This is an old post but it raises an issue I have been harping about for some time. The conversations you described and the questions raised are so common as to indicate a standard. The difficulty in making responses derives from the uncritical acceptance of those standards. In particular, you wrote:
“She asked me if I wanted to be a woman, and I told her I don’t think so… but I don’t know.”
Once again there is the fallacy of conflating sex and gender in the misconstruction of terminology. Even over 70-years after de Beauvoir pointed out comprehensibly that simply being female does not make you a woman.
The thing is that you do want to be a woman, obviously. To say you ‘don’t know’ when you make such efforts to be feminine (i.e., the defining characteristics of being a woman) is puzzling. How could you not know?
The thing is that you both meant ‘woman’ (gender) to mean ‘female (sex) and the point of concern is that standardized values, concepts and conventions state that a male (sex) cannot be a woman (gender) which is also absurd because thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of males show their ability to be very feminine and to be women in all respects excepting their sex which I assume, in your case, is immaterial as although you want to be a woman (gender) you aren’t necessarily keen on being a female (sex) which you can’t do anyway.
Some people like to be feminine.
Some are male and some are female.
Some people like to be feminine all of the time, some like to be feminine part of the time.
Some are male and some are female.
There is no contradiction, crime or catastrophe in that.
The question here should not be, “What do we do about this problem?”, but rather, “Why is this a problem?”
Araminta.
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