What is a woman?

What is a woman to me?

I feel in modern times women are being reduced to sex categories, ignoring our vast and varied biology. The very biology that for years has allowed women to be stereotyped, seen as weaker and even seen as so great in difference to other women, women were enslaved and sold.

Biology as diverse as a woman's has caused so many non white women pain and fear yet the biology of women is now somehow fixed?

Sojourner Truth "Ain't I a woman?"

Yet we are all women and that must be respected while acknowledging our differences, our separate struggles, our journeys to claiming our womanhood. The discriminations other women have faced that we don't and the discriminations other women have faced that we do because of biological diversity.

Some simply see women as one simple biological fact, men and women. Nothing else.

Some of us see it as a rainbow, A beautiful spectrum of difference and diversity. Men, women, trans, non binary people, all valid.

I wasn't born a woman, I was born a baby, I became a child, on an equal footing with boys, running and jumping and getting dirty in the mud. What was there to tell us apart but the hair and clothes chosen for us by adults?

I wasn't born a woman, society told me I was one when I reached physical maturity. Society told me what to wear, how to act.

Am I a woman? I choose my own hair, my own clothes, my personality and how to express myself in the ways that other women do that I enjoy as an individual.

Can anyone look at me and declare my womanhood undoubtedly? Probably but only because that is what I choose and how I express myself. Is that true of all people? No.

You see everything about who I am as a woman is on the inside. Its in my thoughts, my opinions, my appreciation of beautiful things, the way I would like to look, the clothes I would like to wear, in the things I appreciate about friends and family, the strength I have for my children, the love and the pure determination to be a good mother.

I am a woman on the inside, not the outside. That's how I identify. I can change the outside. I can gain or lose weight, I can wear more or less make up, I can cut my hair or grow it out. I can have my body surgically altered but who I am on the inside remains the same.

I am one woman amongst a world of biologically diverse women, not a single one of us looks exactly the same, we don't all choose to express our gender identity visually at all, yet still identify as women.

It is the same for trans women.

I am a woman and so is she.