So this article is not to impinge in any way on the work of Rosalind Pagan, who wrote an article some time ago by roughly the same title. We are talking about different things here, but I think the Schrödinger's cat analogy applies to both concepts nonetheless.
I've been doing some thinking lately (when have I not?) about what it means to be a woman. That I identify as a woman is not in question; I have since the day I accepted myself and decided that I needed to live my truth. But what exactly was I thinking that I would become on that day, March 16th, 2026, when I lay in bed and cried and decided I would no longer hide it?
Certainly, I expected to gain a female body, to the extent that hormones and surgery would allow. By that time, I'd also figured out that I'd processed the world as a woman for all of my years despite wearing the cloak of a male body. I'd done some rigorous inventories of myself and figured out that many of my habits and thoughts aligned with women's, even if I'd never really considered it. That I was a woman "in my mind" was without a doubt the truth. So you would think it would be easy for me to simply jump into girl society and become a regular, right?
No.
I have learned to fear those women who would consider me not a woman: the TERFs, the transphobes, and everybody in between who is ready to throw down the gauntlet on what I am. Perhaps they cite often-rehashed bioessentialist talking points that have been argued into the ground as false for years. Maybe they would cite their own life experiences as women involving mistreatment at the hands of a society that is often misogynist. Perhaps they would cite "male socialization" and the privilege that trans women supposedly get as "men" (I personally missed out on a lot of it). On the other hand, there are women who are willing to accept me as a woman even in my imperfect state (bless you).
The problem is I don't know which of you is which. I mean, maybe I can guess part of the time, but if we were thrown together in the same room or space on the Internet, I wouldn't be able to know until you started to espouse your opinions, which means that I really do exist in some kind of superposition state where I am both a woman and not a woman at the same time, based upon the observer and the knowledge they have about me.
In my current state, I am obviously trans when I present as a woman, but at some point I won't be. This fact does not give me joy, but rather makes me deeply uncomfortable because I feel like I'm lying to those of you who would not consider me a woman if you knew I was trans, and I want you very much to be allowed to think what you will think regardless of my own internal state. It's only fair that you are aware that I lack a uterus so that you may judge my entire life according to your whims. If you feel like the absurdity of this is stunning — it's because it is.
You shouldn't care if I am trans or not; you should accept that, to some extent, I've experienced life just as all women have in certain ways, even if I was shielded in others, and that I've experienced things that you haven't by being trapped in the wrong body for decades. If you feel like I'm not the right person to share your experiences with, I totally understand. I've never experienced menstruation — and never will — so I am not the right person for that conversation. Likewise, I've never given birth and never will, and I will stay clear of those spaces. I grew up being sensitive like that, which is something common to trans women and not common to cis men at all.
Before I transitioned, I wrestled with this question a lot and decided that, while nobody could objectively define what a "woman" was, trans women and cis women overlapped the definition in a Venn diagram, whereby we shared most of the space in the middle. For example, pregnancy and menstruation were things that trans women didn't experience, and transition and transphobia were things that cis women didn't experience (and there are others, but not many). Thus, I became confident in simply calling myself a woman because the vast majority of what one might go through is shared.
As I live in fear of those who would not call me a woman, I declare that I am Schrödinger's woman. People may not agree on what I am, but I know what I am.