The following is a transcription of a Twitter thread I wrote back in July in response to some lady that ended up being a sock puppet account.

I don’t identify as a woman, I am a woman. I was a little girl who was told over and over and over again that she wasn’t. Who was harassed, and tormented, and excluded because she didn’t act like she looked.

I was a little girl who had to listen to her father rail on day after day about how women are inferior and everything wrong with the world. Who had to watch him beat and abuse her mother, and knew if he knew the truth he would do the same to her.

I was a little girl who couldn’t understand why the other girls suddenly didn’t want to play with her any more, just because she looked like a boy. Who was told she couldn’t wear dresses, and wanted to destroy the suits her mother made her wear.

I was a teenage girl who so desperately wished she could menstruate that she abused tampons just to have a feminine coded experience. Who stole clothes and wore a stuffed bra in secret just to feel whole.

I was a teenage girl who was forced in to a boys locker room in middle school PE, and received so much abuse from her classmates that she changed in a bathroom stall every day until she graduated.

I was a young lady who wanted to cry every time she saw a pregnant woman, because she wanted so badly to be able to have a baby. Who later in life again felt intense depression during both of her wife’s pregnancies, because she could not experience that joy first hand.

I was a woman who learned about feminism in her twenties and understood immediately how women are persecuted and shoved aside, and forced to be second class citizens below men. Who seethed in hatred at the male privilege she received because of her external appearance.

I was a woman who had to pretend to be a man for twenty five years, had to lie about her interests, hide her wants and dreams, because she was too terrified that if anyone ever found out who she really was, she would lose everything she held dear to her.

Now I am a woman who has finally shed that illusion, and is still being told she is not a real woman, because she can’t possibly know what being a woman is like. Who is being told, like all other women, that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.