Girls Wishing to Live as Boys Do

Assumptions from past to present on the nature of female nonconformity

Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c. 1896

What man is so ungrateful to Providence as to reproach it with the misfortunes of others, if it has had only smiles and benefits for him? How could one persuade these young supporters of constitutional monarchy that the constitution was already out of date, that it was a burden on the body politic and wearied it, when they found it weighed lightly on them and they reaped only its advantages? Who believes in poverty when he has no experience of it?

- George Sand, Indiana¹

I have always tried (but I think I failed) to turn you into a sublime hermaphrodite. I want you to be a man down to the navel; below that, you get in my way, you disturb me—your female element ruins everything.

- Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet, c. 1854²

The moral world of the sick-bed explains in a measure some of the things that are strange in daily life, and the man who does not know sick women does not know women.

- S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient³

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Conforming Female Nonconformity to Categories?

Given the assumptions made over many years, over a century now, if not longer, too many assume that girls wishing to live as boys do must be homosexual. Such a mistaken view has most recently taken its form in the notion that most girls diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” must be lesbian. Those considered as having “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (“ROGD”) become especially assumed this way. Statistically, because those who are homosexual—lesbians and gay men in the actual sense—constitute such a small demographic, it does not make sense to hold that the majority of these girls are homosexual. In fact, most would be heterosexual, like most girls suffering from anorexia nervosa, who have similarly expressed wishing to live as boys do to escape their femaleness. Beyond the statistical impossibility of having a homosexual majority among nonconforming females, if not the obvious impracticality, these assumptions have been interrogated before. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1949, gives some insight on these matters, from the very beginning of her chapter titled “The Lesbian.” She writes:

People are always ready to see the lesbian as wearing a felt hat, her hair short, and a necktie; her mannishness is seen as an abnormality indicating a hormonal imbalance. Nothing could be more erroneous than this confusion of the homosexual and the virago. There are many homosexual women among odalisques, courtesans, and the most deliberately ‘feminine’ women; by contrast, a great number of ‘masculine’ women are heterosexual. Sexologists and psychiatrists confirm what ordinary observation suggests: the immense majority of ‘cursed women’ are constituted exactly like other women. Their sexuality is not determined by anatomical ‘destiny.’ (emphasis added)⁴

Beauvoir draws an interesting distinction here: the homosexual, or the lesbian, versus the virago. Often a more literary slur to designate so-called “masculine” women, the rebellious female, virago derives from the Latin virāgō—a woman having man-like qualities. By “masculine,” one may presume the positive, mistakenly, but the word holds a derogatory meaning, as the so-called “mannish” woman seems marked as undesirable, lacking in the “womanly” or “feminine” qualities expected of her, as defined by her relation to man. In Latin, vir refers to the male—virility or virtue. The Oxford English Dictionary includes “heroic woman” and “female warrior” in the old definition, but, over the word’s ongoing usage, these meanings have become null, if not sarcastic.

Absent its sarcastic cut, the only positive meaning to the word applied to woman comes from its relation to man, assumed to be the default for the heroes and the warriors. Now, some of the word’s more well-known synonyms include battleaxe, bitch, fury, gorgon, hag, harpy, hellcat, nag, she-devil, shrew, spitfire, and witch—so much for any positive meaning. The negative, too, referring to woman exhibiting “unwomanly” qualities, namely her not being submissive enough, appears defined by relation to man’s invention of woman superimposed upon the female human being. Perhaps the virago could be the “virile,” masculinized female, including the woman on synthetic testosterone, this “viriloid,” who may be heterosexual, if not bisexual—but not homosexual. Rightly, however, Beauvoir notes that “the lesbian,” popularly and erroneously construed, exhibits so-called “mannishness”—even “a hormonal imbalance.”

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Masculine-Feminine Categories Taken for Granted in Psychoanalysis

Referencing psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, Beauvoir notes that Deutsch encountered “a wounded Polish legionnaire she treated during World War I who was, in fact, a young girl with marked viriloid characteristics.” First a nurse to soldiers, the woman came to wear the soldier’s uniform herself. Despite the woman presenting masculine secondary sexual characteristics, she was sexually attracted to men. Even without the page number provided in The Second Sex, I referred to volume one of Deutsch’s Psychology of Women and found the case. Here is the passage from Deutsch that Beauvoir paraphrases:

This 18-year-old girl had pronounced masculine secondary sex characteristics (a mustache, no breasts, etc.) and, like the girl mentioned above, she felt inferior as a woman, emphasized her masculinity, and had many fantasies about heroic deeds that would make her famous and compensate her for her lack of feminine charm. She had joined the army as a nurse; later by dint of clever stratagems, she succeeded in denying her sex and becoming a soldier. Apparently, once she had gratified her masculinity, her feminine nature asserted its right more strongly than before, for she fell in love with another soldier. Her comrades decided that she was homosexual, for she—‘he’ at that time—could not conceal her erotic feelings. Her heterosexual relationship, which I observed in its subsequent development, had a favorable outcome.⁵

Deutsch takes for granted “feminine” and “masculine,” a move evident throughout her Psychology of Women. While further discussion could be made of Deutsch’s analysis, what I wish to underscore is the heterosexuality of the girl, despite her being “viriloid.” As Beauvoir explains, “Man himself does not exclusively desire woman; the fact that the male homosexual body can be perfectly virile implies that a woman’s virility does not necessarily destine her to homosexuality.” She writes that, interestingly, this masculinized female came “to be regarded as a male homosexual,” as seen in Deutsch’s recollection, despite the woman truly being a heterosexual female. Even before the coining of “gender identity,” then, we see the derealization of sex through stereotyping.⁶

In discussing mental health professionals’ views of lesbians, Beauvoir references psychoanalysts Ernest Jones and Angélo Louis Marie Hesnard for critique. These two men, as Beauvoir writes, classified lesbians into two categories: “masculine lesbians” trying to “act like men” and “feminine lesbians” in fear of men—with great similarity to Deutsch’s notion of female homosexuality. The “masculine protest” of “masculine lesbians” has an evident connection to what Freud termed “penis envy”: the woman’s misunderstood “imitation” of man—also known as her “masculinity complex”—foregrounding the analysis in woman’s desire for woman. For so-called “feminine lesbians,” the fear of men typically has to do with child sexual abuse by a man or a persistent fear of the penetrating male organ: the penis. So, these psychoanalytic theories say, there can be a fixation on the mother, for whom the female seeks others like her, locked in “the clitoral stage” instead of “the vaginal stage” of female sexual development: condemning her to sexual immaturity, stuck in homosexuality.

A similar line of theorizing has been messily applied to male homosexuality: If not child sexual abuse by a man, then mistaken identification with the mother from boyhood, with a fixation on the father. Psychoanalysts’ stereotyping of female homosexuality has been what many think of when they hear of “butch” and “femme” among lesbians. However, in prioritizing how the female must be defined by relation to the male, the psychoanalytic theories miss the existence of a reciprocity within female homosexuality between women. While framed in terms of scientific objectivity, the invented distinctions falsely see homosexuality through heterosexuality, ironically missing true particular distinctions in the invention of peculiar and false distinctions. “For numerous reasons, as we shall see,” Beauvoir writes, “the distinctions given seem quite arbitrary.” Still, the above psychoanalytic theorizing has survived, more or less reproduced in therapeutic approaches today.⁷

Of course, as one may expect, Beauvoir does not accept the distinctions of “masculine lesbians” and “feminine lesbians,” as theorized by Jones and Hesnard. Rather, she posits a critique of the masculine-feminine categories, those mapped onto lesbian relationships, being taken for granted in the prevailing biological and psychological theories. Beauvoir writes:

To define the lesbian as ‘virile’ because of her desire to ‘imitate man’ is to doom her to inauthenticity. I have already said how psychoanalysts create ambiguities by accepting masculine-feminine categories as currently defined by society. Thus, man today represents the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male. Her sports, her political and intellectual activities, and her desire for other women are interpreted as ‘masculine protest’; there is a refusal to take into account the values toward which she is transcending, which inevitably leads to the belief that she is making the inauthentic choice of a subjective attitude. The great misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to hold that is natural for the human female to make a feminine woman of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to realize this ideal; the ‘real woman’ is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past; these supposed ‘instincts’ of coquetry or docility are inculcated in her just as phallic pride is for man; he does not always accept his virile vocation; she has good reasons to accept even less docilely the vocation assigned to her. […] Woman feels undermined because in fact the restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility, it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation.⁸

There has been a readiness to see the female refusal of femininity as sickness, regardless of the woman’s sexual orientation. In protesting the mutilation of femininity, the woman transcends toward humanness. Ironically, femininity to its most artificial extremes, the embodiment of the disembodying inauthentic, has been framed as female authenticity. As long as masculine-feminine categories remain embedded in prevailing biological and psychological theories, unquestioned with regard to the social reality, such theories misrepresent subjectivity as objectivity. Perhaps the analyst should ask why the woman desires so-called “masculinity”—or “virility”—in the first place. Social facts would suggest reasons left unexplored in the fixation upon the individual psyche. So much blame gets cast upon the individual that we miss society in the process. The woman’s “masculine protest” begins to appear more like humanity in bondage than just a change in role. One cannot perform oneself free of the shackles; the chains themselves must be destroyed. A girl wishing to be seen as human would seem quite easily misconstrued as her wishing to be a boy.

Theories regarding lesbians as “virile,” desiring to “imitate” men, rely on the presumption that the human female must be feminine. Not being feminine becomes not being female, as not being masculine becomes not being male. It seems worth noting that Beauvoir pairs the “real woman,” man’s invention of woman, with eunuchs—a deliberate analogy to underscore artifice triumphing over authenticity. Man’s invention of woman is the subject of the third section of The Second Sex: “Myths.” Beauvoir writes:

Woman is the supreme reward for him since she is his own apotheosis, a foreign form he can possess in the flesh. It is this ‘incomparable monster,’ himself, that he embraces when he holds in his arms this being who sums up the World and onto whom he has imposed his values and his laws. Uniting himself, then, with this other whom he makes his own, he hopes to reach himself. Treasure, prey, game, and risk, muse, guide, judge, mediator, mirror, the woman is the Other in which the subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary to man’s joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have had to invent her. They did invent her. But she also exists without their invention.⁹

A borrowing from Latin, apotheosis refers to deification, a divine climax, used here intertwining the sexual and the religious. Man builds his own deification on woman that she may be the avatar of his desire: both the virgin and the whore, both under his occupation. A more philosophical analysis of sexual relations explains more deeply why men achieve orgasm, climax, from dressing as “women”—an expression of male sexual narcissism. Man attempts to assimilate woman into himself through his desire—now going as far as believing it to be literally possible to unite himself with her in his flesh as hers.

But this idea that men can be women by accepting mutilation reifies men’s invention of women, asserting, in opposition to Beauvoir, that womankind does not exist without men’s invention. Identification as the Other becomes annexation of the Other. Men annexing womanhood as their identity embrace the very inauthenticity that Beauvoir critiques as their authenticity. Of course, no reciprocity exists in such annexation, even as many women collaborate against womankind and men claim to annex womanhood in women’s interests. Not only in her defense of lesbians but also elsewhere in The Second Sex we find the necessary context for Beauvoir’s widely misrepresented line “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”¹⁰

“My Life Was a Sham”

With Beauvoir’s defense of lesbians, we find her including useful cases recorded by physicians, one of them being sexologist Havelock Ellis. Here is a narrative that Beauvoir excerpts among the ones that Ellis collected:

Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself that, whatever anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was not a girl . . . I regarded the conformation of my body as a mysterious accident . . . When I could only crawl my absorbing interest was hammers and carpet-nails. Before I could walk I begged to be put on horses’ backs . . . By the time I was 7 it seemed to me that everything I liked was called wrong for a girl . . . I was not at all a happy little child and often cried and was made irritable; I was so confused by the talk about boys and girls . . . Every half-holiday I went out with the boys from my brothers’ school . . . When I was about 11 my parents got more mortified at my behavior and perpetually threatened me with a boarding-school . . . My going was finally announced to me as a punishment to me for being what I was . . . In whatever direction my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from the point of view of a boy . . . A consideration of social matters led me to feel very sorry for women, whom I regarded as made by a deliberate process of manufacture into the fools I thought they were, and by the same process that I myself was being made one. I felt more and more that men were to be envied and women pitied. I lay stress on this for it started in me a deliberate interest in women as women, I began to feel protective and kindly toward women.¹¹

Not much has changed in social conditions being misunderstood as individual problems, but the late nineteenth century lacked today’s “gender medicine.” Most peculiarly, what has changed has been that this lesbian today would be diagnosed with “gender dysphoria.” This lesbian felt alienated from her femaleness by the restrictive conventions of femininity. There is significance to this woman’s story of girlhood in that it reveals how the lesbian had a self-perception of not being a girl. Her interests were carpentry work and horseback riding—with everything she liked, including her desires for her own sex, being deemed wrong. When the lesbian says that she saw women as being “made by a deliberate process of manufacture,” her insight underscores Beauvoir’s analysis of men’s invention of women.

Though Beauvoir does not give the case history number or name in Ellis’s work, I found the original narrative in volume two of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex: History XXXIX—Ms. D.¹² From reading it, we can confirm the narrative referenced above in The Second Sex, with interesting additions omitted in Beauvoir’s excerpting. Here are a few other selections in reading the original recorded by Ellis:

The things that really affected the question were my own likes and dislikes, and the fact that I was not allowed to follow them. I was to like the things which belonged to me as a girl,—frocks and toys and games which I did not like at all. I fancy I was more strongly ‘boyish’ than the ordinary little boy. (p. 235)

Curiously enough, I thought that the ultimate explanation might be that there were men’s minds in women’s bodies, but I was more concerned in finding a way of life than in asking riddles without answers. (p. 241)

As regards my physical sexual feelings, which were well established during these few years, I don’t think I often indulged in any erotic imaginations worth estimating, but so far as I did at all, I always imagined myself as a man loving a woman. (pp. 242-243)

If it had been desired to make me a thoroughly perverted being I can imagine no better way than the attempt to mould me by force into a particular pattern of girl. Looking at my instincts in my first childhood and my mental confusion over myself, I do not believe the most sympathetic and scientific treatment would have turned me into an average girl, but I see no reason why proper physical conditions should not have induced a better physical development and that in its turn have led to tastes more approximate to those of the normal woman. That I do not even now desire to be a normal woman is not to the point. (p. 243)

I know that psychically I have always been more interested in women than in men, but have not considered them the best companions or confidants. I feel protective towards them, never feel jealous of them, and hate having differences with them. And I feel always that I am not one of them. (p. 244)

From girlhood to womanhood, this woman persisted in a sexual attraction to women, though she befriended men. The additional selections from her narrative indicate her degree of “mental confusion,” as she terms it. Among the most insightful cases recorded by Ellis, Ms. D. exposes the artifice imposed upon women as their authenticity. “My life was a sham; I was an actor never off the boards,” she explains. “I had to play at being a something I was not from morning till night” (p. 243). There seems to be far more worth analyzing in how the restrictions of femininity, as we have seen, cause a state of dissatisfaction—or dysphoria—for women and girls.

“Am I a Biological Mistake?”

Assumptions remaining virtually unchanged, it should be no wonder, then, why girls who want to live as boys do find themselves branded as “trans boys.” While certainly there are young lesbians subjected to social and medical transition, it would be a mistake to presume them as the majority. On the female child defying the femininity imposed on her, Beauvoir writes:

This revolt by no means implies a sapphic predestination; most little girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and aspirations . . . [T]he future woman naturally feels indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her. The question is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them. Her conformism comes from her docility and timidity; but this resignation will easily turn to revolt if society’s compensations are judged inadequate. This is what will happen in cases where the adolescent girl feels unattractive as a woman: anatomical configurations become particularly important when this happens; if she is, or believes she is, ugly or has a bad figure, woman rejects a feminine destiny for which she feels ill adapted; but it would be wrong to say that she acquires a mannish attitude to compensate for a lack of femininity: rather, the opportunities offered to the adolescent girl in exchange for the masculine advantages she is asked to sacrifice seem too meager to her. All little girls envy boys’ practical clothes; it is their reflection in the mirror and the promises of things to come that make their furbelows little by little all the more precious; if the mirror harshly reflects an ordinary face, if it offers no promise, then lace and ribbons are an embarrassing, even ridiculous, livery, and the ‘tomboy’ obstinately wishes to remain a boy.¹³

Once mostly designated as “tomboys,” now declared “trans boys,” we find girls rejecting femininity as impractical. But why has there been more of an effort to label the individual, one way or another, than to understand the social conditions? On “dressing like a woman,” Beauvoir observes, “Nothing is less natural than dressing like a woman; no doubt masculine clothes are also artificial, but they are more comfortable and simple and made to favor action rather than impede it.”¹⁴ Like feminine clothes, impractical labeling has mystified social reality, toward the impediment of understanding what drives individual behavior. Interviewed by Peggy Orenstein for her 2016 book Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, queer theorist Jack Halberstam, also known as Judith, known for her 1998 Female Masculinity, explains:

The whole concept of ‘butch’ is now seen as a kind of waiting room in which you stay until you change your gender physically. We don’t have words for someone who has strong cross-gender identification but feels good about their bodies. Butch has become anachronistic, but trans implies transition, possibly hormones and surgery. Genderqueer is as good a holding term, but it’s clumsy, really.¹⁵

Butch, Halberstam claims, has grown old-fashioned, this artifact from a less-enlightened time; trans is fashionable—and so enlightened. An obvious yet frequently obscured difference happens to be the profit: A woman simply not being feminine, with no medicalization, generates no profit compared to the lifelong medical patient. We may consider what Halberstam wrote concluding “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity,” an essay featured in the 1994 collection titled The Lesbian Postmodern:

All gender should be transgender, all desire is transgendered, movement is all. The reinvention of lesbian sex, indeed of sex in general, is an ongoing project, and it coincides, as I have tried to show, with the formation of, or surfacing of, many other sexualities. The transgender community, for example, people in various stages of gender transition, have perhaps revealed the extent to which lesbians and gay men are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to identifying sexualities that defy heterosexual definition or the label straight. The breakdown of genders and sexualities into identities is in many ways, therefore, an endless project, and it is perhaps preferable therefore to acknowledge that gender is defined by its transitivity, that sexuality manifests as multiple sexualities, and that therefore we are all transsexuals. There are no transsexuals.¹⁶

Girls or young women reading the above passage would be confused, but they would likely attempt to map “gender transition” onto their lives for “an ongoing project.” But, of course, the female body is not an avatar in a video game to be edited—breasts lost in “top surgery” happen to be lost forever. For the female body, the drug-induced endocrine disorder euphemistically known as “transmasculine puberty” has effects that last beyond stopping excessive amounts of exogenous testosterone put into the body. In other words, girls cannot turn to women like Halberstam, those who collaborate in the mystification of women’s social and political conditions. In the notes to Halberstam’s essay, there is this worthwhile passage:

As I was writing this piece, I read in a copy of Seattle Gay News (January 1992) that a transsexual group in Seattle was meeting to discuss how to maintain the definition of transsexual operations as medical rather than cosmetic, because if they are termed ‘cosmetic,’ then insurance companies can refuse to pay for them. As always, discursive effects are altered by capitalist relations in ways that no are unforeseeable. I do not think we should give up on the cosmeticization of transsexualism in order to appease insurance companies. Rather, we should argue that cosmetics are never separate from ‘health,’ and insurance companies should not be the ones making such distinctions, anyway.¹⁷

But cosmetics are separate from health, first, due to their unnecessary nature and, second, their possible negative impact on actual health—as obvious examples, Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) for women and inflated muscles injected with Synthol for men.¹⁸ Contrary to Halberstam’s ill-thought advice, a sound and ethical distinction between the necessary and the unnecessary in terms of medical intervention matters for patient health outcomes. Paradoxically, one can perform “nuance” to the point of losing all nuance—and medicine is no place for the performative. It seems evident that being “trans” has been falsely sold as something “transcendent,” despite transcending nothing, certainly not the stereotypes being medically inscribed. “Gender medicine” demonstrates what S. Weir Mitchell referred to as “[t]he moral world of the sick-bed” applied to human sexual relations.¹⁹

The designation of “butch,” even when the female is not homosexual, has become, as Halberstam puts it, that “waiting room” before hormones and surgery. While girls as so-called “tomboys” have generally been more accepted than boys as so-called “sissies,” with some exceptions, there has nevertheless been a maneuvering to do away with the nonconforming girl aging into womanhood. If womanhood can be stripped from her body, as much as possible, then it appears considered her destiny. The girl who feels discomfort with her breasts or her menstruation can opt for a medical-technical solution through hormones and surgery. Anatomy is not destiny, so we may say, yet these medical interventions allow no true escape from the very anatomy being altered.

Why even use the language of “strong cross-gender identification,” as Halberstam does, if we are to subvert this same binary left unquestioned? Perhaps the idea that “all desire is transgendered,” as Halberstam phrases it, means capitulation. It was never about resistance to change women’s status but about translation submission into the language of subversion. Though she does not question Halberstam characterizing “butch” as being “anachronistic,” Orenstein recognizes the mutilating character of modern femininity. “When we’ve defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way,” Orenstein asks, “where is the space, the vision, the celebration if other ways to be a girl?”²⁰ There is no clear answer given, obviously, because there has seemed to be no sparing girls from one mutilation or another—corset to binder to surgery. While Orenstein comes very close to a critique of how “gender transition” can be seductive to girls, she never arrives. Nevertheless, there is value in the narrative that Orenstein includes from Amber McNeill—not the girl’s actual name. Here is her personal account, a contemporary narrative set alongside the others being excerpted:

I looked heavily into it. I could tell you everything under the sun about being transgender. I’d go through these lists l’d find online. They would ask questions like, ‘Do you cry when you think about having a vagina?’ And I’d think, ‘No, not really.’ Maybe if somebody told me I could choose one sex or the other I would have picked the other, but I don’t feel upset about it. I had all these conflicting feelings. Like, I don’t really care about my boobs. That’s weird, right? So then I dealt with ‘Am I a biological mistake?’ I mean, say your name is Cheryl, and you’re becoming Sean. You have to not want to be Cheryl anymore and never talk about Cheryl again. Well, I love being Amber. I could never in a million years imagine not being Amber. I am Amber. And I don’t know if I fit being a lesbian perfectly, but I’m definitely not a transgender person. I can live my life in this body, confident and happy, and in a healthy relationship. And it took me a year, an entire year, to be able to sit here and tell you that.²¹

A girl asking whether she can be “a biological mistake” makes clear how easily biology can be scapegoated, most likely even more so for the young rather than for the old. For girls, from Ms. D. in the past to Amber in the present, there is the ancient mystification of their female bodies to overcome—especially when their bodies have been disembodied from their experiences. Existing biological and psychological theories have been lacking in rigorous attention to social factors—namely, the surrounding culture and its part in psychosexual development for both sexes. The girl who, unconsciously or consciously, internalizes becoming a “sublime hermaphrodite,” in the Flaubertian sense, would be among the young female patients at clinics today. Femaleness would appear to her as her ruination—with very little surprise why the girl has come to grasp her body as this burden. The girl’s sex becomes “a biological mistake” in “need” of a medical-technical “fix.” In reality, however, neither her mind nor her body is wrong—she needs to be reminded of her embodiment.

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1. George Sand, Indiana, 1832, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85.

2. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, c. 1854, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, ed. Francis Steegmuller (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2023), 293.

3. S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 1887, 5th ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1909), 10.

4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 417.

5. Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, vol. 1, 1944 (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 334.

6. Beauvoir, 418.

7. Beauvoir, 420.

8. Beauvoir, 420-421.

9. Beauvoir, 203.

10. Beauvoir, 283.

11. Ms. D., quoted in Havelock Ellis, quoted in Beauvoir, 421-422.

12. Ms. D., quoted in Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2, 1900, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, 1927), 235-244.

13. Beauvoir, 422.

14. Beauvoir, 434.

15. Jack Halberstam, quoted in Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 165.

16. Judith Halberstam, “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 226.

17. Halberstam, 227.

18. See Zoe Applegate and Helen Burchell, “Brazilian Butt-Lift Surgery: What Are the Risks and Why Is It So Popular?” BBC News, September 16, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-66798236.amp; Hannah Sparks, “This Once-Scrawny Bodybuilder Is Injecting Dangerous Oil into Muscles,” New York Post, December 3, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/12/03/this-once-scrawny-bodybuilder-is-injecting-dangerous-oil-into-muscles; and Brooke Steinberg, “‘Brazilian Hulk’ Bodybuilder Who Injected Oil into Muscles Dead at 55,” New York Post, August 2, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/08/02/brazilian-hulk-bodybuilder-who-injected-oil-dead-at-55.

19. For an insightful critique of Mitchell, see Suzanne Poirier, “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctor and Patients,” Women’s Studies 10, no. 1 (1983): 15-40, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1983.9978577.

20. Orenstein, 165.

21. Amber McNeill, quoted in Orenstein, 165-166.