What makes me female?
To the best of my knowledge, I have been identified as female from the moment of my birth. At that point, it was the absence of a penis and balls that defined my gender. What is it that makes me a woman? It’s a question I’ve been asking a lot. I have a body that looks female, (I have breasts, hips and so forth) I have given birth to a child, I have lactated. But the inside of my head has a lot of difficulty with a female gender identity, and certainly doesn’t want a male gender identity either.
Do my breasts make me female? Obviously not, because women can have mastectomies and still be female.
Does my womb make me female? Again, a hysterectomy does not cause a woman to stop being a woman, so clearly that isn’t it.
Does my capacity to have babies make me female? No, because not all women are able to carry a child to term, or even to conceive. The possibility of reproduction cannot therefore be the defining quality.
Does my genitalia make me female? I think not, because many gender-ambiguous babies have been mutilated to give them the appearance of femininity even when the internal body parts don’t support that appearance at all. Genitals cannot therefore be the defining thing either.
It can’t be my chromosomes, because XXY is also a thing. A person may appear XX but also have a Y in there.
It definitely can’t be my brain structure because the inside of my head is undoubtedly the least gender-conforming bit of me.
Equally, a man who loses his penis or balls to accident or illness is still a man. A man who carries enough fat on his body to have something resembling breasts, is still a man.
How do we know? How much of gender is what we agree to present to the world and how we agree to read those presentations? If you give children the same sorts of haircuts and put them in gender-neutral clothes, it can be very hard to identify their genders just by looking at them. As adults, some of us remain able to pass ourselves off as the gender we don’t normally present as, or to confuse anyone looking at us.
Historically, gender has been very much tied up with power and with who can do what. However, if you have equality, do you need easy visual guides to gender? Do you need gender identity? I’m increasingly inclined to think that the answer is no. Which would leave us representing ourselves visually as the kind of people we our – practical, sensual, sporty, outdoorsy, arty, delicate, powerful… whatever you want to be, with no assumption of any ‘natural’ relationship between how you look and what you’ve got in your pants.
