Becoming a Woman
A great deal of the text in this narrative is directed toward the precision of language relative to social constructs. This is a concept that those who insist upon a strict and rigid binary gender duality cannot quite wrap seem to wrap their heads around. Not that the author of this book makes that task any easier with her complicated construction of metaphor:
“If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.”
Feelings
A common enough expression of gender dysphoria is the claim by someone identified externally as male to feel like a woman or vice versa. This simile seems simple enough, but it is, in fact, the very foundation of the book’s argument. As such, any simplicity to the “like” comparison is thrown to the wolves almost immediately:
“The articulation `I feel like a woman’ by a female or `I feel like a man’ by a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly redundant.”
Aretha
Curiously enough, the signature callback to the concept of this simile-based expression of feeling as though belongs to the opposite gender that is presupposed about them traces back not to psychological theories of Jacques Lacan or the writings of Simone de Beauvoir—both of which are extensively quoted—but rather to pop culture:
“Thus, `I feel like a woman’ is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin’s invocation of the defining Other is assumed: `You make me feel like a natural woman.’”
Beauvoir
But, of course, it goes without saying that the philosophical ministrations of de Beauvoir on the meaning of gender is essential to the text. At one point, it even seems as if the author of this book is using the writings of Beauvoir to suggest that the entirely concept of gender is metaphorical:
“If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.”
One Gender to Rule Them All
Another attempt to situate gender as resting completely within the metaphorical realm is based upon the semantics of the terms. Gender divergence can be said to exist artificially only as a patriarchal construct to subjugate the feminine as a lesser being than the norm which equates exclusively with men:
“Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general."
