From "Human" to "Woman"

Dehumanization, dismemberment, and the female body

When I was little, my cousins who lived in Oklahoma were my best friends. By the time my aunt and uncle finished their family, there were enough cousins to fill the positions on a baseball team, three-quarters of them boys. I loved my girl cousins, but they were too old to be my primary adventure buddies. My boy cousins, closer in age to me, became my closest friends, specifically my younger cousin E.

Before puberty, gender differences were almost imperceptible in our relationships with each other: we would play, run, fight, tackle, argue, and tease each other without discrimination. I even got in trouble once, after beating E a little too brutally while wrestling, because I didn’t understand what it meant when he “cried Uncle” (I thought he was calling for his father/my uncle, so I was like, “he can’t help you now.”) Back then I felt like a fully equal member of our bunch: I could go anywhere the boys did, do anything they could, and be equally as responsible in the eyes of the grown-ups when we got in trouble.

There was a period of time—I don’t remember how long exactly, but at least three years—during which I didn’t see my cousins at all. The first time I visited them after puberty, I didn’t understand, at first, what had changed between us. Both of our families had moved, and we were all teenagers now, but it wasn’t just the setting and our ages that had changed; there was some fundamental dimension of the camaraderie between us that seemed to have fallen away completely.

It became clearer when I tried to follow my former friends to the boys’ room, what used to be the central hub of activity and conspiracy during our visits. It was where the good stuff happened, the stuff the grown-ups didn’t need or want to know about, and its location in the very back of the old Oklahoma house made it perfect for plotting without interruption or supervision. It was where we played board games and shot Nerf guns at each other and staged the meetings of the invented cadre of international spies we liked to make movies about. It was where the piano was, and my brother had just begun to play his newest composition for everyone inside, when my cousin E turned and shut the boys’ room door on me, still outside.

I can still remember the look on his face as he closed the door behind them, with all the boys who used to be my friends inside, and the red heat of my own face when I realized why they had kept coming back out every time I followed them in. It became hideously clear that I was the thing that had changed: it was like I’d come back from my years-long absence with sex stamped all over me, so potent, so dangerous that my very proximity to my male cousins was somehow inappropriate. I was inappropriate. Internally, I felt like the same person I always had been, but it was the external changes, the ones I couldn’t opt out of, that had monstrified me. In my case, I was absolutely certain that the “awkwardness” of puberty did not generate from me, but from the reactions of people around me to my changed body, the meanings that were socially applied to it.

Before I had these reactions to guide me, I had no idea at all in my head of what I must have looked like to other people, other than a small dark-skinned child. This interaction with my male cousins, along with a million others too numerous to name here, generated and shaped the image of my sexed body in my head that I began to carry with me, that I began to let affect my behavior and presentation. In the same way that I can recall back to a time before I understood my racial difference from my white peers, I can remember back to looking in the mirror when I had just hit my teens, prior to having any access to social media, and realizing I had no way of evaluating my looks, of knowing whether I was pretty or ugly or fat or skinny (oh, for those days to return). I hadn’t learned how to self-monitor and objectify yet, but socialization was soon to remedy that lack.

In those early days, I mused long and hard. What was different about me post-puberty? I’d grown breasts; I had curves, a different distribution of fat than a few years earlier; I bled now. That was all. I’d always known my body was flesh, but never before had I experienced it as meat, as a commodity to be consumed, used up. And a thing that somehow made me less human, more woman.

“Glory and power” vs. “birth and moonblood”

I’ve always related to Cersei Lannister’s resentment of her exclusion from power because of her sex, but never more so than in her observations about the difference in the way she and her twin brother were treated as children, despite being identical in every single other way except for sex. They were once “so much alike that even [their] lord father could not tell [them] apart,” but when it came down to the social roles allotted to the both of them, Jamie was born to real power, and Cersei was born to "sing and smile and please”¹:

The queen’s face was hard and angry. … “When we were little, Jaime and I were so much alike that even our lord father could not tell us apart. … Yet even so, when Jaime was given his first sword, there was none for me. ‘What do I get?’ I remember asking. We were so much alike, I could never understand why they treated us so differently. Jaime learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock, while I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. Jaime’s lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood.”

I think, perhaps, in the inequitable society humans have created, that the quintessential condition of the human female is to always be judged. When I was younger, I thought of it this way: if you can see a woman or girl, you have already judged her, and those appearance-based judgments matter in a way that our sight-based judgments of men do not. If you can see a girl, you have already judged her; you have slotted her into one of several essential categories of discrimination that we impose on sight: Is she fat or skinny? Cute or ugly? White or something else (“ethnic”)? Young or old? I don’t think this is conscious or controllable, or that we can stop doing it, or that women are immune from performing this automatic imposition of judgment: in fact, one of the most insidious things about patriarchal beauty standards is the role other women play in enforcing them by shaming the transgressors.

Deborah Tannen puts it this way: “there is no unmarked woman,” no way to escape the fact that each grooming and clothing decision we make carries a meaning unapplied to our male counterparts’ choice of dress or style:

“If a woman's clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message—an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been.”

There’s no way to foreclose these messages by dressing or acting a certain way: you send them just by virtue of possessing a female body. After puberty, I felt like this inherent sexuality now stamped on my body was like a blanket that I could throw off for brief moments, revealing the human underneath, but that would eventually settle back down on me for all my efforts, smothering me again. It was inescapable: I carried sex with me wherever I went.

That was when I started to develop the image in my head of what I must look like to men, an image that fueled my hatred of my body and myself. I added a little bit to this image every time I received a commented on my appearance, negative or positive: at 13, when my mother passed me in the hall at theater practice and pulled my shirt down over my jeans to the tops of my thighs, in view of all my peers; at 15, when a fellow lifeguard chided me for being “jailbait,” and I had to ask him what that meant; at 22, when I stepped outside my apartment as a senior in college to smoke, exhausted and bra-less in pajamas pants and a huge holey t-shirt, and a male passerby who cajoled me into sharing my bowl with him ended our interaction by entreating me to flash him. It took me three days to get up the courage to leave my apartment after that, worried I would encounter him again. (And then the second I did leave, there he was, riding in the same elevator I took down.)

My male cousins’ behavior telegraphed something similar to me: that I couldn’t escape or foreclose the messages my newly sex-imprinted body was sending. I’d transformed, completely unintentionally, into something that was inherently inappropriate to be around—my body imprinted irreversibly with the stigma of sex, almost regardless of how I chose to adorn it. The same logic informs the refusal of fundamentalist Christian men like Mike Pence to dine alone with a woman, a position that masks itself as respectful or courteous to hide its actual implications—that women aren’t fit for the same confidences or conversations as their male counterparts; in other words, that “woman” cannot be defined as “coworker” or “peer” in the same, neutral way that “man” can, precisely because of the stigma of sex applied to their bodies. The Christian courting strategy guides popular in the spaces I grew up in also advise that young men not befriend women at all, and indeed, that they avoid contact with them unless absolutely necessary (known as the Billy Graham rule). In this view, women aren’t friends, or people; they are potential dates and sex partners (to Christians, potential wives and mothers).

For decades, I’ve seen the body I have dissected and pulled apart publicly in abortion debates and discourse about surrogacy and arguments over transgender identity, its parts put up for scrutiny and sale, men on Reddit and Twitter and everywhere else believing breasts and vaginas are mix-and-match accessories that you can buy and install like any other product. The practice of surrogacy further separates, divides, and commodifies the female body, as does so-called inclusive language around motherhood, giving birth, and all the physiological functions there involved, isolated into organ-specific terms like chest feeder and front hole—as if these abilities and traits were randomly splayed across the population in no perceivable pattern.

Nearly every news clip I have turned on since Roe vs. Wade, my bodily autonomy vs that of a potential fetus I could be carrying is being debated, with those words I can feel beneath my stomach bandied about every other moment: rape, incest, the life of the mother. Almost as cavalierly, trans “women” on Reddit fantasize about uterus implants and even full-term pregnancies, ideas that lie more in the realm of science fiction than plausible medical interventions. The obvious question invoked—from whom would these uteri be harvested?—is rarely considered or answered. The idea of the floating, personless uterus, divorced from any female body and even further from any human being, is encouraged by, again, language like “uterus-havers,” which someone once pointed out could easily be used to describe men who “possess” women of childbearing capability, like Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale: the uterus he “possesses” just happens to be in the body of the woman he owns.

For me, and for almost every woman I know, these words are not abstract. They refer to us. Our bodies. Our lives. Every not-guilty verdict. Every news story of assault. Every time a woman goes missing and only her lifeless body is found. Every woman being raped or assaulted or left for dead, in a sense, is me. The pieces and parts may be disembodied, dehumanized, disconnected from our physical selves. But they are all still us. They are all still me.

Noping out: the consequences of dehumanization and dismemberment

The language of beauty standards, surrogacy, and abortion discourse are not the only arenas that encourage female people to take themselves apart piece by piece and evaluate each part separately, perhaps to even discard those pieces they deem not in line with their sense of identity. The trans movement engages in this, too, to such an extent that Eliza Mondegreen aptly refers to them as a “cult of disembodiment.” It strikes me as notable that, for natal males, transitioning generally entails “adding on” to the body they currently possess: exogenous sex hormones to grow breast tissue and assist with fat redistribution; surgeries to implant silicone fake breasts or transfer fat from one area of the body to another, or rearrange the existing tissue of their genitals into a facsimile of a natal vagina. On the other hand, the most common gender-affirming surgery appears to be the double mastectomy (couched more often in the euphemistic terms “chest masculinization” or “top surgery”), an excavation of breast tissue that is supposed to produce a flat, masculinized chest shape, freeing patients to be their “most authentic” selves. Why only those born female are required to sacrifice parts of the body they were born with to achieve that authenticity is rarely addressed. Doctors on social media further invoke dismemberment when they show off buckets of removed breast tissue, sometimes even photos with the female patients themselves, showing their scars. They are always smiling; for now, they have escaped the stigma of sex by removing some of the physical parts that signify it from their bodies.

Next to “trans women are women,” “some women have penises” is one of the most oft-repeated mantras of gender ideology, a justification for fully-intact males to be able to claim womanhood (and lesbianism, too, if they want) without surgically altering themselves one bit. Where is the equally-forceful explosion of the analogous sentiment that “boys” can have breasts? This is what I meant when I said that males as a group stay intact under this ideology, and on a fundamental level, it’s because of power. Women don’t have the social power to dismantle men as a sex class in the same way men have proved they have the influence to do the opposite. The reason woman-identified men have been able to deal such devastating blows to women’s rights and language is that female people simply cannot enforce their chosen identities socially the way male ones do.

There is another imbalance here that is much harder to parse: in the liberal ideological sphere, the idea is that natal males who claim transgender identification move “down” in status in reference to the rest of the imagined world population, but conversely (and confusingly), “up” in the increasingly important hierarchy of oppression olympics. They move from the most privileged category to the “most oppressed” category by means of a simple speech act (and in some cases, absolutely nothing more). Trans activists would argue that trans-identified females move from a genuinely exploited category, the sex capable of reproduction, to the “privileged” category of “maleness.” But since physical maleness is a prerequisite to possessing that power, those whose bodies give away that they do not genuinely possess maleness are never actually allowed in; they never really leave the plane of powerlessness. There’s a reason you don’t hear about trans “men” and “boys” dominating male sports and causing distress by forcing their way into previously male-only spaces the way trans-identified males have done. Conversely, I would argue that most trans-identified males never experience anything remotely like the lesser social position that being born natally female entails. Rather, the power of the trans “woman” is generally two-fold: he is observably male, and has the power of maleness, and also uses that power to coerce everyone around him pretend to perceive him as female. He never leaves the plane of power.

Going from “woman” back to “human”

All through writing this, I’ve been thinking about how helpless I felt once, trying to explain to a grad school acquaintance—my bald, male, tattooed, over-six-foot-tall once-friend—the dynamics of powerlessness and vulnerability when you are part of the half of the population that is on average shorter and smaller than the other half. When the other half has historically terrorized you, committed the vast majority of all sex crimes and other violent offenses against you, subjugated and raped you for your reproductive potential over thousands of years. I tried, I did my best, but I could never really convey to him the fear that comes along with living in a state of vulnerability like this, the horror stories mothers feel they must bequeath their daughters, the ways they traumatize their girls the same way they were traumatized, in an effort to keep them safe. The fear and pain that feel like our only inheritance, when men’s is public space and freedom and neutral humanity: the rest of the world. Actual personhood. Glory and power on the one hand; birth and moonblood on the other.

You probably recognized the banner image for this post immediately, a photo of a male Canadian high school teacher who made headlines earlier this year for the sexualized costume in which he arrived to teach wood shop. I’m not interested in giving this person much more attention than he has already accrued, but his example is useful for one point I’d like to make. With his sexist caricature dominated by size-Z prosthetic breasts, this man has, perhaps unwittingly, demonstrated what my post-puberty self most feared people saw when they looked at me: that my secondary sex characteristics were so exaggerated, they were all anybody could see about me, all that mattered. That now all they saw was sex, or the possibility of sexual gratification, or unfulfilled reproductive potential. Nothing human or humanizing, nothing individual or relatable. Not human, but woman.

Every time I see the performance of “woman” by a trans-identified male, I see my worst fears confirmed: I see what they think of us. It is the primary fuel for my rage, and I don’t understand how any actual women can fail to see it. I hear it in the “fem voices” they put on, ones that make me wince even more at the sound of my own voice. I hear it when they bemoan “missing out” on their imagined version of “girlhood," by which they invariably mean laughably stereotypical pursuits like shopping and sleepovers. I see it most often in the costumes they wear, what they think we are.

The way trans-identified males relish in performing these pornified stereotypes of womanhood is undoubtedly a factor in actual women deciding that they want off this particular ride. In this light, the outsized explosion in recent years of natal females identifying as trans is completely unsurprising: the more trans-identified males demonstrate and reify their idea of womanhood as a pair of walking tits, the more female people will abandon it like a house afire. I can’t blame them at all for seeking out this refuge from sexualization, because—like me—I imagine most of them can remember back to a time when they were still perceived as human, before they became irreversibly imprinted with sex, and that—also like me, at one time—they would do almost anything to get their humanity back.

The logical result of this culture of violent sexualization and dismemberment, then, is the objects of dismemberment desiring disembodiment, an escape from the vehicles of their suffering, while males want to continue owning and controlling the female body. I cannot help but hear a profound cry of despair from those female people stepping back from the category of woman to try to take refuge in being human: just take them, and leave me alone.

raoof.h

A post shared by Raoof Haghighi (@raoof.h)

1. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin, 524.