This post is two years old, but still a very important subject in today’s world. Maybe more so, after the attack in Manchester, England, which was, after all, an attack on WOMEN.
The idea of women being ‘woman-identified’ or ‘male-identified’ is a concept that came out of the feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s and seems to have fallen out of use; I rarely hear feminists use this phrase. Currently, the word “identify” is only being used in the context of transgenderism where people ‘identify as’ a certain gender, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. ‘Woman-identified’ as it was used in the feminist consciousness-raising groups had to do with women’s identification with their oppressors—women seeing ourselves in terms of how we are defined by men.
In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks explains:
“In the early stages of feminist movement we used the phrase ‘woman-identified woman’ or ‘man-identified woman’ to distinguish between those activists who did not choose lesbianism but who did choose to be woman-identified, meaning their ontological existence did not depend on male affirmation. Male-identified females were those…
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