Not A Female

I opened up Tinder this morning to see they had updated a few settings options. Of course, they haven't changed the male or female choice. That would be ridiculous.

Every day online when I sign up for things I am confronted by that male or female choice, and i have to make a decision how I respond to it. And it's not an easy choice. Not because the question itself is difficult, but because I have to guess what they mean by it, and what difference that declaration will make to me.

You see, as far as I am concerned, I am male. That's basic biology. I mean, no matter what I do, I will never menstruate, I will never have period pains, or PMT, I will never be at risk of unwanted pregnancy, or be able to have a wanted one. There are undoubtedly things that should be on this list that I cannot think of, physical experiences I will never have, that are so far removed from my understanding I can't even think of what they are. Equally there are male experiences I have had that I cannot deny, though I wish I could forget.

Because I was proclaimed male at birth I have a path of expectations that I was pressured to go down, that puzzled and infuriated people, sometimes including myself, when I couldn't or wouldn't conform to them. But that failure to conform doesn't in itself make me female.It just makes me unusual.

So why do I call myself a woman? Well, because I am one, apparently. Woman has been defined by society as a descriptor as a certain type of person, it has a legal definition which apparently I meet. I didn't unilaterally declare myself a woman, I went to various doctors and psychologists who told me that was what I was, and accepted the descriptor.

I don't like the word, myself. I wish we used the terms the other way around, maybe, or used some other word again for it. Etymologically speaking, the root of woman is womb-man, man with a womb, and that's as far from an apt description as I can think of. And ironically enough, it's more that all males are females with a penis (really, look it up).[Edit: It has since been pointed out to me that this is wrong, it's actually more closely a corruption of wife-man, so it is a description of social status, which makes me a lot happer to adopt it]

I feel guilty for appropriating the description, and consciously think of myself as just a far outlier of maleness. But subconsciously I am probably the person that I am at least partly because I started to identify as and with the girls I played with as a child. If someone calls me he or him I get upset for days, but it's a very bland crime on the speakers part. It shouldn't carry any weight or meaning at all. Yet somehow, it does.

It matters because identity matters, because we have a human need to fit in with our peer group, and we see our interactions through a filter of how we think of ourselves. We take some of them so much for granted that we don't notice they are there. When people talk of privilege, this is what they really mean. If you say that it doesn't matter, it just means that you have so much privilege, you fit and are happy with that identity so much that it just isn't something you think about. That isn't an option open to many immigrants, or adopted parents, for instance.Yet they may well still identify as British, or mothers, and be legally and practically so.

When I see a man who identifies as a man but wears skirts and make-up, I am delighted that he is stretching the confines of the rigid gender-box they are assigned. But for me to fit in that box it would either break me or the box. My personal choice would be to break the box, to throw them away, and have everyone taken as an individual, but I don't have the power to impose that on the society I live in. So if I have to pick a box, I'll take the other one, and fit much more neatly into a category everyone understands.

When it's about medicine, or reproduction, I pick the M box. When it's about socialising or shopping (or safety) I pick the F one. I wish that companies would have a second set of boxes so that I could declare both at once, but they seem to have missed the memo.