You don’t simply become an adult: you become a product on the sexual marketplace, regardless of your own will.
It announced my femaleness, it invited certain ways of being looked at, sometimes touched. It betrayed me. I couldn’t dispose of it, so I hated it instead.
This divides you: you learn to see yourself from the outside, as an object, through the imagined eyes of men. You lose your space in the world, and any part of you that goes beyond the strictly minimal can start to feel like grotesque excess.
I don’t know of any (…) word that describes my desire to discipline and punish myself into something safely un-sexed.
I didn't hate my body because I wasn't a girl; I hated it precisely because I was, and because of everything I feared or knew that being a woman might mean.
— Sarah Ditum, The tragedy of becoming a woman (GIDS told girls they needed a cure for femaleness) [review of Hannah Barnes' Time To Think]
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