Real Women Are Better Off with Truth

Write what you know, they say. Here’s something I know from experience: being a woman. I can’t say I know what all women experience, but I know the basics, plus my own experience.

And I want to say, to those “woke” people claiming that a man can be a woman—or that a woman can be a man, for that matter—are wrong. Offensively wrong.

What happens when a person goes through a so-called “transition” from male to female? They dress in stereotypical feminine ways—dresses, maybe sexy or maybe frilly. They put on makeup. They may take hormones or undergo surgeries to disguise the original body parts and produce the appearance of feminine ones.

Sometimes it’s a pretty effective disguise. Voice is still an issue, but some women have somewhat deep voices, so they might possibly be in the target range.

But is being a woman just a matter of “presenting” as a woman before the world?

Does it come down to clothes, makeup, and chemical and surgical castration, and that makes someone a woman?

As a real woman, I resent the very assertion.

There are so many things—and such a range of things—that come with being a real woman.

Me, with a couple of awesome real women.
We've been in each other's lives since freshman year of college.

There’s the physiological. There’s understanding what it means when your hormones affect your mood and behavior, and sometimes sabotage your otherwise capable self. There’s the preparation for producing offspring that begins at puberty—changing your shape, your interests, and your sense of calendar timing.

There’s the tremendous change that comes with pregnancy—with the miracle of growing a person inside you. There are the physical effects of that: nausea, tiredness, sinus congestion, discomfort, looser joints leading to difficulty walking near the end. Plus the thrill, fear, and anticipation of this permanent change to your life.

Then comes the actual birth. Women, when they get together, tell and compare their birth stories. I’m not certain I know why. It’s not to one-up one another; it’s to participate in the sisterhood of mothers. We share these life-changing stories.

No matter how unpleasant the pregnancy—and delivery—that new life in your arms is miraculously worth it. And this new little one teaches you something about love that you thought you understood before, but you realize you didn’t. It gives you a glimpse of the love of Heavenly Father for His children—all of us.

And there’s the psychological. No matter what you see about the terrors of having a house full of “littles,” messing things up, doing gross things, and upending your previous order—those little ones teach you how to be a better, more loving, more patient, more service-giving person. Without them, you might never become the person of your potential.

Me with a grandson 5 years ago

A woman understands how this person with a heartbeat that used to be inside her now moves through the world separate from her. And she understands what it is to see this young person grow into an adult, who will leave home and start a new family, hopefully. Which is both painful and beautifully satisfying.

A woman knows what it is to grow older, and focus less on appearance, more on being productive in other ways than producing new humans. She knows the mix of feelings surrounding losing fertility and moving beyond that time, including the new emotional upheaval of menopause, followed by something of a calm beyond that.

Let’s include women who never have children. Is she still a woman? Yes, of course. She might be infertile but will still have gone through all those physiological changes in preparation of the potential, which women’s bodies do.

And we include some women who aren’t loving mothers, or even good people. They’ll still understand things about being a woman that a man does not—cannot—comprehend.

Being a woman is a human thing—a very specific human thing. Different from being a man. That’s regardless of job choice, talents, tendencies toward being outgoing or introverted, logical or emotional, brainy or… not. Women cover the whole range of humanness—except everything that is specifically what a man is.

So, when a tiny fraction of humanity—around 3 per thousand people[i]—decides they want to be something that they simply are not, and closer to just 1 per thousand people who are male but want to claim they are female,[ii]  what does a real woman think about that? In today’s world, are we even allowed to have an opinion about that? In locker rooms and sports all over, real women are told to shut up about it. Suck it up. Suffer in humiliation. Be powerless.

Me with two more awesome real women.
We started a homeschool group together back in 2005.
Julie (left) has a book coming out soon and does a
podcast on grief recovery.

Here’s another thing about being a woman: We’re better off with truth. When speaking up about unfairness at the workplace. When speaking up about unwanted sexual interest anywhere. When speaking up about rape absolutely every time it occurs. When speaking up about males trying to take over women’s sports.

Women are better off with truth.

What about that tiny percentage of about one per thousand people who decides to claim they are a woman even though they were born male? Let’s try treating them with honesty. We can do that while also treating them with dignity. We can offer them sympathy for a mental disorder that isn’t being treated very logically by the medical and psychological communities. We can hope for better treatment for them—even expect that and pressure for it.

We can accept that they want to present themselves as something that they are not, and we can say, “You’re welcome to do that, as long as you do not require me to participate.” We don’t have to pretend that their “transition” is real. We don’t have to treat them to the portions of life that are reserved for women—out of respect for women—such as in locker rooms and in women’s sports.

We don’t have to lie and say they are an exception to the scientific fact that, if you are born male, you can’t be a woman.

We don’t have to use a pronoun that they demand—a part of speech that refers to a person generally in their absence in place of a name, for brevity or when the name may not be known. Why should anyone be allowed to control the way someone refers to them when they are absent or unknown?

We can speak up loudly and repeatedly that we will not allow this fraud to be perpetrated on children, and we can push for laws to protect children from the permanent damage this fraud has been subjecting them to.

We can expect them to respect our differences of belief.

And if they do not, we may have to get louder about how offensive this tiny minority has been toward real women. We have tolerated their offensive lies long enough, pretending they can reduce everything that we women are down to makeup, clothes, and outer appearance.

Women are much more than that. And telling the truth about that is better for us all.

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[i] We’re using the whole population total of .3% transgender. Children are likely lower. See “The Search for the Best Estimate of the Transgender Population,” New York Times, June 9, 2015.

[ii] We’re assuming, for simplicity, that half of transgender individuals are males who present as females. So, of the 3 per thousand, that leaves 1.5, rounded down to the nearest whole person.