The wildest thing about those “straight guys dressing femme just to get chicks” posts are……….. okay. S….so? Like, if women are out here absolutely horny off their rockers for femme guys (which, I mean, probably), like, okay, then do that. Put on a skirt if that’s the new m/f mating call of the decade. Why not? Girls who’re into men deserve a guy who looks hot in a skirt. How is this any different then when guys in unison decided to start wearing skinny jeans or showing off their butts more? Literally what is the harm even if straight guys are just doing it to appeal to women??? They’re allowed to try to appeal to women, that’s who they want to date….
Ok I’ve seen chucklefucks on both this and the other post mentioned and as a Freshly Minted Man here’s something else to add:
To everyone who says “but men trying to attract women is predetory” FUCK OFF with that gender essentialist bullshit! Men wanting to be attractive and desirable (even if its *gasp* hetero) isn’t inherently predetory! Men aren’t inherently predetory.
You realize by saying “men being femenin trick women into thinking they’re safe” is saying women = good, safe, soft, perfect and men = bad scary evil
And thats guess what! Sexist! Straight UP! Because women can be dangerous, predetory, whatever, and Men can want to be attractive and desirable and whatever.
Men aren’t your enemy- toxic gender roles and gender essentialism IS
Can we talk about how goofy it is to go “well I guess men can dress however they want, BUT ONLY if they’re not trying to be attractive or meet people, otherwise it’s SUPER PREDATORY.
The entire history of dude fashion which has def been about looking attractive and appealing to women, but that’s masc and expected so that’s all fine. But if you wear a skirt or dress it’s PREDATORY.”
Just like… Some people really need to examine their biases maybe.
Let’s just get to the root of the issue, people are saying this shit because their is a whole system of oppression based around the idea that “men dress like women to be predators!”
It ain’t suddenly woke because folks are saying it about straight men instead of trans women.
i hate i hate i hate i hate “drunk girls in the bar bathroom” mythology with a misery that would make you think i have personally experienced mistreatment in women’s restrooms, which i haven’t, but i just. hate watching new mythologies of mystical sisterhood form.
and it’s funny because all this angst for a missing “sometimes”, if you put in the “sometimes” i would be on board, i think part of the thing that’s driving me mad is that i am almost on board because there is a real thing that sometimes happens to the lucky ones and it actually is pretty beautiful! but “sometimes” isn’t allowed in mythologies of mystical sisterhood and so instead of a nice thing it’s a slammed door in the face of everyone who’s ever been uninvited from (much less mistreated by) the mystical sisterhood.
The majority of the people in the trans community (irrespective of assigned sex) are potential targets for the dual framing device of “you’re either an incompetent hysterical woman or a dangerous oppressive man, depending on what’s most politically convenient for me.”
its important to me as a detrans woman to be vocal about it. its important to me as a detrans woman who initially only had radfems to talk to about detransition, because i couldnt find a single trans inclusive detrans person for over a year, to make sure other people know they have options.
radfems arent your aly if you’re questioning your gender. they dont have your best interest at heart. they dont care about helping you explore who you are, theyre only interested in sucking you in to be another transmisogynistic pawn for their violent ideology.
if you’re trans/nonbinary now, but are wondering if it isnt right for you, know that you have options. you can talk to me. there are people who have not done a 180 into bigotry who are here to support you.
please reblog, do not just like, this post.
i dont have a large platform. i want this to get spread. i want to remove terfs from the forefront of detrans/reidentification awareness & support. they cannot continue to be the first contact for questioning people.
i am begging you, yes you personally, to please reblog this, and comment or reply in the tags if you’re a safe, trans-inclusive detransitioned or reidentified person to approach.
When I read thoughts and ideas about relationships written by people with very rigid ideas about gender, I’m perplexed at how they find dysfunctional beauty in a world-view that seems to me like it must be full of despair.
People with these essentialist ideas often believe, in the end, that to understand or be understood by a person of “opposite” gender is impossible. How they navigate relationships is so fascinatingly horrible.
Having a conversation with your spouse—in which you both attempt to be as charitable and honest toward the other as you can be—isn’t on the table in the first place.
Instead, you must look for secret cues in your spouse’s behavior based on generalizations about how “Men” or “Women” think and feel. You must approach them first and foremost as a Man or a Woman, with the assumption that true empathy or understanding are impossible, and that any common ground you share as Humans is secondary. You have to constantly dehumanize your spouse with inflexible labels that deny their individuality.
Resentment, bitterness, and arguing are not only inevitable, they are romanticized.They are evidence of some kind of endless, martyr-like Noble Struggle toward an incomprehensible Other that both cannot be coexisted with and must be.
They’re so befuddled by the fumes of Gender Essentialism that they can’t seem to think, “Maybe my spouse seems like an Incomprehensible Other because I haven’t even tried to FUCKING TALK TO THEM about how they are feeling.”
After reading some truly odd opinions about consent and rape culture in the library, I have decided that the concept of getting clear and enthusiastic consent is incomprehensible to some people because their relationship skills are so fucking dysfunctional.
Of course they think it’s bizarre to ask, in words, if their partner would like to have sex. They think it’s bizarre to ask in words about ANYTHING. “How do I know when you need alone time?” “How can I make you feel better when you’re sad?” “Do you want to vent or do you want my opinion on what you should do?” “Do you like getting gifts or would you rather do something else for your birthday?” are all equally incomprehensible questions.
You’re supposed to just Know—know what your partner needs when they’re sad or upset, know what kind of gesture would make their birthday special. And the libraries are full of books intended to help couples that are finding out that you do not, in fact, just Know these things, and who are too hung up on the supposed Inherent Differences between men and women to think of a solution.
The bad books try to be like a guidebook for “translating” the incomprehensible gobbledeygook that Woman Thoughts supposedly are to a Man Brain (and vice versa).
The good books patiently walk these couples through basic adult communication skills and a crash course in “your partner is a person, you can talk to them.”
I have to add. that even supposedly more “progressive” and feminist writings and things ALSO do this kind of essentialist thinking.
It’s more subtle, and often spun in a way that makes Woman Thoughts more valuable or superior, but it’s the same kind of thing. Women are more peaceful, more relational. They ~connect~ communities together. Women are intuitive and more ✨holistic✨ than men’s Rigid Rational Thinking. Women are more able to empathize with the oppressed, more in tune with human pain, less violent, less threatening, less confrontational, less abusive.
I was in a class discussion a while back discussing whether a male historian could handle the subject of domestic violence as well as a female historian could, and was surprised that almost everyone in the class thought No. Even though it was acknowledged that men are victims of domestic violence sometimes, there still seemed to be something thought to be inherently different…that was broadly applicable to women.
It’s interesting how people appear to find it easier to understand that “men can be abuse victims” than to understand that “women can be abusers and/or abuse apologists.” Abuse happening to a person doesn’t challenge that binary thinking as much as someone perpetratingabuse.
here’s my one whole discourse post for pride month. you fucks will never ever ever wean off the radfem shit if you keep trying to give “cis men are evil” nuance. no, it’s not bad because they could be closeted or questioning, it’s bad because gender essentialism is a fucking brain poison and it makes you stupid
God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they’re just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?
Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed “men” (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that’s not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion
Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
The distinction between boy/man and girl/woman as societal genders is evident once you start understanding gender as an intersectional phenomenon. A boy of color who is forcibly assigned the incongruent role of “man” by institutions like the police has his very identity fundamentally undermined and a whole different set of societal expectations thrust upon him compared to what a boy-assigned-boy does. A disabled woman who is assigned an identity of “girl” through infantilization is barred from interacting with the world the way that women-assigned-women do.
Beyond just age, there are other lines along which the gender binary is revealed to actually be an amalgamation of multiple distinct social genders. “Frigid woman,” for example, has historically been treated as a separate gender phenomenon from “mother,” wherein mothers are “real” women and “frigid” women are failures who are barred from accessing true societal acceptance as women. Even among women who do fulfill the societal expectation of childrearing, the roles of “mother” and “grandmother” are different, and people fitting those roles will have very different experiences navigating the same world, both on an internal and an external level.
In cultures where there is high stigma against alcoholism, “alcoholic” is practically a removed gender from “man.” And when you consider the relationship that stigmatized perceptions of alcoholism have with traits like parenting ability, impotence, ability to work, aggression, attraction, etc, the link between consumption and gender becomes quite evident!
And it really wasn’t all that long ago when the functional framework for queer attraction within sexology was to understand homosexuality as a third (bio)sex assignment. Being gay and being trans used to be one and the same; “attraction to/has sex with men” was a core requirement of the “woman” gender and “attraction to/has sex with women” was a core requirement of the “man” gender, such that what we think of as a gay man of today would have been just as effectively conceptualized as a woman back then, and vice versa. The first known use of the word “bisexual” was to refer to somebody “possessing characteristics of both sexes,” ie somebody who could perform relationships with both men and women, ie somebody who could perform as both a man and a woman. The concept of gender being something distinct from attraction has only been a mainstream concept for a handful of decades now.
Basically, if an anthropologist with no bias towards binarism looked at how human society behaves, they would see quite a lot of genders, even among people who the binary system currently considers to be cis. They would see boys, girls, partnered mothers, single mothers, partnered fathers, single fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, twinks, bears, dykes, femmes, working women, homemakers, alcoholics, asexuals, manual laborers, white-collar workers, and so many others.
A poststructuralist lens specifically would tell you that all the lines in the sand are arbitrary, whether that’s the binary or any other taxonomy we come up with around any other criteria. At the end of the day, categories are what we use to try to make sense of the world, but challenging the supposed innateness of those categories through intersectional analysis is important and necessary work. The fact that the gender binary is so easy to deconstruct via the intersection of age demonstrates how flimsy of a model it is for describing real human diversity.
Thinkin about those day when I used to be a transmed..
Why tf was I convinced to join a group of people that 1) have repeated the WRONG definition of gender dysphoria multiple times, and 2) don’t even have a set in requirement of gender dysphoria (like, how bad must your dysphoria be to qualify as trans? Is a little dysphoria enough, or does it have to be severe?)?????
All I see are children running around, spouting pure garbage from their mouths and hoping that it’ll sound “scientific” enough.
Like a flat-earther not having a set model for their earth, transmeds can’t even negotiate how much dysphoria makes a trans person “trans”, let alone define it properly. Sad!
A post I’ve been thinking about but yall need to realize men are just people. Gender and biological essentialism is still bad even when you apply it to men. Men aren’t inherently evil or bad. Men are taught toxic masculinity and to be misogynistic (just as white people are taught to be racist) but they aren’t inherently this way. This isn’t meant to absolve them either. Men need to take responsibility for unlearning the toxic messages they have been taught. But like, honestly men are just people. They aren’t inherently bad people.
Men are just people, people who also struggle due to the patriarchy.
