There is Always Hope: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Woman
In this vulnerable personal essay, E.G. reflects on the winding path toward embracing her womanhood, including battling internalized misogyny and discovering radical feminism.
By E. G.
This past Halloween I found myself searching for a change of scenery and pace—and more importantly, a good party. Last-minute, I booked a flight to Los Angeles to spend the weekend with my good friend Olivia, who moved out to LA a year prior.
We caught up, cried, and indeed partied in our weekend together. At some point, I brought up the old Fiona Apple meme (“there’s no hope for women”) as a joke. Olivia straightened to full attention. “But there is!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There is always hope for women,” Olivia said, smiling, before pulling up a video of Apple proclaiming as much (via Fiona Apple Updates on X).
“There is always hope for women,” Fiona said on the screen, “we are the hope!”
I left LA not only deeply grateful for my female friendships, but hopeful for womankind. I haven’t always felt that way, and it hasn’t always been easy.
The ouroboros of gender nonconformity has trapped me for many years: I would question my natural aversion to femininity; label my aversion nothing more than “internalized misogyny;” force myself into the femininity demanded of womankind; before eventually eschewing it once more; only for the cycle to begin again anew. I destroy myself and rebuild myself again and again, each time wishing for it to be different, only for it to be the same.
Olivia and I met studying art history at the same university, where we became fast friends—a not insignificant feat for me, as female friendships have been few and far between in my life. We talked about moving to New York City, about our favorite movies and music, about our hopes and fears, and sometimes, fleetingly, about gender.
This last topic was sadly unavoidable, given that Olivia met me as “M,” my masculine alter-ego: complete with short, shaggy hair, a wardrobe of ill-fitting men’s clothing, and, of course, a preference for gender neutral pronouns.
We met shortly after I exited my first long-term relationship, one that spanned from the end of my teens into my early twenties. This relationship was both my first time living away from home and living with a partner. I was wholly unprepared for the brutal and unrelenting reality of patriarchy, particularly the ways my male partner would take advantage of me in my own home: including domestic labor, sexual availability, and general “mothering”—all things socialization had told me were expected of women in heterosexual relationships.
Gendered socialization is ruthless in its pervasiveness and ubiquity. Moving-image media, including cinema, is a primary locus of this socialization, as described by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Repetitive viewing of media that presents women as sexual objects both visually and narratively teaches viewers that a woman’s worth is only in her sexual attractiveness to men. This view of woman-as-object and man-as-person is further reinforced outside of entertainment: when learning of history, current events, and culture, one is met with a series of great men’s achievements. Naturally, this begets the question: why have there been no great women? (For answers, read Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?.) The void of this history, made intentionally barren, enforces the idea that being a woman is inferior.
All of this became very clear to me as I remained trapped in my relationship due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. As a last measure of regaining control over my life, I developed an eating disorder. Fixing my body, I thought, would fix my life.
I wasn’t the only one with this idea.
Following the successful gay rights “born this way” campaign, transgender activism leaned into “born in the wrong body” rhetoric. Unlike “born this way,” which asserts that homosexuality is natural and does not need to be fixed, the “wrong body” line of thinking asserts transgender people are born wrong and need fixing. Once “fixed,” your body will match your soul and all will be well.
It’s an attractive claim. It offers a miracle cure—once you reach the pot of gold at the end of the transition-rainbow, your woes (somehow all attributable to gender dysphoria) will simply disappear.
This spoke to me. Something about having a secretly male soul was appealing to me on a subconscious level. It meant that I didn’t deserve the treatment I was receiving both inside and outside my home. If I was “fixed,” everything would be better.
Furthermore, the proposed existence of people who truly “feel like women,” who resonate with femininity and all its failings, made me question if I was really a woman. If someone does not want to be feminine—as is the case for myself and many other gender nonconforming women and girls—it therefore must mean they do not have a soul that is inherently female. They (we) are, obviously, not women.
The rise of nonbinary identified females is not a coincidence. It is synchronous with a decline in the condition of womankind globally. Women’s rights have been massively restricted whilst social conservatism and far-right propaganda have become inescapable online. Many young women have watched their male peers radicalize into a form of woman-hate previously restricted to the dark corners of the internet. This messaging is not only from anti-woman pundits in the public sphere but primarily via the ubiquity of hardcore internet pornography. (Read more in my Anti-Porn Bibliography.) In our culture, being a woman is to be the recipient of relentless sexual violence. It is terrifying, and it is everywhere.
Being nonbinary was a safe haven from a patriarchal reality that was too ubiquitous for me to properly identify and react to. When I left my relationship and started my new life as “M,” I was free. My nonbinary identity was synonymous with liberation from gender roles and newfound social success.
However, it wasn’t always so smooth. Sometimes people would try to give me tips to be more “masculine” to help me to be more “authentically me.” Sometimes I was offended, but sometimes I would take the advice. I eventually found myself monitoring my behavior in public, making sure I was acting as masculine as possible. My body dysmorphia began to include gender dysphoria. I began to dislike the soft curve of my jaw, wishing it were sharper. I hated the way my hips interrupted the vertical slope of my silhouette. I wished my body looked more and more male.
One night last fall, a month before Olivia moved away, we split a bottle of white wine on my couch and talked for hours. Once sufficiently tipsy, I found myself baring my soul to Olivia: “Little girls undergo a schism,” I explained desperately, “where they have to decide if they are a feeling, complete, thinking human, or a woman.”
Olivia said nothing, just looked at me. At that moment I felt very exposed, like she had just figured out the puzzle of my psyche. And, in retrospect, she probably had.
After she moved away, I felt more estranged from womanhood than ever before.
The further I attempted to force my body into a male mold the more extreme my eating disorder, gender dysphoria, and depression became. I found myself trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity, body issues, and internalized misogyny that reared their ugly heads as the hydra of gender dysphoria.
One of the forms of gender dysphoria I struggled with most was sexual. I hated being relegated to the role of “woman” during sex and often wanted to be the active, penetrating party. This spiraled into a rather severe case of penis envy.
One night last winter, I tried to masturbate and ended up crying because of genital dysphoria. I wanted a penis. I wanted to penetrate. I hated my genitals. I’d previously investigated phalloplasty but came away resolute that it was not for me. I didn’t want a phallo-penis grafted from my arm, I wanted a real one. I wished I had been born a man. And I cried and cried, alone in my room.
In many ways, it was a wake-up call. I realized then that I was never going to be a man. I was a woman, and there was no changing that fact. I realized that I had traded one oppressive beauty standard for another—that I was still a voyeur inside myself, watching myself for any weakness. The further I went down this road and the more I committed to changing my body, the more I would hate my body. My dysphoria would not get better, it would get worse. It was simply an inevitability, given that I am fundamentally and immutably female.
I had to sit with this realization for a while. Meaning, of course, I bottled it up for a few months until it all exploded one night in the spring. I was drunk at my new boyfriend’s house—I don’t remember what set me off, to be honest. I just remember screaming and crying and being mad at God for cursing me with the ill fortune of being female. “What kind of sick joke is it,” I remember saying, “that humanity is divided into two classes—a class of real people, and a class of sex slaves—and why do I have to be one of the sex slaves?”
I then shut up.
Half of me couldn’t believe what I just said—the other half was relieved I’d finally admitted it to myself. My nonbinaryism reflected my deep internalized misogyny: that I wasn’t truly mad at the oppression of women. I was mad (furious, actually) that it affected me. On some level, I thought myself superior to other women. My nonbinary identity was me desperately pleading with the world not to treat me as a woman—that I didn’t deserve it.
The truth is that no woman deserves to be treated as inferior. And moreover, we are treated as inferior not because we are, but in fact because we are not.
This humbled me on an indescribable level. I began reading radical feminist theory ravenously and set out to see myself as a woman and work through the ways gendered socialization had shaped me. I realized that being a woman has nothing to do with femininity or beauty or sexuality or submissiveness or anything other than being an adult human female. Radical feminism, in this way, saved my life.
The reality that I was a woman and nothing could ever change that fact was no longer stifling but liberating. It connected me with a rich female history and active feminist community. Reading writings by thinkers such as Mulvey, Nochlin, & Dworkin put words to aspects of patriarchy I could not yet describe and provided a framework for resisting its pervasiveness. I realized that each individual rejection of womanhood in lieu of nonbinaryism is not only a personal disservice, but an act of betraying our sex.
As Olivia and I sat in the cool California air on her front porch and caught up, one of her roommates returned home. I introduced myself as “Emily” without a second thought.
“Wow,” Olivia said once we were alone. “That was so beautiful.” She reached over to squeeze my hand.
When I asked what inspired that reaction, she gestured like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Emily, not Em!” She hugged me and expressed her happiness for me.
In the year between our meetings, I had changed—or maybe I had stopped trying to change myself. During that year, being a woman went from a cursed inevitability to a neutral fact about myself to a liberating truth that I no longer run from. My womanhood is androgynous, avant garde, and alien. None of these things affect my femaleness, just as my femaleness has no bearings on my aptitude or capabilities.
I learned to stop worrying and love being a woman.