Educating Véro

I've seen a few "what is a woman" posts lately. Maybe it's because of South African sprinter Caster Semenya. Maybe it's because we trans women tend to think about the question a lot. It's important to us.

Cassandra posted an entry with a link to an interesting and very candid piece from New York Times columnist Peggy Orenstein, who questioned how the loss of her breasts and ovaries might affect her sense of self as female. Before that, Jill posted an entry that started with a quote from a trans blogger who claimed that we could never be women because we had never been through what women have been through growing up, both socially and biologically.

Am I a woman? Can I become one?

Biology is not destiny, but we ignore it at our peril. Everything, everything, EVERYTHING we are results from some combination of genetics and environment. We are Homo sapiens sapiens, with 23 chromosome pairs chock full of genes that code for various proteins and form the basis of who and what we are. At the same time, as we grow we become human beings, a result of socialization and learning and interacting with our environment and with other human beings.

Some of what is coded in DNA is immutable: I will only ever have light brown eyes. Much is potential, potential that might or might not be expressed, depending on the environment. A child with a genetic predisposition to psychopathy who is reared in a loving home and favourable circumstances might never express any psychopathy. The same child reared in a home where he is beaten and unloved will probably exhibit psychopathic behaviour. Same genes. Different environment.

We are all born Homo sapiens sapiens. We become human beings. Likewise, we are born male, female, or intersexed. Those are biological realities. We become men or women, with subtle gradations between those two poles. That's the ultimate reality. How do we become women or men? We learn.

So...what did my biological state look like as a child? I'm reasonably sure I have a 46,XY karyotype and that the H-Y antigen was expressed on the Y-chromosome, typical of a male-bodied person. I was born with male genitalia. Yet it's now clear to me, and I imagine it will be clear scientifically before too long, that the structure of my brain does not fit with the rest of the biological pattern. For whatever reason—genetic predisposition that got expressed, drastic environmental influence (I don't think my mother took DES while she was pregnant with me, but it's possible), or something else—my brain was undervirilized in the womb.

I know some will attack me for saying this, but I don't know what else to call a condition in which a brain with typical female structures resides in a male body other than an intersex condition. It's only that it's not yet possible to test for it, because it involves the brain. Like other intersex conditions, it might be strongly expressed, weakly expressed, or in between. In my case, it was always there, but it vacillated between weak and strong until it hit with full force in my early 50s.

So I started with a male body and an androgen-dominant hormone balance but more typically female brain structures placed into an environment in which the assumption was that I was a boy. From the beginning, something was different, possibly because of my brain or simply because of genetic tendencies. I wasn't typically boyish like my brother. I wasn't a girl, obviously, but more like a soft boy with feminine tendencies. Still, I was brought up as a boy, and learned, more or less, to be a man, although the sports male role models of my youth were later replaced by musicians and writers.

I was not socialized as a female. I did not learn how to be a woman when I was young. For any male-bodied person, no matter how feminine, that just wasn't going to happen. And of course I did not learn about periods, pregnancy, and other things having to do with the female reproductive system.

Have I "always been a girl/woman"? I'd say no. Have I always had a "female brain" (in simplified terms)? I'd say yes. I had a biological potential that was not yet realized.

Fast forward to the present day. The body that started as male has been somewhat modified, although not nearly as much as I wish, and the hormone balance is now similar to that of a normal pubescent female. Of course my karyotype hasn't changed, but a lot else has. And like a young female of the species, I am busily learning just what it means to be a woman. Girls are not born women. They learn to be women. I'm learning it late in life. I cannot learn any of the parts that have to do with reproduction. I cannot learn in the natural way that youth learn, as part of growing up. But I'm not letting that stop me.

Consider it adult education. We adults learn a little more slowly, but we can still learn pretty much anything we put our minds to, especially if we are strongly motivated.

One thing that's different, even for adult education, is that in this case I have a lot to unlearn. I can't just learn to be a woman on top of what I already know. I am jettisoning a lifetime of male behaviour and male thinking. I thought I didn't have that much of it, but when it came time for new learning I had more than I had realized. Unlearning is often harder than learning, but in this case it is absolutely necessary, because what I'm learning must replace what I had learned before. I'm not getting rid of myself. I'm losing things I acquired that didn't really fit in the first place and now get in the way of who I want to be.

I learn in all the ways that anyone learns. I observe. I listen. I discuss. I listen some more. I learn by doing. I make mistakes and learn from those. I'm very self-aware, and I'm good at internalizing what I take in. Observing is how I learn how to act, how to move, how to behave. Listening is how I gain insight into how other women think and feel. I can't know their thoughts, but I can listen carefully to what they say and how they say it.

As for thinking like a woman, well, I think like me. That's all any of us ever does. I see myself as a woman, and I find that I react to stories about women in a very personal way. I find myself drawn these days to stories by women about women, on a very emotional level. Often these days I forget my origins and feel as though I've always been a woman. Yes, I realize that's completely subjective.

Will all of this ever make up for my not having been reared as a girl? I don't know. I think so. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that's more objective. In my experience, women accept me as a woman, whether they knew me before or not. They relate to me as they relate to other women. I see that when I'm with a group. Sometimes they have girl talk with me. If they see me as a woman, who am I to argue with them? I fully agree!

So I will say yes, I am a woman, and yes, I am still becoming a woman because I am still learning (and unlearning). And I will continue to learn more as long as I am able. If anyone doesn't think I'm a woman, or thinks no trans woman can possibly be a woman, I have to leave them to their opinion. For my part, I think I meet the criteria. Late bloomers still bloom.