Woman: Difference between revisions

Anyone with a female gender identity is female: she is a [[woman]] or girl. Women are a very diverse group, and many assumptions about the definitive characteristics of womanhood are not held in common by all women. Having the ability or desire to give birth are not what makes someone a woman, because many women and girls can't or don't want do that, due to health conditions, age, or personal choice. Looking like a woman in other people's judgment does not make someone a woman, because others can misjudge that, and there are women who look masculine, and other people who look feminine, whether by choice or by nature. Only identifying as a woman makes someone a woman. Any woman's womanhood is valid no matter what kind of body parts she has, or what gender she was [[assigned gender at birth|assigned at birth]]. Cisgender women, transgender women, and [[intersex]] women are equally women. Because gender isn't the same thing as [[sexual orientation]], women are still women whether they feel sexual attraction to men (heterosexual), or to women ([[lesbian]]), or to people of any gender ([[bisexual]] or [[pansexual]]), or none ([[asexual]]).  

The word ''girl'' originally meant "young person of either sex" in English;<ref>Used in Middle English from c. 1300, meaning 'a child of either sex, a young person'.  Its derivation is uncertain, perhaps from an Old English word which has not survived: another theory is that it developed from Old English 'gyrela', meaning 'dress, apparel': or was a diminutive form of a borrowing from another West Germanic Language. (Middle Low German has Gör, Göre, meaning 'girl or small child'.)  "girl, n.". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. 13 September 2013</ref> it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a ''female'' child.<ref>By late 14th century a distinction was arising between female children, often called  'gay girls' – and male, or 'knave girls' -: a1375  William of Palerne  (1867) l. 816  ' Whan þe gaye gerles were in-to þe gardin come, Faire floures þei founde.' ('When the gay girls came into the garden, Fair flowers they found.') By the 16th century, the unsupported word had begun to mean specifically a female:  1546  J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. x. sig. D,  'The boy thy husbande, and thou the gyrle his wyfe.'  The usage meaning 'child of either sex' survived much longer in Irish English. "girl, n.". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. 13 September 2013</ref> The term ''girl'' is sometimes  used colloquially to refer to a young or unmarried woman; however, during the early 1970s, feminists challenged such use because the use of the word to refer to a fully grown woman may cause offence. In particular, previously common terms such as ''office girl'' are no longer widely used. Conversely, in certain cultures which link family honor with female virginity, the word ''girl'' (or its equivalent in other languages) is still used to refer to a never-married woman; in this sense it is used in a fashion roughly analogous to the more-or-less obsolete English ''maid'' or ''maiden''.

== Symbol ==

Many transgender women [[transition]] to address [[gender dysphoria]], and some also consider themselves to be transsexual women. Any transgender person's transition path is very individual. Common features in a transgender woman's transition path include [[hormone therapy]] to create a balance with estrogen higher than testosterone, and a wide variety of kinds of [[surgery]] to choose from.

In the transgender community, "[[gatekeeper]]" is slang for the system of health providers that decide whether to allow a transgender person to get gender-validating health care.<ref>"Trans, genderqueer, and queer terms glossary." [http://lgbt.wisc.edu/documents/Trans_and_queer_glossary.pdf]</ref> Medical gatekeepers, as well as the serious risks of living in trans-misogynistic culture, both put pressure on trans women to conform to society's behavioral and physical ideals for feminine cisgender women. One form of this pressure is that gatekeepers told trans women not to interact with other trans women outside of gender centers, saying that this would invalidate their womanhood. Keeping trans women isolated from one another in this way made it so that trans women couldn't organize among themselves to do activism for their own rights.<ref>fakecisgirl, "The Misery Pimps: The People Who Impede Trans Liberation." October 7, 2013. ''Fake Cis Girl'' (personal blog). [https://fakecisgirl.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/the-misery-pimps-the-people-who-impede-trans-liberation/ https://fakecisgirl.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/the-misery-pimps-the-people-who-impede-trans-liberation/]</ref>