Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”
He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.
When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.
It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.
I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.