Becoming a woman is not a trap
How many women does it take to define what it is to be a woman? This may seem obvious, especially as gender critical believers would have you believe that womanhood is a universal based on certain biology and certain shared lived experiences of girlhood into womanhood. They ring fence woman based on that assumption, with anything falling outside of that boundary as man. Yet, as intersectional feminists have long argued, there is no single definition of woman that encompasses every woman’s body and life experience. Every woman becomes woman across her life, either the day they reach majority or in the conscious choice of transitioning. No woman is naturally a woman, she is a social construction of all the elements that society frames womanhood through whether she buys into that construction or not. Becoming a woman is a deeply problematic patriarchal construction, yet it is not a trap designed to snare women provided they have the means through which to fight back against patriarchy.
Not every woman has the tools to achieve their personal liberation, indeed, the whole point of feminist discourse is to educate women in their own liberation. Audre Lorde explicitly lays out that white middle class feminism does not have the conceptual tools to smash the patriarchal house precisely because it is rooted in a particular intersectional perspective. Gender critics fall in the same trap of assuming…
