“Failed” Woman: The Unattainable Gender Ideal
For those of us who identify with the idea of womanhood or being a woman, there is an expectation that “woman” is not a static identity, but instead something that needs to be in constant maintenance to keep up with the cultural times and beauty standards. The ideal of the “perfect” woman has changed throughout history, reflecting the power structures and values of the times, leaving a legacy of women feeling compelled to play constant catchup to an ever-changing ideal.
Even within older Hollywood styles of glamorized blonde bombshells, and even older colonial settler ideas of white beauty standards, the societal norm implies that the pinnacle of womanhood is a woman who is in keeping with the standard body type, temperament, and ethnicity deemed appropriate for mass consumption.
However, there is no right nor one way to be a woman.
Anyone who has once considered themself to be a woman or is currently a woman could tell you that everyone seems to have a specific idea of who or what a woman is and should be. However, in reality, in as many ways as there are different ideals of what a woman should be, there are also a million and a half ways we’re told we “fail” at being a woman.
In examining all this, there is an inherent unattainability to womanhood.
To have an ideal that is not only constantly changing but also incredibly narrow, leaves many feeling like a failed woman. Being a “failed woman” is both a description of an experience and a moral judgment made by society. The experience of a “failed woman” implies that we are all starting from the same place on equal footing to meet the established requirements, yet in reality, every single person may have their own unique experience trying to express womanhood that intersects with their race, ability, class, gender expression, etc.
Whether you grew up as a debutante or a tomboy, navigating womanhood can be a challenge for all, and especially for those who transgress gender. For trans and nonbinary individuals, this feeling of not fitting into a neat image can be understood across the gender spectrum.
Not Quite Woman Enough
The heightening of your voice to seem approachable, the curling in your shoulders to seem smaller, the picking apart of every minute detail of social interaction. For some transwomen, transfemme, and nonbinary people, the struggle to align with womanhood and the struggles of unattainable femininity is a daily task. The feeling of “not being femme or woman enough” is heightened with every misplaced hair that could be scrutinized.
For some transmen, transmasculine, and nonbinary people, the alignment of womanhood is perhaps not the goal but a preconceived idea placed onto them at birth, like an ill-fitted part they are expected to play. In this case, womanhood can feel like a challenge predestined to fail, where the word “tomboy” or “butch” becomes less of a descriptor and more of an insult.
For trans and nonbinary people, this feeling of failing at being a woman can be demoralizing despite where you are on the gender spectrum. The language of “failed woman” itself is harsh and can leave one with a sense of finality. Yet, deconstructing societally defined failure and what it means to fail, does not mean that there is still no possibility. Trans and nonbinary people have the opportunity as a community to reconcile with these feelings and push back against and redefine the idea of what it means to be or succeed as a woman and what that can look like.
Never Woman Enough
For trans and nonbinary individuals, the experience of feeling like a “failed woman” is only exacerbated by the current political climate surrounding trans and gender diverse communities.
The rhetoric surrounding trans and nonbinary people as being a “failed woman” has gained traction within TERF movements. TERF or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminism’ and TERF ideology is a specific form of transphobia and more specifically transmisogyny that has cultivated the idea of “failed” womanhood as a marker for discrimination. By their definition womanhood is a “sex-based” oppression, meaning that those who are “assigned female at birth” are subject to inherent discrimination and any attempt to not identify with your gender assigned at birth is considered traitorous,confusing, or dangerous.
For transwomen and transfemme people specifically, these ideas are used to create biological determinism to exclude them from womanhood altogether. Coupling these ideas of weaponized biology and “failed woman” allows TERFs to take an experience, unique to many people, and use it as a barometer for validity.
Though the structure of misogyny is complex, and women’s oppression can’t be reduced to only specific biological or anatomical elements, in many instances oppression based on these things is still very much a feminist issue. What TERFs perhaps don’t realize is that this stringent categorization of womanhood where one can either succeed at performing current standards of womanhood, or fail to do so, also hurts feminism as a whole. It reduces womanhood to an outsider’s ideal and makes no acknowledgment that individual womanhood is not homogenous.
I’m Not A Failure, I’m Just Me
Breaking down the walls of how to feel like a woman or to stop feeling like a failed woman can seem insurmountable when there is no role model for your type of gender expression. But failing to perform a preconceived notion of womanhood isn’t failing to be a woman.To be a woman is to feel like a woman, and to feel like a woman is to understand that women come in many different shapes and sizes. While there will likely always be a cultural ideal of womanhood, we can choose to engage or not engage with that ideal, how we define womanhood for ourselves, and what that means for us.
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