Crista Schorr-Kon

I am writing on the subject of sharing our ‘lived experience’. As a woman in our community of NZAP [APANZ], I have not felt safe to do that. So here I will try to share while feeling unsafe; as for me, there is no other option that holds integrity.

I have heard transwomen use the phrase ‘feeling like a woman’. As a woman I really do not know what that means as I do not feel like my experience of my inner self is gendered. I have reflected on this for a couple of years now. What makes me feel like a woman is my body, the way I have been perceived and treated, and the experiences I have had because of having a female body. I think that has led to me identifying with ‘feeling like a woman’. So I guess this is the opposite of transwomen who describe their experience coming from the inside-out whereas mine comes from the outside-in.

I grew up in a progressive household, so I was not dressed in pink or anything like that. But, as I got older, I got looked at by men in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable—it felt like they wanted to take my body from me. When my body changed at puberty it was excruciating, I did not want a woman’s body and the attention it brought. I did not want periods either. I grew used to the periods and the attention, and have at many times enjoyed and feared the power my body holds over men. I have enjoyed the power of being able to make two children in my womb and being able to feed them with my body, being a mother. But being a woman has also been really difficult and I have had experiences of extreme powerlessness and terror with men. Now I am going through menopause which is another really difficult time; insomnia, anxiety, lack of desire, aching, forgetting everything, feeling exhausted, angry and sad. But it also brings more peace and acceptance with my body, it does not get looked at in the same way by men anymore; it feels more like mine and less like theirs.

I feel hurt, misunderstood, and disrespected when transwomen use my words to describe themselves, ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a mother’ as it feels like it negates all of the experiences I have described above. It feels like a repeat of someone wanting to take my body from me, and it also feels like they claim to know my internal world when they do not. But I do not know if my internal experience is of ‘feeling like a woman’. It does not necessarily feel gendered, it just feels like ‘feeling like a self’.

I am aware that this will easily be interpreted as the privilege of being what some call a ‘ciswoman’ (I don’t like this word) who never had to feel any incongruence with their body. But, believe me, I have felt incongruent for so much of my life. I have been thinking about my relationship to my female body all my life, as it has, to a huge extent, dictated the experiences and life I have had. I understand that transwomen may have had an acute and ongoing experience of not belonging in their gendered bodies and there is no way I can claim to know what that feels like. But as we are all meant to be exploring and sharing our ‘lived experience’ of our gender, I wanted a chance to use my words (rather than being silenced) to describe what it has felt like for me so far, being a woman.

I hope at some stage we will be able to have these discussions openly in NZAP [APANZ].

Crista Schorr-Kon was an adventurer but is now a 53-year-old psychotherapist and mother of two children—a feisty 18 year-old daughter and 21-year-old son with a moderate/severe physical disability who has defied the odds.