Just a note that I’ll be away from Substack next week, unless I really can’t help myself.
When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban for the second time, I was traveling across Central Europe. The contrast between the life that I was free to live and the lives of women under such a repressive regime could not have been more striking. I was free to travel alone. No one chaperoned me or curtailed me in any way. No one even knew where I was. I spent my own money that I had earned. I had one educational degree to my name and was about to embark on another.
And I knew all the time that I was free to move about so unencumbered only because my missteps—serious ones—had not been binding. I would have been bound in the way only a woman can be bound. Those missteps of mine would have bound almost every woman in almost every corner of the earth for almost all of human history.
I was free to meet a strange man and spend an entire day with him, at first just talking and then kissing and touching. My tongue was free to speak a language that was not my own. I was free to feel the breeze in my hair and the sun on my skin. And the whole time, I knew that the life that I had—on those beautiful summer days—was an impossibility for so many women whose lifetimes overlap with mine but whose opportunities don't. Kandahar was falling and Herat was falling and women's rights were falling and I was in Vienna, I was on a train to Zurich, glued to the news but free.
And now it's a year and a half later and women's rights are still falling in Afghanistan, with female university students shut out of their educations in the midst of final exams. The women and girls of Afghanistan are bound in ways that only women and girls can be bound, for reasons that only women and girls are bound. And it matters: it matters how their lives are curtailed and it matters why. It matters that we can ask and answer the most basic questions about the conditions of women and girls around the world. And that means we have to know who women and girls are and why it is their educations, their childhoods, their bodies, their autonomy, their freedom of movement and expression that are so often targeted. It's because of their sex, because they’re female—no matter how they feel about that fact—and because so many societies operating under many different belief systems have reduced women to reproductive resources to be controlled and extracted, not human beings who are ends in themselves, who have their own needs and desires.
All of which brings me back home. Even the most repressive cultures have a word for this distinct class of human beings, the ones who carry the future of humanity in their bodies because everyone, everyone knows who women are. In the West, where women like me enjoy unprecedented freedoms to conduct our lives in accordance with our own desires, we're losing this language. We talk about female human beings as if we were only our bodies and functions, even though we should be able to see—with perfect clarity—where such thinking leads: through abortion bans and surrogacy and prostitution and through the violations of basic human rights that too many of our sisters around the world live under every day. This loss of language matters. Uterus-havers don't have dreams. Women do. Menstruators don't need educations. Girls do. Gestators are commodities and services. Mothers aren't.
When it comes to 'inclusive' language—which is to say language that falsifies the realities of sex—I've lost track of how many times friends and colleagues have enjoined me to just play along. They suggest it would be kinder of me to pretend that some men are women and some women aren't. Ideally, I'd believe it, too, but almost nobody does. Belief is not essential. Falsification is. No matter what they say, their lack of belief surfaces eventually. It turns out even the most effusive allies know the facts of life, no matter how fiercely they protest their innocence of such sordid matters. They are not shocked by sudden developments in their sex lives ('I thought my husband would get pregnant this time around!'). They know exactly who women are: women are the ones who are supposed to bend, make space, and call the silence around their lives and experiences and needs by new names, like inclusivity.
Thus, when it comes to language and our understanding of the world, two sets of laws must be in operation: In Afghanistan, there are women and girls who are oppressed because they are female. But in the West, those words—women, girls, female—must become meaningless and anything we might share across our many differences, any solidarity we might owe our sisters whose burdens are much heavier than ours, must dissolve. Yet something is shared and something is owed.
"Sisterhood is powerful". Take away the specificity from language, replace it with "Siblinghood is powerful" and you have removed all of the significance and the meaning of the phrase. Why fight for something if you cannot name it? The mere act of naming confers significance, provides a handle upon which to move the energy. Thank you for this thoughtful essay. Have a wonderful holiday season, Sister!
I appreciate all of this essay. As the ex-wife of a man, the father of our children, who now claims he's also "mother," I know the experience of erasure. Vaishnavi Sundar, auteur of the 4 part series, Dysphoria, partly autobiographical, broadly documenting girls who translate trauma into wanting out of the female category, is finishing a documentary on trans widows. A trailer for Behind the Looking Glass is now up at Lime Soda Films YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhAlvw_kAHs
Exulansic, another female desister who had a "trans-masc" phase in early adulthood discusses Fallacies of Cross-Dressing on my channel, Ute Heggen (transcript at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rhmYp2Wq2E&t=1s
Cross-sex ideation ideology is an assault on women, motherhood and childhood.