I'm Not Like Most Women

or, why I will probably never vote again

My boss is a woman.

Her boss is a woman.

We get along splendidly, and always have.

Neither of them is a maniacal back-stabbing witch.

The number of people I love is very small.

That tiny group includes two women.

I get along very well with both of them. It is a circle of connection, support, challenge-when-called-for, love, and trust.

Neither has ever betrayed me.

I have never feared that either has, or will.

From my careful observations in the last year, these facts tell me something crucial:

I am not like most women.

If what I have learned from spending time with people on the right is to be believed, I and I alone am not like most women.

Most women have spent decades experiencing nothing but abuse, betrayal, and vicious, maniacal slander at the hands of other women. Most women would feel safer passed out drunk and naked in a room full of strange men than having a single close female friend.

Most women find themselves to be capable of logical thought, rational decision-making, and caring for others, but other women to be silly, shallow, stupid, pathetic creatures with whom they’re ashamed to share a demographic category.

My experience of other women as humans with flaws and strengths, vices and virtues, imperfections but not psychopathy, is apparently unique among women right of center.

Women left of center can’t even define women, of course, and by their own standards the group of “women” includes many men. Their takes are therefore easily dismissed as meaningless.

Therefore, with only the takes of women right of center to consider, I think the logic holds:

I am not like most women.

Why Teenage Girls Transition

I no longer wonder why teenage girls transition.

We are required culturally to examine gender and sex constantly, like it or not. It is no more wholly ignorable than the fact of who is President. It is part of the cultural weather of the west.

Who wouldn’t take any route possible to escape being part of this vile, horrific group of morally monstrous creatures?

Combine the opportunity to be purged of moral guilt with the likelihood of experiencing degrading, violent sex with men—which is certainly the experience that most single women I know seem to have—and transition seems like a wholly rational choice.

I’ve considered it myself. Is that shocking? It shouldn’t be.

I have no inner sense of myself as male, but I also have no inner sense of myself as female. Transition is constantly presented in our culture as an exciting journey, one that provides access to enormous reservoirs of happiness, joy, and authentic self-knowledge.

I don’t “feel like a man.”

But also, I don’t “feel like a woman.”

I feel like myself. Having a female body is one part of being me, but I no more “feel like a woman” than I “feel” deaf, American, or literate.

So why not transition, if it might be a strategy for happiness?

When the thought occurs to me, I do my best to apply rational analysis. My pros vs cons list boils down to:

Pros

• Testosterone is an antidepressant.

• I could shave my head.

• Never experiencing what my female friends do at the hands of men (having gotten the “OMG so I went home with this guy and out of nowhere he starts choking me and when I freak out he seems really shocked, like there’s something wrong with me that I don’t want to be choked” phone call on four separate occasions in the last couple of years).

• Job-hunting without fear of discrimination for being a female mathematician.

• Getting new jobs and progressing in my career without ever worrying if I’m a diversity hire.

• Greater confidence.

• Nothing would ever be my fault again. Every interpersonal conflict would be the result of transphobia and I would never feel like I felt this week again.

  How would these things play in real life? I fucked up badly this week and hurt someone who matters to me. The next time I hurt someone I care about, instead of coming to terms with what I did, assuming responsibility for it, apologizing, and repairing the relationship, I could just denounce their transphobia. Trump card, baby!

Cons

• Making myself above criticism also means I’d never learn anything for the rest of my life. I’d be stuck. Stymied.

• My body is not meant to handle huge doses of testosterone and I have enough to worry about, health-wise.

Right about this point in the list-making I usually actually hear myself and end up writing:

This is fucking insane and thank the baby Jesus I have therapy this evening.

Women on the Right, per Right-Leaning Men

It would probably be impossible for me to exaggerate how hard I have worked, after a childhood of serious abuse, to overcome an impulse to hate and blame all men. This work was made harder for how little pressure I felt to work on those attitudes. Really, who could blame me? I am someone whose father was physically, emotionally and verbally abusive. I was groomed by a male pedophile as a kindergartener and raped as a first grader. As an adult, I made the kind of choices in boyfriends that are entirely predictable in someone about whom those two facts are true, and had several extremely traumatic experiences.

If I concluded that men were inherently monstrous beings—seriously, who would argue with me?

It took me almost three years to tell my therapist all my secrets, because he’s male, and some part of me couldn’t shake the fear that, secretly, all men have some level of sexual interest in children, and thus the gory details, if divulged to any male, would be giving him masturbation material.

I worked insanely hard to get over that fear and to accept that the vast majority of men are not like that. Truly and thoroughly purging that fear from my soul is one of the few real triumphs of my life. I trust three men now to the fullest extent I am capable of trust—my therapist; a straight friend who is also something of a mentor; and a gay friend. I even have other male friends I trust a lot, if less than those three.

Just as importantly, I no longer have even a lingering fear that all men are secretly monstrous, both desirous and capable of hurting women and children.

The double standard on the right I have noticed the most is that women who make sweeping conclusions about men, no matter how understandable or how deep the trauma involved, are weak, pathetic, and need to get over their “daddy issues.”

On the other hand, an adult man who makes a bad choice about which woman to impregnate and gets screwed in family court?

His attitudes about all women are entirely justified and understandable and require endless patience—particularly from women, who line up to affirm his feelings and assure him that his emotion-driven conclusions are rationality itself.

That kind of condescension is actual sexism. Men are just as capable of accepting responsibility for their poor decisions and moving forward without making sweeping conclusions about half of humanity as I am, even if, as I did, they need to work at it.

Men on the right are also quite fond of insisting that sexism is dead while proclaiming deeply sexist attitudes. I heard a man on the right say recently that many domains (including gaming and sports) are men’s spaces, and women only enter them to turn them into a “hypergamous monkey sex ladder.”

When such notions are applauded by other right-leaning men and affirmed by right-leaning women, I can only conclude that they’re either accepted as truth or that the right is just as full of cowards as the left.

Never Gonna Vote Again

Either way, I want no part of their tribe. Their religion is not my religion, and I mean that both in the explicit and implicit senses of “religion.”

The right is full of people who share the opinions of their fellow conservatives who have discussed my childhood abuse with me. When I ask them what they think should have happened if I’d gotten pregnant at ten—I got my period at 9 and it was roughly a year after I got my period before I outgrew the pedophile’s attraction; how I didn’t get pregnant is a mystery—they affirm at once that an abortion is unthinkable.

No, it wouldn’t be acceptable to give a raped ten-year-old an abortion. It’s not the baby’s fault!

(As if it was mine; as if a ten-year-old’s body is prepared to handle giving birth, much less her mind.)

They would have a pregnant ten-year-old put into government custody/foster care, where she would be required to act as an incubator for her rapist.

The pedophile chose the vehicle for his offspring and by their moral standards, the job of the government is to enforce his choice.

Since the red states starting changing their abortion laws, post-Dobbs, many on the right also seem to think that the one and only thing government does well is write abortion restriction laws. There’s absolutely no way that any of those laws could conceivably be interpreted, by a good-faith actor, to require endangering the health of miscarrying women! Doctors and hospitals are so committed to abortion as a sacrament that they’re happy to risk multi-million dollar lawsuits by willfully misinterpreting laws just to make a point—a point that patient privacy laws won’t let them legally make, even! THAT is commitment, folks, right?

Fuck the left and their Woke religion.

Fuck the right and their bullshit.

I’m an adult human female, and to be one of those with even a modicum of self-respect requires me to refuse to play the American political game until Team Red or Team Blue gets their shit together.

I’m not holding my breath.

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