OP this whole post is beautifully said, even if the truth in it is hauntingly unsettling.
“The idea that sex is composed of a series of parts that we can reconfigure at will.”
This is exactly why when we say that women are adult human females, TRAs will say things like “Oh so you’re reducing being a woman to having a vagina?”
It never occurred to me to fire back, “Why do you think that having a vagina is the only thing that makes me female?”
The female body is an intricately complex system that impacts our health and our lives every day, and the vagina is not the defining trait of the female sex but a statistically reliable indicator of it. What TRAs refuse to accept is that having a vagina means your body is supposed to have other components of the female reproductive system. This is not transphobic. This is not intersexist.
My body is both intelligent and messy and beautiful and gross and impressive. Every cell, every hormone, every muscle is why I am alive and strong. My uterus isn't there just to make babies. There are studies showing that it affects cognitive function and plays a role in memory. And my ovaries don't just make eggs. In actuality, the ovaries create hormones that impact bone density, cholesterol levels, heart health, and mood. There are things about my female body that work right, and there are things that don't work right. There are advantages I have over a typical male body, but there are also disadvantages I have compared to the male body. There is nothing about this that I have to be ashamed of.
To tell us that the female body, as a complex and holistic system, simply does not exist is how they can gaslight young girls into thinking that their bodies have not been taken advantage of by males in nearly every society since the dawn of time. It is how you squash any discussion of medical misogyny and doom millions of girls to a future of suffering with endometriosis, PCOS, and countless other disorders. It is how you convince a young girl who doesn't like her breasts because she doesn't like that boys ogle and grope them that it is because her breasts are the problem that must be removed instead of the men who raised these boys to believe that sexual access to her body without concern for her humanity was their birth right. It is how they convince a young girl that if she is poor and left to suffer by a society that does not care for her safety and well-being, that she can simply make an OnlyFans so that all men have access to her body which was never really hers to begin with, so there's no reason why this should be traumatic in the first place.
"The body as parts. People with uteruses, people with prostates, people with penises. We are all just a series of commodities, to be bought and sold, our human bodies are the enemy, our male and female forms are aberrations, mistakes that were forced on our sexless default."
I'm really starting to grasp now that this is not a bug, it's a feature.
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