Woman Isn’t

If you think the fact that some women will never have children, have never menstruated, no longer menstruate, have had their uterus or breasts removed, etc., proves that males can also be women, you’re a sexist.

Please examine that misogyny as you don’t think much of women. Women are more than their biology, but not less.

(One of the best analogies to illustrate this is this– humans are a bipedal species. Does this mean that people without their legs are not human? Does this mean that the existence of humans without legs proves humans are not a bipedal species? No, of course not. Those are absurdities. And women, similarly, are characterized by their capacity to give birth. Whether they do or do not as individuals is irrelevant. Human doesn’t need to be redefined, and neither does woman. We have working definitions that make ease of communication possible.)

 

Letter from Angela Douglas, trans woman, published in Sister, 1977.

Being a woman is not being a not-man. Womanhood is not defined as the absence of total masculinity. Woman is not something you can define only in relation to seemingly not

Imagine a world where Rachel Dolezal is called black, and she and black people are called “non-whites”.

amounting to man. Womanhood would never be revoked by an absence of those individual biological things, and absence of those things in others is not confirmation of who can or can not claim womanhood. “Woman” is not some dumping ground category to include men who don’t conform to rigid gender standards. If this were true, 90% of the world would be “woman”. Woman is not an afterthought. Woman is not second place.

Woman is not something man-made. It has been a vicious lie that woman is made by man, and society believes. It is male-centric lenses that we see through. Eve came from Adam’s rib, who was made by God in his image. Even Athena sprung from Zeus’s head. Pornified, pedophilic

“I felt like a woman!” reports Stefonknee of his “adopted dad’s” penis inserted man-on-man into his “six year old girl” rectum at the Oasis swingers club. “I was surprised I didn’t think I was going to be pregnant, I was so much a girl. I actually have an erection right now from it so I’m just going to pull my dress down a little bit,” he told the journalists who were covering his journey to girlhood.

visions cloud our mind that a woman has long blonde hair, circular mini basketball breasts plopped atop a chest, bodily hairlessness, painted faces, a dress, and 8 inch heels that force us to walk delicately and keep us from running away. My vagina is not “front hole” and cannot be duplicated by mutilating a piece of scrotum or rectum and fashioning it crudely. I am not a hole. Woman is not a collection of holes. The natural sway of our hips can be mimicked with practice (I was mocked for mine, call it cis privilege), our voices can be coached, and hormones can help you feel more weepy, because that’s what women do. They weep. Sitting in our sexual trauma support groups and memorizing our facial expressions, body language, gestures, can help you recite the true stories that help make up what we really are to society: your victims. If you were also a victim, this likewise does not make you a woman. “Victim” does not mean woman, you’ve got it backwards. “Woman” often means victim.

Man made all of those things and now you believe that is who woman is. That is not what woman is. Man makes robots and dolls to fit these visions and to satisfy male wishes. This is also not what woman is, but many believe it is just as good if not better, an improvement on woman. Surgeons and religions claim they do, but they do not create woman. Nature made woman. ONLY nature can make woman. Man has had this god fantasy for a long time because he fears woman might be a goddess. Man will never stop trying to create woman. Woman is not in his head or in his lab. If you tell him this, it hurts his feelings.

If you prefer the sex object vision of woman as the true definition of womanhood, if you prefer to refer to male thoughts when seeking confirmation of what and who woman is or isn’t, you are supporting misogyny. If you think male-created domination trumps nature-made bodily definition of womanhood, you are exercising woman-hate.

Man and woman are not defined by the acceptance or rejection of stereotypes. Men and women both can be stereotypical or not, and they are still man or woman. Biological sex is not a stereotype. It is reality. It is the only reality.

We have all been conditioned by these beauty standards and these gender roles in the west. I do not blame you if you find the pictures in the magazines attractive, this alleged ideal woman. Surgeons, artists, and photoshop crafts her. It is attainable by anyone, male or female, with access to these tools. However, you and I have problems if you believe the male crafting of woman is the truth. You and I have problems if you think what goes on in a male-centered world for a male-centered brain trumps the truth of being born female in this world.

Woman and man are not personality types. They are body types. They are not Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. They are not who likes pink and frills, and who likes trucks and muscles. Your sex does not dictate your personality. Your personality does not dictate your sex. You can be male or female and like anything you want, present any way you want. Only biological sex can determine your sex. It’s not determined by whether you are sassy or polite, or in who you like to sleep with.

Biological sex is a physical, material, observable, objective reality and what you are born with dictates how society will treat you. We don’t get to pick that. It is innate. Gender as some innate thing, however, is something that requires faith. How does one “feel like” a woman when one has never been one? Why should I blindly believe in that when my eyes and my experience show me otherwise? I’m not a religious person. I believe in myself more than I believe in whatever a man says to me. I’m to understand now that this is bigotry.

I don’t care how you live your life, and I support whatever feels authentic to you. But don’t ever mistake the role, the performance, of womanhood with actually being one. Don’t mistake the costume of woman for womanhood either. These were things imposed on us, programmed into us, and they do not define us.

My friend was a trans woman. This was the last thing she tweeted to her followers.

I notice most people who disagree with that fail to define woman when asked. They can’t but I can. A woman is simply this: an adult human female. No more, no less. Womanhood is not a role to be enforced nor is it a uniform, it is merely a material reality. Who you gonna choose to believe– them or me? Your choice. But who you believe says a lot about you and what you truly value woman for.

No, Attachment Parenting Isn’t Some Evil Plot

I saw this reddit-based propaganda piece written by a man (Jesse Singal) on the wicked, wicked ploy of evil people to guilt mothers into using attachment parenting methods in order to keep them locked away in their woman dungeons for all eternity. It is entitled “Is Attachment Parenting a Plot to Force Women Back Into the Home?”– lol. And who would know better than this man, and the infamous Dr. Amy?– otherwise known as “she who shall not be named” in internet mothering communities– because holy shit, if you say her name three times, like Beetlejuice (or Bloody Mary), she appears, along with her flying monkeys of Oz (her devotees), so badly so that modding internet mothering communities is a troll-infested nightmare. Not to digress too far, but let’s face it– Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and childbirth/motherhood has no shortage of women who are suffering (whether they know it or not) from PTSD and understandable accompanying rage which could be directed any which way by heady narcissists of the internet age. So, I started to respond to the piece and found my words quite lengthy, not at all appropriate for a tweet or even a series of tweets. Which brings us to this post.

(For those who don’t know, “attachment parenting” is just a fancy new way of labeling natural and instinctive mothering and parenting techniques, usually with the gentlest methods. It means picking up a baby when it cries, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, baby-wearing, natural birthing, etc. There is nothing truly new or invented about it. And no two mothers do it exactly alike or even necessarily adhere to all of the components. Mothers often stay at home to fill this role. And make no mistake, language matters; naming these methods using only new buzzwords like “attachment parenting”  without further understanding is a clever psychological reversal that disguises the fact that woman is being separated from that which would have come naturally, to be replaced with reliance on “expert advice” to the contrary, stemming ultimately from patriarchal institutions. Creating doubt in a woman’s self and instincts is often packaged and sold to us as “equality”, and any feminist can attest to.)

Before I get into that, I just want to say that this is going to be just another case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, for women. No matter what women choose, it will be vilified, in case any of you needed reminding. Nothing is woman enough or feminist enough, unless it comes from a man or his institution, of course (and then it’s job well done). And so, pitting woman against woman is a divide and conquer strategy from those who want women to forget how amazing and strong and worthy they are of love and also basic human rights, and who truly do have ultimate mothering and parenting authority in the natural world. It’s a way of keeping us perpetually down. Now on with my response.

Dr. T is a horrible person who rallies angry, traumatized women together to attack and troll women who do things differently and those who have lost children. There have been numerous private groups of hers and her followers, some of which you were actually forced to show your ID in order to be accepted (I am not joking), so the worst of the worst is not visible to the general public. The scathing violent tendencies, the plotting to destroy lives, etc. However, what IS published is typically bad enough. (Yes It Is Your Fault That Your Baby Died At Your Homebirth. — and she has the nerve to pontificate on “social control of a woman”?) And I know about these deeds because I was one of the tormented (my crime: planning an unassisted birth and talking about the subject of freebirth publicly with other women). My friends were other targets of hers (some of these include mothers of stillborn children. I can think of at least 4 of these women off the top of my head– I know them in part because our shared antagonism by this woman brought us together over the years). She also believes single mothers, lesbians, and mothers who leave an abusive spouse are selfish.

 

Will the Real Dr. Amy Please Stand Up?

And attachment parenting is just parenting. It’s just natural, instinctive parenting. There is no plot. It’s just what happens when mothers prioritize mothering over other forms of modern existence, as much as is in their comfort level. Many are religious and traditional but many are feminist and radical.

If Dr. T is so keen on staying in the work force, why did she spend all that effort to go to medical school and barely practice herself as a doctor only to become a stay at home mom to her own children? Then she took up internet doctoring and was charging people for answers, and is now writing books demonizing women who choose natural mothering choices, despite the fact that she did barely practice and is out of practice in her profession by at least two decades?

How feminist is Dr. Tuteur?
She is using a lot of feminist-seeming arguments about women in the work force and the societal guilting of women in motherhood, but she laughs at phrases like ‘birth rape’, insists all Cesareans are good if not all completely necessary, and flat out denies the abuses women endure under current obstetric rule in childbirth today. In her views of modern medicine and specifically obstetrics, patriarchy is suspiciously absent. That women seemed traumatized by their hospital births seems to be something Amy is really confused about the existence of, having no comprehension of the connection between serious bodily injury, detachment from baby and hormonal flow, and psychological harm to the mother or child. Her two-dimensional understanding of childbirth sounds very masculine: ‘you got a healthy baby, and that’s all that matters, so what are you whining about, selfish women?’ In her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, one of her many stabs at midwives indicates that they are “merely replacing the patriarchy with the matriarchy”, outing herself as not actually very feminist, at all.

She also doesn’t believe in intuition or any concept of “women’s wisdom”, and thinks those are essentially myths. To my mind, this is woman-hating. In her world, the only true thing is listening to your doctor. And you’re only smart and worthy of being left alone if you do exactly what he or she says. Amy doesn’t see her own hypocrisy and instead decides it’s the open breastfeeders (for example) who sing the virtue of the practice who are doing the bad deeds, because these actions somehow shame other mothers who don’t breastfeed and this makes them feel bad. For all the bashing of the romanticization of primitive/natural living/parenting, her allegiance seems to be to technology as this infallible lifesaving thing, despite the fact that it frequently stands in direct opposition to the natural world and is in fact responsible for numerous atrocities, and void of the recognition that the rape of the natural world and of women and mothers is more aggressive and harmful than *women who make other women feelz bad by doing*. Most radical feminists will understand me when I say that “biophobia” is deeply patriarchal.

I’ve been dealing with her for years after being targeted, and from knowing her story and watching her strategize, I am aware that she projects her bitterness and regrets onto others to make a name for herself and feel better about her own choices, both professionally and personally, as a former doctor and as a mother. She is relentless and vicious. She has Google alerts plus voluntary scouts seeking out baby loss stories and she goes at mothers immediately fresh in grief with her minions, armchair diagnosing whether or not they “killed” their babies when tragedy strikes. She’s like Westboro Baptist for natural parenting, birth, and baby loss. ( <— this mother is a radical feminist btw. Imagine losing a baby and having some internet psycho “doctor” sic her hundreds or thousands of rabid fans after you to harass you and potentially dox or harm you and your family? All because she disagreed with how you gave birth, how you parent, and because she crowned herself the long distance expert in your child’s cause of death?) She and others have believed women like me shouldn’t be published, don’t have a right to voice our opinions or stories… I think we’ve all seen how no-platforming affects our freedoms as women. And when they can’t get women like me censored, they come en masse to try to hurt us in the reviews.

If I try to separate myself from what I know are her motives and try to focus just on the argument, I could see how aspects of attachment parenting CAN be used as a method of guilting women into staying at home.

That said, these parenting methods are not a fad, they are (many of them) primal and predate our modern conventions and senses of what now constitutes “normal”.

I’m tired of her representing Dick-Read as a eugenicist, too. I’ve READ Childbirth Without Fear, has she? I doubt Jesse Singal has read it either while he allows her to defame the author, not that Singal cares or has any reason to care, has any close personal connection to its contents or why it matters. It’s a great book and has helped generations of women have painless natural childbirth, liberating them from sadistic medical cycles that were stopping women from even wanting children (like after I had my 2nd born). Grantly Dick-Read’s critique is on civilization. White “civilized” women have been convinced they are not animals, which is a lie which has caused them undue torment in childbirth. Other “less civilized” women were having more ease. The man toured the globe. He was a doctor who reported what he witnessed. If anything, it is more damning of racism and classism and Western civilization. But Amy will twist that to whatever suits her warped agenda.

Grantly Dick-Read admired women and spoke highly of them and wanted to see them freed from pain. His reverence was so poetic it brought tears to my eyes on repeated occasions. Amy speaks ill of women constantly and seems to find glee is personally causing them pain. Their contributions to the world in terms of pain and suffering and disdain versus liberation and honoring is starkly felt. Hearing their words is the difference between love and hate.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
I hesitate to embrace the message of Singal’s piece. Because even without the people Amy is trying to shit talk (which is like, 90% of her notoriety– gaining fame by attempting to defame others including some blatant lying on her part), these methods of parenting are instinctive and time honored. If modern women choose otherwise, fine. But Amy cares nothing for you, what she does is preys upon women’s feelings of pain, “mommy wars”, having felt guilted, inadequacy, the sense of being pit against each other unjustly, and uses it to her own personal advantage. She’s a really disturbed individual with more issues than Time, so taking anything she says seriously is a folly you choose at your own risk, and it’s anything but woman-loving. She doesn’t have scruples, she has personally invested grudges to legitimize the back story of her life to herself, the likes of which in its fullness may be a nut we never truly crack.

If only men and those who cater to male rule would stop interfering and let women do their work, in peace.