Being a notmother, biologically, doesn't have that effect on me, but I've spoken with hundreds of women who find their sense of femininity, gender fulfillment, and womanhood blasted to bits by infertility or other reasons for remaining childless (yes, even the childfree by choice often go through this, too). Though it's probably politically incorrect to do so, I inwardly identify as "trans" and think that most people really don't fall conveniently onto one end or the other of the supposedly binary gender spectrum. So maybe it's just not that important to me, to feel like I'm "complete as a woman" as opposed to "complete as a person." ANYway, I got lucky on that one, but lots of women despair over this issue, over the connection between a gender identity they treasure and a reproductive role they can't or won't play in their lives.
Peggy Orenstein has an interesting take on this, vis a vis transgender and transsexual issues, and how cancer and surgery threatened her own sense of womanliness/femininity.
"The way I could best reduce my risk would be to surgically remove both of my breasts and my ovaries...associated in the most primal way with reproduction, sexuality, with my sense of myself as female...In the weeks that followed my diagnosis, during that heightened, crystalline time of fear and anxiety... I began to fret: without breasts or hormone-producing ovaries, what would the difference be, say, between myself and a pre-op female-to-male transsexual? Other than that my situation was involuntary? That seemed an awfully thin straw on which to base my entire sense of womanhood. What, precisely, made me a girl anyway? Who got to decide? How much did it matter?"—Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times
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