Woman vs Female

[Bonnie Chan]

Zooey... If you really seek to get people here, particularly male CDs here, to understand your point better about woman oppression that you feel, you first need to be respectful when talking to people. The way you say now, it's very distracting for people to read and get personal very easily. I must say I'm finding myself a hard time understanding you too because of how you say it. It's very hard for me to actually get any point you tried to bring out with your replies.
Also, a lot of time you replied here, you only say "you men don't understand woman", but you didn't elaborate more on "why" (and that's what I'm trying to dig out from you.) It's not very helpful at all.

Beyond that, I would say that your sample size is rather small. More importantly, it's heavily biased towards women in relationships with gender nonconforming men who want to make it work badly enough to attend support groups and other functions with them.

The same thing can say with you too. How many *real* women have you talked to regarding this issue? I emphasize on *real* to indicate GG only, not including trans woman. If you have already talked to other trans woman and got similar response to yours then okay, that's also a good knowledge to know too. But that won't apply to GG. No, you're still far different from GG woman out there that has lived all their life as a woman and they may have different opinions from you.

Because it implies that women who aren't all decked out the way CDers like to see women, somehow aren't as attractive? How many times have we seen in this forum, "I'm a lot more attractive or feminine than my wife".

Reine, I think being "attractive" and being "woman" are two different things. And I'd never say I'm more attractive woman than real woman, because I'm never a real woman. I can understand saying that would offend a lot of GGs. It's like saying "you're not beautiful", it's almost like an insult if one says it inappropriately. (The exception is that sometimes someone might want to get an honest opinion to improve themselves and they're ready for negative feedback then that's a good attitude.) But I'm not even sure how is that related to reducing woman to exterior thing?

I think the confusion is how you define "woman". I believe that for most people, you are a "woman" as long as you have a physical body of "woman", regardless of what your hobbies are, what you like, how you feel, what's your personality. The same goes with "man", you are a "man" as long as you have physical body of "man", even if you may not like sports, don't drink, have weak body, etc. Reine, as you mentioned earlier, woman and man have a lot of shared traits together and so our brains are not so much different, given if we have grown up in the same environment.
So, now, if I'm going with this logic, doesn't it mean we already define both "woman" and "man" according to the exterior thing, being physical body of each of us? Or am I mistaking the term "exterior thing"?

And now comes to the "I feel like a woman when I CD", at least for me, it'd be because when I look at myself in a mirror, I can resemble a woman, though not 100%. I can feel like a woman when having all shape wears (e.g. breast forms/butt pad/wigs) and wear my male cloth too sometimes, just for fun. But I must admit I do like to wear appropriate woman clothes more so that I can look like an attractive woman which feels better to myself.
So I'm not sure if my said behavior is reducing woman to exterior thing? It might be, but I'm still not convinced yet why it's a bad thing, and I need help from GGs to give some more example that I can relate to.

- Bonnie