A strange kind of loneliness creeps in when something breaks in the house and there’s no one else there to fix it.

This week, it was the washing machine, blocked, overflowing, relentless.

I stood there, wrench in hand, navigating the cold logic of appliance repair and the hot ache of doing it all alone. There was no one to delegate it to. Just me, in the quiet hum of responsibility.

But it wasn’t really about the machine.

It was about what the machine breaking stirred up in me: that deep, slow grief of holding everything together on your own. The longing, not just for someone to fix things, but for someone to say, “It’s okay. You don’t have to do this alone.”

The Cycle of Aloneness

Philosophers have long wrestled with the idea of being alone.

Heidegger spoke of being thrown into the world, dropped without explanation, expected to carve out meaning in a life that offers none by default. Sartre claimed we are condemned to be free because with freedom comes the full weight of responsibility for everything we do or don’t do.

But aren’t we wired for connection?

Simone de Beauvoir believed that while we are radically alone in an existential sense, we are also always in relation to others. We become ourselves through contact, through being seen, supported, and held. And yet, no matter how deep our love or connection, there is always a part of ourselves that no one else can fully reach. The private swirl of thoughts, sensations, memories, we are the only ones who ever fully live inside our own skin.

So when there’s no one to turn to, when roles once shared become yours alone, the world feels heavier.

The washing machine becomes more than a chore. It becomes a symbol of the quiet weight we carry. A mirror of what we’re missing.

Spinning in the Paradox

This is the paradox I live with daily. I’ve always valued my independence fiercely. I fix things. I make plans. I stand on my own two feet. And I am strong.

But still, sometimes, I ache to be looked after.

To be someone’s priority. Their soft place to land. My supporter, my champion, my personal carer. Not because I can’t do it, but because sometimes I’m tired of being the one who always can.

I want someone who chooses to carry part of this with me. Not out of obligation, but out of love.

Even when you’re not completely alone, even with people who care, there’s rarely anyone there right in that moment when the machine breaks, when the world spins off balance.

Most people are dealing with their own loads, their own tangled cycles of overwhelm, heartbreak, deadlines, and pain. No one’s really at anyone’s beck and call. Everyone’s just trying to keep things turning.

And that’s what makes the ache sharper.

Because it’s no one’s fault. But it still hurts.

The Inner Spin

There’s a whisper in these moments: I just want someone to make it okay.

It feels childish, indulgent even. I ask myself: Why do I want to be rescued?

But maybe that’s not the real question.

Maybe the real question is: Why do I feel ashamed of needing support?

The desire for rescue is often misunderstood. It’s not about helplessness, it’s about rest. It’s the longing to lay down the relentless burden of self-sufficiency, just for a little while. To be held, even if just in spirit.

And yet, in a world of fractured systems and performative strength, we rarely ask for help.

We don’t believe we can.

We fix the washing machine. We swallow the ache.

We spin on.

The Cycle Ends, But It Doesn’t Stay Still

Existential philosophy doesn’t offer comfort exactly, but it does offer clarity. No one is destined to come. But that doesn’t mean we are without value, or without meaning.

We are meaning-makers.

We are people who fix blocked washing machines while grieving the version of life where someone else might have said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”

Sometimes, fixing the machine is the act of love.

Sometimes, it’s resistance.

Sometimes, it’s just what gets done because no one else will do it.

That doesn’t make the longing wrong.

It makes it human.

And like the washing machine, we keep going.

Through rinse, through spin, through pause.

Until everything stops. The final whirr. The quiet.

A breath before the door clicks open.

A breath before the next load is added.

A new cycle begins. And we begin again.

Because you’re still here.

And that matters.

One of the most painful accusations a person can receive is:

“You can’t see things from other people’s perspectives.”

It is a curious accusation, because it is often made by people who are also, in that very moment, struggling to see yours.

The result is a psychological stalemate. Both people feel misunderstood. Both believe they are trying to explain. Both feel hurt by the other’s response. Both become increasingly convinced that if only the other person could really see the situation clearly, everything would change.

But sometimes the problem is not that one person cannot see the other’s perspective. Sometimes the problem is that both people are seeing something real, but not the same thing.

And in the gap between those realities, whole relationships can collapse.

I have been reflecting recently on whether we often confuse understanding with agreement. To understand another person’s perspective does not mean I have to adopt it.

I can understand why someone feels hurt without agreeing that I intentionally harmed them. I can understand why someone feels frightened without accepting that I am dangerous. I can understand why someone reached a particular conclusion without believing that conclusion is fair, accurate, or complete.

I can understand the emotional logic of someone’s story and still disagree with the story itself.

Yet, in conflict, those distinctions often dissolve.

“You don’t understand my perspective” can start to mean:

“If you understood me properly, you would agree with me.”

But that is not necessarily true.

Some of the deepest conflicts occur not because people fail to understand each other, but because they understand each other well enough to know that they profoundly disagree.

That is where things become difficult. Disagreement, particularly in close relationships, can feel like rejection. It can feel like betrayal. It can feel like the other person is refusing to know us.

But sometimes they do know us. They simply do not interpret the situation in the same way.

This is where Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem offers a useful lens. Originally developed in relation to autism, it challenged the idea that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are caused simply by autistic people lacking empathy. Milton argued that misunderstanding is often mutual and relational: people with different experiences, embodied realities, communication styles, assumptions, and social worlds may struggle to understand one another across that gap.

In other words, the difficulty is not located inside one person as a deficit. It happens between people.

Although the Double Empathy Problem remains especially important in relation to autism, I think it also has something to teach us about human rupture more broadly.

Because in many conflicts, both people may sincerely believe they are being clear.

One person may think:

“I am giving context.”

The other experiences:

“You are justifying yourself.”

One person may think:

“I am being transparent.”

The other experiences:

“You are overwhelming me.”

One person may think:

“I am distressed and need reassurance.”

The other experiences:

“You are making me responsible for your distress.”

One person may think:

“I am trying to repair this.”

The other experiences:

“You are not respecting my boundary.”

The same behaviour becomes different data depending on the interpretive framework. This is where so many relationships begin to unravel. Not necessarily because either person is lying. Not necessarily because either person lacks empathy. But because each person is reading the other through a different emotional grammar.

The person who feels unheard may explain more. They want context to be seen. They want the full story to be held. They want people to know that there were reasons, pressures, histories, complexities, intentions, constraints, and meanings.

So they write more.

They clarify.

They provide evidence.

They try to prevent misinterpretation by adding more detail.

The person who feels overwhelmed may withdraw. They feel pressured. They feel that every response creates another wave of explanation. They may worry that disagreement will lead to escalation. They may decide silence is safer.

So they step back.

They stop replying.

They become brief.

They protect themselves through distance.

Now the tragedy begins.

The person who explains experiences the silence as abandonment.

The person who withdraws experiences the explanation as pressure.

The explainer says: “Why won’t you talk to me?”

The withdrawer says: “Why won’t you let this breathe?”

Both may be telling the truth of their experience. Neither may be accurately understanding the other’s intention.

The Power Threat Meaning Framework helps deepen this further. Rather than asking, “What is wrong with you?” it asks:

What happened to you?

How did power operate?

What threats did that create?

What meaning did you make of it?

What did you have to do to survive?

This matters because conflict is rarely just about the present moment. We bring histories into rooms.

A person who has spent much of life being dismissed may experience disagreement as erasure. A person who has spent much of life managing volatile dynamics may experience intensity as danger. A person who has carried too much responsibility may experience challenge as further burden. A person who has felt abandoned may experience boundaries as rejection.

None of this means all interpretations are equally accurate. It means all interpretations have a history.

PTMF helps us ask a more generous and more precise question:

“What threat might this response be protecting against?”

The long email may be protecting against being misunderstood.

The silence may be protecting against emotional overwhelm.

The insistence on formal agreements may be protecting against vulnerability and ambiguity.

The push for quick resolution may be protecting against uncertainty and fear.

The withdrawal from a role may be protecting against collapse.

The anger may be protecting grief.

And the grief may be protecting love.

René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire adds yet another layer. Girard argued that we do not always desire directly. We often learn what to want by watching what others value. Desire is triangular, not linear. We want objects, roles, status, relationships, recognition, or achievements partly because others make them meaningful.

This is uncomfortable because most of us prefer to believe our desires are pure, original, self-authored little swans gliding across the lake of personal sovereignty. Girard, inconveniently, points out the invisible committee of other people swimming beneath the surface.

A role may not simply be a role.

A leadership title may not simply be a job.

A company may not simply be a company.

It may become a symbol of recognition, legitimacy, belonging, proof, safety, importance, or finally being listened to.

The object begins to glow because of what it promises.

“Maybe if I become successful enough, people will listen.”

“Maybe if I build something credible enough, I will be taken seriously.”

“Maybe if I become the leader, I will finally feel safe.”

This is not vanity in any simple sense. It is often a wound seeking architecture.

But the problem is that the object can become a trap. The title that promised freedom may demand obedience. The role that promised authority may require self-erasure. The organisation that promised belonging may become another site of performance.

The professional identity that promised credibility may require the exile of the wild, inconvenient, angry, irreverent, truth-telling parts of the self.

“Congratulations,” says the status object, “you are now important. Please become less alive immediately.”

There is the irony, wrapped in a tasteful leadership-development ribbon.

There is a particular kind of pain in realising that a role you wanted has begun to suffocate you. You may have wanted influence, but not the performance of respectability. You may have wanted to be taken seriously, but not to become palatable. You may have wanted to build something meaningful, but not to become trapped inside the machinery required to maintain it.

One part says:

Be calm.

Be strategic.

Be professional.

Be responsible.

Be credible.

Do not frighten the horses.

Another part says:

Tell the truth.

Break the script.

Refuse the costume.

Stop translating yourself into managerial beige.

That second part may look disruptive from the outside. It may look angry. It may even look unreasonable. But sometimes it is the part of us still fighting for aliveness.

Not all rebellion is destruction. Sometimes rebellion is the psyche’s refusal to be absorbed into a role that has become too small for the self.

Girard also wrote about scapegoating. When tension builds in a group, the group may unconsciously locate the problem in one person. That person becomes the container for the conflict the group cannot metabolise.

It is psychologically efficient.

Instead of asking:

“What tensions are present in the system?”

the group asks:

“What is wrong with this person?”

Instead of asking:

“How have we all contributed to this rupture?”

the group says:

“If only this person would change, everything would be fine.”

This can happen in families, workplaces, activist spaces, friendship groups, coaching communities, academic departments, and small organisations with big dreams and inadequate governance. Which is to say: everywhere human beings gather and pretend they are above projection.

Of course, sometimes one person has genuinely behaved badly. Sometimes repair requires accountability. The danger is when accountability becomes containment: when a person is made to carry the entire weight of a relational or systemic breakdown.

Perhaps seeing another perspective does not mean agreeing.

Perhaps it means being able to say:

“I can understand how you experienced me that way.”

“I can see why that hurt.”

“I can see how my behaviour landed, even if that was not my intention.”

And also:

“I do not accept every interpretation you have made about me.”

“I do not agree with the whole story.”

“I am allowed to hold my own meaning.”

“I can be accountable without absorbing everything.”

That last sentence matters.

There is a difference between accountability and self-abandonment.

Accountability says:

“I am willing to look at my part.”

Self-abandonment says:

“I will accept your entire version of me so I can remain attached to you.”

Many of us confuse the two. Especially when the relationship matters. Especially when the loss feels unbearable. Especially when the accusation touches an old wound.

There is a particular grief in being misunderstood by people whose understanding mattered.

It is not the same as being criticised by a stranger.

A stranger can misunderstand you and you can usually survive it with a cup of tea and a moderately theatrical eye-roll.

But when someone close to you misunderstands you, or seems to collapse your complexity into a conclusion, something deeper breaks.

Because the hidden hope in love is:

“You will see me whole.”

Not perfect.

Not innocent.

Not always right.

Whole.

The light and the shadow. The generosity and the sharp edges. The tenderness and the rage. The integrity and the mistakes. The deep care and the defensive strategies that sometimes arrive wearing hobnail boots.

To be loved only when we are easy is not the same as being known.

And yet, there is an equally difficult truth: other people are allowed to decide what they can remain close to. They are allowed their limits. They are allowed to step back. They are allowed to say, “I cannot be in this dynamic anymore.”

That does not mean their whole interpretation is correct. It means the relationship, as it was, can no longer hold what has emerged.

This is where grief enters.

Because sometimes the loss is not only the person. It is the version of ourselves we were with them. The shared mythology. The assumed loyalty. The imagined future. The belief that love would be enough to carry complexity.

Sometimes it is not.

Maybe the most honest thing we can say in those moments is not:

“You don’t understand.”

But:

“I think we are making different meanings from the same events.”

Maybe the most mature form of perspective-taking is not:

“I now agree with you.”

But:

“I can see why this is your truth, and I need to remain faithful to mine.”

That is not easy.

It is much easier to reduce someone to a villain, a victim, a narcissist, a bully, a coward, an avoidant, an overreactor, a controller, a martyr, a drama queen, a problem.

But people are rarely just one thing.

And perhaps the work, if there is any work left to do, is not to persuade everyone to see us as we see ourselves.

It is to become spacious enough to know that we will be misunderstood and still remain intact.

To take responsibility without taking the whole blame.

To listen without disappearing.

To grieve without chasing.

To release the throne.

To stop mistaking agreement for love.

And to say, with as much compassion and clarity as we can manage:

I see your perspective.

I understand why you might feel that way.

I am willing to reflect on my part.

And still, I see it differently.

References

Boyle, M., & Johnstone, L. (2020). A straight talking introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework: An alternative to psychiatric diagnosis. PCCS Books.

Cheang, R., Skjevling, M., & Blakemore, A. I. F. (2024). Do you feel me? Autism, empathic accuracy and the double empathy problem. Autism, 29(9), 2315–2327.

DeThorne, L. S. (2020). Revealing the double empathy problem. The ASHA Leader, 25(3), 58–65.

Girard, R. (1965). Deceit, desire, and the novel: Self and other in literary structure (Y. Freccero, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

This article explores the psychological mechanisms underlying deception, the social conditions that allow it to flourish, and the ethical implications for individuals and societies when truth itself becomes contested.

The Paradox of Human Honesty

Research consistently shows that people vary widely in their tolerance for dishonesty. Behavioural economist Uri Gneezy demonstrated that some individuals experience lying as psychologically costly, while others are willing to deceive when incentives outweigh moral discomfort (Gneezy, 2005). Subsequent work has confirmed that honesty is not binary but exists along a spectrum shaped by perceived consequences, social expectations, and identity concerns (Rogers et al., 2017).

Crucially, deception is cognitively demanding. Experimental studies show that lying typically requires individuals to first access the truth and then inhibit it while constructing an alternative response, producing measurable cognitive load and response delay (Bird et al., 2019; Knapp et al., 1974; Neuschatz & Golding, 2022). This cognitive conflict supports the idea that dishonesty is rarely effortless, even among experienced liars.

This internal tension helps explain why people engage in impression management when lying. Liars do not simply fabricate information; they actively attempt to appear honest, managing eye contact, emotional tone, coherence, and confidence (Ekman, 1997). Truth-tellers engage in similar behaviours, but with a crucial difference: liars know their story is false, generating psychological strain even when outward demeanour appears controlled.

Effective liars monitor the reactions of others and adapt their narratives to maintain credibility. Over time, repeated storytelling can lead to memory distortion, selective recall, and reduced emotional salience of the original lie (Bird et al., 2019).

Denial, Projection, and the Protection of Identity

Beyond strategic deception, lying is often supported by psychological processes that protect the self from threat. Here, identity regulation, cognitive dissonance, neutralisation techniques, and unethical amnesia become central (Bandura, 1999; Barber, 2019).

For some individuals, truth threatens a fragile self-concept. Lies function to stabilise identity by presenting the self as competent, innocent, victimised, or morally intact. Over time, narratives can become fused with identity, making retraction psychologically costly.

Cognitive dissonance arises when individuals hold conflicting beliefs, such as “I am an honest person” and “I am lying” (Festinger, 1957). Rather than stopping the lie, discomfort is often reduced by reframing deception as justified, necessary, or essentially true. Repetition dulls emotional salience, contributing to unethical amnesia, a reduced awareness of one’s own dishonesty, which makes deception easier to tolerate and repeat (Bandura, 1999).

Defence mechanisms play a key role. Denial avoids acknowledging uncomfortable facts; projection externalises blame by attributing dishonesty or malice to others; rationalisation reframes deception as unavoidable or harmless (Cohen, 2004). These mechanisms are common human responses to threat, but when paired with sustained deception they entrench false narratives and harden resistance to evidence. Protestations of innocence then serve less to persuade others than to preserve internal coherence.

Deception Does Not Operate in a Vacuum

Lying is profoundly shaped and reinforced by social context. Early environments characterised by punishment for honesty, inconsistent caregiving, or image-based validation can make deception an adaptive survival strategy. Later, social reinforcement, being believed, gaining sympathy, avoiding consequences, strengthens commitment to false narratives.

Public repetition is especially powerful. Once a lie is shared socially, the psychological cost of recanting increases; the narrative must now be defended relationally as well as internally.

Truth-default theory proposes that humans generally assume others are honest unless something triggers suspicion (Levine, 2014). This default enables social cooperation but also creates fertile ground for deception. Strong assertions of honesty (“I’m telling the truth,” “I have nothing to hide”) can paradoxically reduce scrutiny, particularly in emotionally charged or high-trust contexts.

At the societal level, deception becomes especially destabilising when shared norms around truth erode. Research on misinformation, political communication, deepfakes, and social media amplification demonstrates how emotional resonance increasingly outweighs factual accuracy (Momeni, 2024; Mulcahy et al., 2024). In these “post-truth” contexts, deception may be reframed as moral resistance rather than dishonesty, undermining trust, legitimacy, and shared reality.

Long-Term Deception: Do People Believe Their Own Lies?

When deception persists for months or years, a critical question arises: do liars eventually believe their own lies?

The evidence suggests a nuanced answer. Individuals often retain implicit awareness that their story began as a lie, yet repeated rehearsal, selective memory, and social validation can blur the boundary between fabrication and belief (Barber, 2019; Laczkó, 2023). Philosophical and psychological accounts of self-deception show how people can suppress unwanted truths while endorsing preferred narratives without conscious delusion (Noonan, 1989).

Social reinforcement plays a powerful role. Lies rewarded with validation, sympathy, status, or avoidance of consequences become increasingly difficult to abandon. Notably, frequent liars tend to overestimate their ability to deceive and to detect deception in others, despite objective detection accuracy remaining low (Markowitz, 2024; Veer et al., 2014).

What About Persistent Liars?

Persistent lying is often viewed through a moral lens, yet clinical evidence suggests it is better understood as a behavioural pattern arising from interacting psychological, developmental, and contextual factors.

There is no single psychiatric diagnosis for persistent lying. A commonly referenced construct is pseudologia fantastica (pathological lying), first described by Delbrück (1891) and later discussed by Jaspers (1963). It involves recurrent, long-standing deception, often elaborate or self-enhancing, occurring without clear external gain. Here, lying serves to regulate internal tension and stabilise identity. Individuals may oscillate between awareness of fabrication and subjective belief, particularly when narratives are repeated and socially reinforced.

Neurobiological and neurodevelopmental factors can further shape how persistent lying presents. Differences in executive functioning, impulse control, inhibition, self-monitoring, emotional regulation, are relevant across neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD and autism, as well as acquired brain injuries (e.g. TBI or vascular events). These factors do not cause lying but may lower thresholds for impulsive responding, narrative distortion, or difficulty tolerating shame.

Persistent lying may also be embedded within personality structures, including Antisocial, Narcissistic, or Borderline patterns, where deception serves instrumental, ego-protective, or emotion-regulatory functions respectively (Riquelme et al., 2016).

This complexity creates ethical and practical tensions. Individuals may retain intelligence and verbal fluency while experiencing compromised insight or inhibition. Behaviour may appear malicious when capacity is partially impaired; yet recognising impairment does not negate harm. Ethical responses therefore require careful differentiation between intent, capacity, responsibility, and impact, particularly in legal, safeguarding, and relational contexts.

Personal and Collective Consequences of Deception

While deception may offer short-term psychological or social benefits, its long-term costs are significant. At an interpersonal level, sustained dishonesty corrodes trust, distorts relationships, and creates unstable social bonds dependent on performance rather than authenticity.

At a collective level, widespread deception undermines shared reality. When truth becomes negotiable, cooperation falters. Institutions struggle to function, and social cohesion weakens. In such environments, truth-telling can even become risky, while dishonesty is normalised or rewarded.

Research suggests that fostering honesty is not merely a moral aspiration but a structural necessity. Environments that reduce incentives to lie, encourage accountability, and acknowledge the cognitive and emotional costs of deception are more likely to support integrity.

Deception, Identity, and the Fragility of Truth

This article has argued that deception is rarely a simple matter of dishonesty or moral failure. Instead, lying exists along a continuum shaped by cognitive effort, identity protection, emotional regulation, social reinforcement, and contextual norms. People do not merely lie to mislead others; they often lie to preserve coherence within themselves. Protestations of truth and innocence, particularly when repeated and emphatic, are often less about persuasion than about maintaining psychological equilibrium in the face of threat.

Across individual, relational, and societal levels, deception is sustained through a dynamic interplay of cognitive dissonance, defence mechanisms, neutralisation techniques, and social validation. These processes allow individuals to minimise responsibility, reframe harm, and protect valued self-concepts even when confronted with contradictory evidence. Over time, repeated rehearsal and reinforcement can blur the boundary between fabrication and belief, giving rise to forms of motivated self-deception that feel subjectively authentic rather than deliberately false.

Importantly, persistent lying cannot be understood through intent alone. Neurobiological, neurodevelopmental, and personality-related factors can influence inhibition, insight, impulse control, and emotional regulation, shaping how deception emerges and is maintained. At the same time, acknowledging impairment or vulnerability does not negate the real harm caused by deception. Ethical responses therefore require a careful balance: neither collapsing behaviour into moral condemnation nor dissolving responsibility into determinism.

At a societal level, the erosion of shared assumptions about truth, amplified by misinformation and emotionally driven discourse, further destabilises trust and accountability. In such contexts, deception may be reframed as resistance, sincerity as naïveté, and evidence as ideology. Understanding the psychology of deception is therefore not merely an academic exercise but a social necessity. If truth is to be protected, it must be understood not only as a factual construct, but as a fragile human practice, one that depends on psychological safety, social trust, and systems capable of distinguishing error, impairment, strategy, and harm.

References

Barber, A. (2019). Lying, misleading, and dishonesty. The Journal of Ethics, 24(2), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09314-1

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.

Bird, L., Gretton, M., Cockerell, R., & Heathcote, A. (2019). The cognitive load of narrative lies. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(5), 936–942. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3567

Cohen, S. (2004). The lies we tell. Index on Censorship, 33(2), 42–47.

Ekman, P. (1997). Deception, lying, and demeanour. In The handbook of communication science (pp. 93–108).

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Gneezy, U. (2005). Deception: The role of consequences. American Economic Review, 95(1), 384–394.

Jaspers, K. (1963). General psychopathology. University of Chicago Press.

Knapp, M., Hart, R., & Dennis, H. (1974). An exploration of deception as a communication construct. Human Communication Research, 1(1), 15–29.

Laczkó, S. (2023). Hazugság, önámítás és lelkiismeret mint politikai fenomén.

Levine, T. R. (2014). Truth-default theory. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(4), 378–392.

Markowitz, D. (2024). Self- and other-perceived deception detection abilities.

Momeni, M. (2024). Artificial intelligence and political deepfakes. Journal of Creative Communications, 20(1), 41–56.

Mulcahy, R., Barnes, R., Scheepers, M., Kay, S., & List, E. (2024). Going viral: Sharing misinformation. Australasian Marketing Journal, 33(3), 296–309.

Neuschatz, J., & Golding, J. (2022). Detecting deception.

Noonan, H. (1989). Reflexive paradoxes. Philosophy, 64(250), 568–569.

Riquelme, I., Román, S., & Iacobucci, D. (2016). Consumer perceptions of deception. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 35(1), 16–26.

Rogers, T., Zeckhauser, R., Gino, F., Norton, M., & Schweitzer, M. (2017). Artful paltering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(3), 456–473.

Veer, A., Stel, M., van Beest, I., & Gallucci, M. (2014). Measuring unconscious deception detection. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.

The question sounds biological. It rarely is.

Bodies exist. Chromosomes exist. Hormones exist. Biology shapes aspects of human development. Yet the meaning societies attach to bodies, the roles, expectations, permissions, risks, protections and hierarchies associated with them, is not determined by biology alone. These meanings are socially organised through law, culture, religion, economics and power.

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that one is not born but becomes a woman (Beauvoir, 1949/2011). She was not denying biology. Rather, she was exposing the social process through which societies interpret bodies and assign them meaning. The category “woman” is therefore not simply a biological description; it is a social position produced through history, institutions and cultural expectations.

To become a woman is to enter a social category.

And social categories are never neutral.

For some of us, that becoming did not unfold gradually through age or socialisation. It arrived abruptly, through moments when our bodies were no longer treated as entirely our own. Moments when responsibility quietly shifted away from those who acted and towards those who endured. Moments when silence felt safer than speech.

I do not need to provide detail. The pattern is historical.

Across centuries, women’s bodies have been regulated legally, morally and socially. In the United Kingdom, marital rape was not recognised as a crime until the landmark legal ruling of R v R in 1991. For much of legal history, women’s testimony in sexual assault cases required corroboration, reflecting institutional scepticism toward women’s accounts of harm. Women’s distress was frequently medicalised under diagnoses such as hysteria, framing emotional suffering as pathology rather than as a response to social conditions (Showalter, 1987).

Even credibility has historically depended on respectability, an uneven standard shaped by race, class, disability and sexuality. Feminist scholars have long documented how some women have been believed more readily than others, while many have been excluded entirely from dominant narratives of womanhood (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 1981).

Sexual violence is therefore not an anomaly within the historical experience of womanhood. It has been structurally embedded in how societies have organised power around female bodies.

But this is not the whole story of being a woman.

Because the category itself is unstable.

Judith Butler later argued that gender is performative, produced through repeated social norms and practices rather than simply expressed from biology (Butler, 1990). Gender is not something one simply is; it is something societies continually enact and enforce. Through everyday interactions, expectations and institutions, people learn how to “do” gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Behaviours are rewarded when they align with dominant norms and corrected when they diverge.

In this sense, gender is less a fixed property of individuals and more an ongoing social process.

Transgender women illuminate this dynamic with particular clarity.

If womanhood were purely biological, it would not require constant policing. It would not provoke political panic, legislative battles or intense cultural debate. The anxiety surrounding transgender women reveals something deeper: that womanhood has always been socially organised, negotiated and defended.

Transgender women do not destabilise womanhood. They reveal its construction.

They show that identity is lived and embodied within social recognition, not reducible to reproductive anatomy alone. Their experiences expose how fiercely societies defend particular definitions when those definitions are tied to power.

History shows that the boundaries of womanhood have always shifted.

Racialised women were long marginalised within dominant feminist movements. Disabled women were frequently cast as asexual or incapable of autonomy. Working-class women were labelled immoral. Lesbian women were pathologised. Today, transgender women face political and legislative battles over belonging.

Each era redraws the boundary.

Each redraw reveals that the boundary was never fixed.

To ask “What is a woman?” is therefore not simply a question of biology or ontology. It is a question of authority.

Who decides?

Who is protected?

Whose harm is recognised?

Whose voice is believed?

Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that power operates not only through laws and institutions but through knowledge itself, through the categories societies construct to describe reality (Foucault, 1978). The categories through which we understand bodies shape whose experiences become visible and whose remain marginalised.

For many women, cisgender and transgender, the nervous system learns vigilance early. It learns that safety is negotiated rather than guaranteed. Bodies can become politicised, scrutinised, legislated, desired, dismissed or violated.

For neurodivergent women, this negotiation may be even more complex. Social expectations that are implicit for others may not be intuitive. Masking can become a survival strategy. Direct communication can be misread as defiance. Compliance can be exploited.

When sexual harm intersects with social marginalisation, silence is not simply personal. It becomes structurally reinforced.

Yet womanhood cannot be reduced to vulnerability.

Women have also been theorists, organisers, leaders and architects of social change. Across centuries they have challenged the very institutions that constrained them. Feminist movements have transformed law, labour rights, reproductive autonomy and cultural norms.

Transgender women have also been central participants in struggles for liberation, even while being excluded from parts of feminist discourse.

If gender is socially constructed, then it is also socially reconstructible.

Existential philosophy reminds us that identity is lived within conditions we did not choose. We are shaped by history, but we are not entirely determined by it. We inherit categories, but we also participate in reshaping them.

For me, being a woman now means holding tension.

It means recognising that harm has been patterned, not random.
It means understanding that definitions shift because power shifts.
It means acknowledging that womanhood has been both imposed and reclaimed.

It also means refusing narrowness.

Womanhood cannot be reduced to reproductive capacity.
It cannot be reduced to victimhood.
It cannot be reduced to stereotype or compliance.

It is a social location that continues to evolve.

The future of womanhood will not be secured by policing its boundaries more tightly. It will be secured by expanding dignity, autonomy and safety for all who live within it.

The question is not only what is a woman?

The deeper question is this:

What kind of world are we constructing when we answer?

Cara Langford Watts

References

Beauvoir, S. de. (2011). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1949)

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–167.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1 – An introduction. Pantheon.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press.

Showalter, E. (1987). The female malady: Women, madness and English culture 1830–1980. Virago.

West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243287001002002