When I say I “think like a woman” I’m talking about the way that my brain feels on female hormones, they help me think more critically and they make my emotions (good, bad, and everywhere in-between) feel less dull. I’m not saying that women have to have estrogen in their system to be women, or that estrogen makes you some emotional mess, but female hormones genuinely feel different. I can say without a doubt that I don’t think the same way that I did when I had male testosterone levels.

I don’t say that I “act like a woman” because that’s blatantly misogynistic, women are individuals and there shouldn’t be any pre conceived ideas of what that means to be a woman.

What insulted me about your post, is that implication that the suffering I experience for my sex is tantamount to being the definition of a woman.

The only thing that makes me a woman is my woman body, my xx chromosomes, my ovaries, my uterus, my fallopian tubes, etc. if I had a disorder where there was an issue or the absence of any of those things, I would still be a woman because the absence of those things causes my body to work inefficiently, and sometimes dangerously. 

The hate directed at me for my body by society does not make me a woman, it’s something I experience as a woman, but that is not what makes me woman.

You may take the same estrogen pills as your mother, but the fact that you’re taking them to try and be like your mother, where as your mother has to take them for a medical reason, does not make you a woman. Your mother is a woman because she was born a woman, but her need to take estrogen and the hostility she has experienced in her lifetime because of her woman body do not make her a woman. She is a woman because she is a woman.

Imagine if I told a black woman that because I am getting surgery to make my skin darker, and to have surgeries that give me African-American facial features, that I am African-American because now people will hate me for being African-American, and treat me as such.

No marginalized or oppressed group should be forced to be defined by their oppression. A woman is a human female. That is it. EVERYTHING else is something else contributed by culture/socialization.

All of the things you described are social symptoms of being perceived as a woman, not the act of being a woman itself. This is an important distinction, because women cannot opt out of this without expensive surgeries and pretending to be a man. I would have to change fundamentally the way my body looks and works to NOT face the oppression that you’ve just described, which you opted into by trying to look like me. A key difference between us is that you choose to present this way. I was born, and had no choice. Whether I have small tits or large tits, flat ass or a wide ass, large or small, conventionally beautiful or considered unattractive, I am still a woman. 

FEMINISM IS FOR WOMEN

Last winter, when Chung Soo-young saw a man rushing out of the women’s restroom at a chain coffee shop in downtown Seoul, the first thing she did was to scan all stalls in search of a hidden camera. Like many other South Korean women, Chung, 26, constantly worries that she could be secretly filmed in private moments. Her fear spiked, she says, when she saw the intruder and “realized I can actually be a victim.”

In South Korea, microcameras installed in public bathrooms for surreptitious filming are an everyday concern. Police data show that the number of “illegal filming” crimes sharply increased from 1,353 in 2011 to 6,470 in 2017.

The fear of digital peeping Toms has led women to stuff tiny balls of toilet paper into holes they find in public bathroom stalls or cover the holes with tape. Six months after her bathroom incident, Chung decided to act and put together her own “emergency kit” to thwart molka, or hidden cameras.

She started a crowdfunding project for the kit, and the response was greater than she had expected. More than 600 people bought the kit, which costs about $12 (14,000 Korean won) and includes a tube of silicone sealant to fill up holes, an ice pick to break tiny camera lenses and stickers to patch up holes.

Thinking of her kits as a “stopgap,” Chung also started building an archive of illicitly recorded videos and pictures she found online to demonstrate how serious the problem is. In September, during a search, she stumbled on a video of herself from that December day.

Once filmed, molka videos are quickly shared online. With the right search words in Korean, it is not difficult to find pictures and videos of women in bathrooms and changing rooms on file-sharing platforms and social networks such as Tumblr and Twitter. Thumbnails of such videos, tagged with an estimated age of the filmed women or the filming location, are posted with a messenger ID. Anyone can contact the seller, who is often the one who shot the film, and get gigabytes of voyeuristic videos for pennies.

South Korean Women Fight Back Against Spy Cams In Public Bathrooms

If women knew just how far suffragettes had to go to get the vote, would stop believing in men's generosity. Suffragettes protested peacefully for decades and got nowhere.

So they changed tactics. They decided to stop trying to appeal to men... obviously men weren't going to give them jack. So instead they made the men in power fear for their lives.

They assaulted politicians, destroyed public property. They invented the letter bomb.

They targeted sports stadiums, racetracks, churches, trains, dockyards. Politicians and their relatives had their houses set on fire. Suffragettes started getting gun licenses.

They would have continued if it hadn't been for WW1 starting in 1914.

you may want a man - I don’t get it but I wouldn’t blame a straight woman for not deciding to give up romance and sex because I myself, as a gay person can’t really imagine living without it (regardless, chances are you would be happier single, given the quality of men). you may want one and it’s ok, but you don’t need one. you never needed one.

men love to tell women that they “need a man in their life”, who will carry their cupboard to the 8th floor, who will fix their shit yadda dadda. “men and women need each other” is standard patriarchal propaganda. the truth is, women who don’t marry tend to report higher satisfaction with life than married women and live longer, while men in marriage are statistically happier than bachelors, despite the “good ol’ ball and chain” narrative, having someone who provides for all of their needs (cooking, cleaning, managing the household, regular sex, emotional support which sometimes extents into serving as an emotional receptacle and free therapist since men like to play tough with their friends and dump all their vulnerability onto one single person who is their partner…) impacts them positively. for women, it’s draining.

tell me now, how often do you have to move cupboards? once a year tops. you can get the two local butch lesbians to carry your damn cupboard, or you can pay someone for it - most men can’t afford a maid and cook to do their upkeeping work regularly, so they expect a partner to do it for free. you can learn to fix stuff yourself, it’s not rocket science. you can have close, satisfying relations with other women and aid each other in childcare. separatism is viable for most straight women even. there’s few things in which men can’t be replaced for you, and for bi women and lesbians, there’s none.