Gender Identification - My survey - some challenges and reflections

I launched my survey on Thursday and a brave woman, Julia, reached out to me to enlighten me about an issue that is so incredibly important that I want to share it here.

I had given three possible answers for gender -
Male
Female
Trans/Gender non-conforming.

She pointed out to me that in forcing people to choose one, I was giving the message that people like her, a trans woman, were not real women.  That was so desperately not my intention and I am SO grateful that she pointed this out to me.  I have since gone back in and allowed people to choose multiple identities and made a note to check as many as are relevant.  I wanted to share this with anyone else who is creating surveys so that they do not make the same mistake that I did.

I also want to share some personal information that I really don't talk about much.  The real reason that I did not want to structure the question into a dualism is because, in my own inner landscape, I am nonbinary.  In my own inner sense of self I feel kind of both and neither male and female,  In fact, the category of gender at all has just always felt really oppressive to me...like anytime I have to talk about it, I'm shoved into an ill-fitting shoe.  Since most people reading this are probably Pagan I will also say that I believe part of my situation is because I have spent my life walking around with so many past life memories that construct who I am and I have been both genders...probably male more than female.  So, I would say, for those of us who are creating surveys, please include something that is also for people like me.  I think that solution of allowing for multiple choices may be a good way.

However, the reasons that I don't talk about my own complicated inner landscape and the reason I, personally, continue to refer to myself as a priestess and have not gone to full non-binary pronouns are as follows:

1.  With my body type (I am extremely curvy and have hyper-exaggerated female secondary sex characteristics), the first thing anyone ever notices about me is my female body.  I have never been seen as anything but female and I never will be.  Every opportunity I have had or not had, every experience I have had has been filtered through how our society views and treats women.  My experiences have been inexorably shaped by patriarchy and misogyny and the fact that I don't "feel" like a woman (or a man or any gender) on the inside doesn't do a thing about that.  My experiences are female.

2.  We are in a political and cultural moment in which women's reproductive rights are under a type of threat that can realistically strip women of the right to own their own bodies.  Without reproductive rights, we are legally not fully human.  I get that.  I see it.  It doesn't matter if I don't feel female on the inside, my right to own my own body is at stake.  My agency is at risk.  My legal standing is at risk.  My legal rights are bound up in my female body.

3.  Violence against women is a serious epidemic and affects all women, our trans-sisters at a particularly high rate.  I've been subject to misogynistic violence as have most women I know.

4.  As I am getting older (about to be fifty), I am experiencing the way in which sexism intersects with ageism in powerful ways and am determined to fight back.  The main label I have loudly and proudly claimed for myself is that I am a young hag.

So, regardless of what my personal inner landscape feels like, I am in strong solidarity with all women and my main identity is as an inclusive feminist.  That identity I claim in full power, without question and without hesitation.

All my sisters, all my people, all y'all...I love you.