Essay

Femininity, womanhood and the trouble with one true definition

Somewhere along the way, femininity got handed to us as a test — a thing you either pass or fail, with a panel of invisible judges holding up scorecards. But femininity was never a test. It is a language, and like any language it can be spoken with a thousand accents, or set down entirely without anyone losing a word of who they are.

Ask ten people what femininity is and you will get ten answers that quietly contradict each other. Softness. A particular way of moving through a room. Lipstick, or the deliberate refusal of it. Care work. A high voice, long hair, a certain patience. The trouble starts the moment one of those answers gets promoted from a way to the way — the moment a description hardens into a requirement. Then femininity stops being something you can play with and becomes something you can be caught failing at.

This essay is an argument against that hardening. Not against femininity — femininity is gorgeous, and chosen femininity is one of the great pleasures available to a person — but against the idea that there is a single correct shape for it, and a single correct kind of body to wear it on.

Performance is not the same as fake

It became fashionable, for a while, to describe gender as performance and to say it with a slightly accusatory edge, as if performance meant pretending. It does not. A pianist performs. A surgeon performs. Performance is simply the doing of a thing in the world, where others can see it and respond. To say femininity is performed is not to say it is insincere; it is to say it is made, daily, out of choices — what you put on, how you hold your face, the register you reach for when you answer the phone.

Naming it as a performance is freeing, because anything that is performed can also be rehearsed differently, or dropped, or rewritten for a new audience. The woman who loves her acrylic nails and the woman who has never owned a tube of mascara are both performing womanhood; neither is closer to some original. The femininity that is chosen — tried on in front of a mirror, abandoned on a hot day, picked up again on a night out — is not a costume hiding a truer self. For a great many people it is the truer self, assembled with intention.

The two-sided scrutiny

Here is the cruel symmetry at the centre of all this. Cis women and trans women are both policed on their womanhood — interrogated, measured, found wanting — but from opposite directions, which is precisely what keeps the two groups from seeing how much the same machine is working on them both.

A cis woman is told, constantly, that she is doing femininity wrong: too loud, too plain, too ambitious, too fat, too old, too hairy, not maternal enough, not pretty enough to be taken seriously and not serious enough to be left alone. The scrutiny insists she is failing to live up to womanhood. A trans woman faces a mirror-image accusation — that she is not entitled to womanhood at all, that whatever she does is suspect, that femininity on her is somehow a costume even when the identical femininity on a cis woman is read as natural. One woman is told she is a bad example of the category. The other is told she does not belong in the category. The category itself is the weapon in both hands.

That symmetry should be a point of solidarity, not division. The standard that punishes a trans woman for not being "woman enough" is the same standard that has been punishing cis women their whole lives. Nobody wins the contest. The contest is the problem.

Womanhood is not a gate with a guard at it. It is a country with no border control — and the people demanding papers were never the ones who lived there.

Who gets to certify a "real" woman?

Whenever someone invokes the "real" woman, it is worth asking, gently, who they imagine signs the certificate. There is no office that issues womanhood. There never was. Across history and across cultures, the things held up as proof — a body that menstruates, the ability to bear children, a particular silhouette, a documented chromosome — have each, on their own, excluded enormous numbers of people that no honest observer would hesitate to call women. Women who never menstruated. Women past menopause. Women who could not or chose not to bear children. Women whose bodies simply do not match the textbook diagram. If a definition of womanhood throws all of them out, the definition is broken, not the women.

The major medical and human-rights bodies have moved, slowly, toward this understanding — that sex and gender are more complex and various than the tidy binary we were taught, and that a person's stated gender deserves to be respected rather than litigated. You can read the World Health Organization on the distinction between sex and gender, and you will not find a single clean line where one becomes the other, because there isn't one. The line was always drawn by hand, by people, for reasons — and lines drawn by hand can be drawn more kindly.

Femininity beyond women

If we loosen the grip of "real womanhood," something lovely falls out: femininity stops belonging to women exclusively, and starts belonging to anyone who wants it. The word for this in queer life is femme, and femmes come in every gender there is. A femme can be a woman, cis or trans. A femme can be a nonbinary person whose femininity has nothing to do with being a woman. A femme can be a man who paints his nails and means it. Femininity is a register, like minor key — available to any voice, owned by none.

There is a particular courage in masculine-of-centre people who reach for femininity, and in feminine people who refuse to apologise for how much of it they want. Both are resisting the same rule, which says femininity must be modest, must be earned, must be tied to a specific body and worn at a specific volume. Drag artists knew this decades before the theory did. So did the soft butches and the lipstick lesbians and the trans men who kept the parts of femininity they loved. Femininity is not the opposite of strength, and it is not a tax that women alone are obliged to pay.

The body is not the rulebook

So much of the policing comes back to bodies — which ones are allowed to be feminine, which ones are read as women, which ones are quietly told they are doing it wrong simply by existing. A fat woman is told her femininity is undignified. A tall woman, a hairy woman, a woman with a strong jaw or large hands or a deep voice, a disabled woman whose body does not perform on cue — each gets the same unspoken note: your body disqualifies you. It does not. The body is not the rulebook. This is the whole argument of body positivity at its least diluted: that bodies are not auditions, and that no shape forfeits its claim to be seen, desired, or believed.

When we let go of the idea that womanhood lives in a specific anatomy, we also free femininity from the impossible job of proving something about the body underneath it. Femininity becomes expression again, not evidence. You are not femininely dressed to certify your sex to a stranger. You are femininely dressed because you wanted to be, this morning, in this light.

What we owe each other

None of this requires anyone to perform femininity. That is the point that gets lost. The woman in steel-toe boots who has never once been called soft is not less of a woman, and the case for unbinding femininity from womanhood is not a case for everyone to femme up. It is a case for choice — that femininity be available to all who want it and required of none, that womanhood be a thing you are rather than a thing you keep proving, and that the energy we currently spend grading each other be spent instead on the lives we are actually living.

How we picture women — in films, on magazine covers, in the stories we tell children — feeds straight back into who gets believed when they say this is who I am. That is why representation is not a soft, decorative concern. The narrower the picture, the more people fall outside the frame, and the easier it becomes to treat those people as exceptions to be questioned rather than examples of how wide the category always was.

The most generous thing I know to do with the word woman is to hold it open. Not to guard it. To assume that the person in front of you knows their own life better than your scorecard does. Femininity, after all, was never a single shape — and womanhood, thank goodness, was never a contest anyone needed to win.

SectionTrans lives, on their own termsReporting and essays that treat trans people as people — never as a debate.Read →SectionBodies are not auditionsOn fatness, desirability and the long fight to be seen without conditions.Read →SectionWho gets to be in the pictureWhy the frame we draw around womanhood decides who we believe.Read →