but i genuinely don't get which part of my upbringing was supposed to have been "female socialization".
i did feel the effects of gender roles later, when i moved and started university at 18. up until then, my environment was, admittedly, sort of insular. then i started at a more traditional institution, and i realized the way i was brought up was decidedly not the norm. people pushed me into boxes that confused me; that i felt had nothing at all to do with me. people would insist i must have been raised a certain way, and were confused when they realized i wasn't. they expected me to behave in ways that were entirely foreign to me, just based on their ideas of how people with my chromosomes and genitalia should act. it distressed me. it got to the point where i started seriously wondering whether i wasn't actually a man, because everyone's telling me being a woman means XYZ, and i'm not that, so surely i must be the other binary gender.
that turned out to not be the case for me, but i don't get why it's so hard to see the inverse of that for trans folk. i was not "socialized" as a woman, yet transphobes would still insist i am surely a woman; what, then, is the difference with trans folk who were not "socialized" as the gender and sex they identify with?
if it's not socialization, then it's gotta be hormones and genitalia. if those can be changed... well, there you go. and if it's about reproductive role — as a person who can get pregnant, i don't think i have to explain why defining identity solely upon reproduction is awful and reductive and outright dangerous.