Title and image source from this Mastodon toot by [email protected]. I even took the damn title because I couldn’t think of anything more apt.
As always, respect my trans homies or I make your pronouns was/were.
Being cis doesn’t mean we automatically are comfortable in our own skin, and a lot of this introspection is universal to the human experience, and super valuable. Everyone should have this dialogue with themselves at some point.
Having trans people in my life led me to question my relationship with gender. In doing so, I discovered that while I am cisgender, I have a lot of hangups about the expectations of my gender in society and among certain cultural groups, including the one I was raised in. It’s helped to resolve some things in my mind and discover things about myself, and I’m grateful for that.
We should all get to gender m0ar
This is why “gender affirming care” isn’t just for trans people. Everyone deserves to feel comfortable with who they are!
Trans rights are very much the same thing as human rights
Holy shit, that’s fucking brilliant!
What defines man in today’s society? You do if you choose to be one and the values and actions you wish to embody as a man.
That is about the long and the short of it yeah.
As trans people we are very keyed in to noticing people of our perceived gender. Our brains recognize you as our people… but instead of nessisarily looking at what is considered the stereotype and being like “that’s a MAN” we sort of notice y’all more holistically. The flamboyant gay man, the quiet anxious man, the chubby kind quirky man, the man who likes pink… Our brains see you all are our people and being like you could very well be somebody’s transition goal and you might not even know it. When we talk to you we get that spark of recognition. You are men. The rest is all just window dressing. Man isn’t a static frame that you squeeze to fit - what you are just expands the definition of man.
All that is really required is that you own it.
That’s really reassuring as a cis straight male because a lot of my self-confidence issues stem from bullying during childhood for not fitting in.
About 2 years ago I decided to get some therapy for an identity crisis I was going through having recently (then) stopping smoking weed, moving from an abusive workplace to a more stable one, paying off my debts, disassociating because I didn’t know what to do plan for my next goal in life, and feeling very alone despite being surrounded by nice caring people (I know, the tiniest violin should be playing compared with what many many people have / are going through).
The thing that stuck with me the most is something my therapist said which was a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet “To thine own self be true.”
i.e. be honest and open with yourself about what you feel is right and, unlike the character in the play, act accordingly.
Oh yeah Hamlet learns all his lessons too late so definitely don’t be a Hamlet…
Being in queer spaces there is a lot of rejection of the program that is considered “the model for success” the whole marry - a monogamous partner, have kids, get mega earning career - those are looked at as options. There are other models that are STILL success. Straight Cis guys in particular are very susceptible to comparing themselves to their peers and using hard numbers to compare. How much do you earn, how much can you lift, how many partners you have, how many friends … It seems quite frankly exhausting.
It’s also mental sabotage.
You are not a bundle of stats. You don’t have to compare any aspect of yourself to anyone else. Learning to actually like the person you are is way easier when you aren’t constantly ruminating on what you aren’t. You have blessings and it’s good for you to count them every now and then. Queer folk tend to all have their own openly burning trashfires but sometimes success is sometimes just realizing you are - all things considered - actually doing okay.
You don’t nessisarily need to “fit in”. You can be you and there’s people out there who are exactly your type of weird compatible. Opening your heart to people who are other types of weird than you is also great as giving what you are seeking is a great way to find what you are looking for when it comes to acceptance.
Once I made that realization, it lifted so much stress from me.
I don’t have to worry about “acting manly” or “manning up” or whatever.
I am a man.
Anything I do is manly. By definition.
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Questioning your gender is for everyone, because even if you realize that you’re CIS, you get to perform your gender with purpose from then on.
Win/win.
There’s a lot of subtext in today’s culture that, while never explicitly stated, boils down to “men bad”. So, as a man, it’s really self-esteem boosting to hear from people who want to be men, who like men and masculinity. Men get very little appreciation in today’s society, and I don’t just mean as individuals. I mean masculinity as a gender is not really appreciated as much as I think we need it to be.
That’s the situation women have experienced since the dawn of time. Most of the negativity felt by those trans guys and the cis guy OP came from “woman bad.” Not manly is another way of saying womanly. Which would be fine if it weren’t considered inherently bad. Many of the denigrating words in our language are directly misogynistic and many more are indirectly so. So while you’re appreciating your masculinity, please try to do so without depreciating femininity. In fact, embrace your own femininity! There’s nothing bad about it.
Wat
Most of the negativity felt by those trans guys and the cis guy OP came from “woman bad.”
What?? That doesn’t make any sense. How is “men bad” actually just “women bad”??
Or are you just chiming in with a totally unrelated point about how women also have it bad in society? If so, I agree, but I don’t see the relevance.
I didn’t mean to negate your whole point, more like “welcome to the club.”
Trans men and cis men with feminine attributes face lowered status and abuse because female=less. Trans men face a different kind of abuse because they are seen as trying to assert their membership in the “superior” group. This is all in addition to the abuse they all face for simply being other than the “norm”.
There’s definitely a smattering of full-on “man bad” out there, but don’t mistake “that man bad” or “patriarchy bad” for “all men bad” or “manliness bad” (assuming it’s a healthy manliness and not toxic masculinity).
Society is still pretty tipped in favor of men, just look at car safety tests and medicine trials, both of which routinely exclude women entirely.
Ah, okay, that makes sense. Sorry, I just assumed you were refuting my point. I agree with everything you’re saying. A lot of times whenever someone brings up male struggles, someone chimes in with “we shouldn’t worry about this because women have it worse”, so I might be a bit overly sensitive.
That’s okay, I totally get that. It often happened (perhaps still is, haven’t been there in awhile) in Reddit 2X that a thread about a woman’s problem would be brigaded by men saying they had it worse, overwhelming the initial discussion because of their greater numbers. I certainly don’t mean to do that, even if we did have the numbers.
I think there are two similar but different points being made by both of yall
The other commenter is referring to when a man is insulted by being called “not manly” which has the subtext of “feminine bad”
And you’re seemingly talking about when someone is called masculine, but use subtext to insinuate that it’s a bad thing.
Both can be hurtful to a man, and one is directly tied to sexism against women. I’d argue both are caused by biases pushed by patriarchal ideals. So similar ideas but a bit different
I thought I was pretty clearly talking about society calling masculinity bad, so I don’t understand what prompted that response. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.
His point is that “man bad” only happens because we did “women bad” for millennia. We spent so long hating on women that,to get to equality, we need to swing the other way for a bit.
But rest assured, men are already very much valued in society. That’s why everything is tailored towards us and we make more money for doing the same shit. You probably don’t notice it though, because it’s just “how things are”.
You got my point, and also exemplify it, by saying “his point.” We’re all guys here on Lemmy, right, that’s just how things are, eh? (Tbf, I landed in here from All. But that’s the sneaky thing about women: we’re everywhere!)
“there’s literally dozens of us!”
But sorry about that. I’m still working on degendering my default speech.
I don’t think we need to swing the other way. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Can’t we just strive for equality?
No, and that’s very silly.
Let’s lay someone slapped you in the face everyday for a week. Could you turn around and simply forgive? Not press charges, not yell at them, just simply forgive. I know I would struggle to do it. And that’s just my face for 7 days, not an entire lifetime of being pushed around.
You’re expecting 50% of the population to have Jesus levels of forgiveness. That is very silly.
That topic has been a source of my contemplation for today as well.
I often consider myself to be genderfluid, but often question myself on whether it’s an actual feeling of another gender or longing to be accepted for who I am by both women and men.
I am caring, I am gentle, I am soft and non-competitive, I am the housekeeper, I do understand women more than men very often, I relate to their vision, yet I am a man. I am perseverant, strong, protective, I know my bearings and I grapple hard onto them. And no one will be there to tell me how to behave, what to wear, who to hang out with. Screw that.
Why should things that we should celebrate in all people be gender locked?
I’m a woman, I have male friends like you describe and I cherish them. Their femininity or gentleness are the anything else don’t make them any less of men, they just happen to be very good men that I’m glad to know.
I find myself wondering if I’m actually nonbinary or just absolutely sick of gendered traits being used prescriptively. Does it matter whether or not you’re nurturing if you feel like a woman?
But then outside of gendered traits, I’m kind of at a loss for what feeling like anything looks like.
At the very least I know I dislike traditional gender roles enough to eschew them all in favor of the “no label” enby label, and that works well enough for now.
I grew up during the fun times of the cold war. My single digits weren’t so bad since Carter was way into this Peaceful Coexistence (Мирное сосуществование) thing. (There’s an old Vulcan saying, Only Nixon could go to China. ) But this is where I learned about masculinity more or less: You may have the capacity for terrible violence, but you keep it locked in a safe behind two keys and launch codes.
Later on, Reagan got elected, and he resumed escalation, secretly hoping the evil Soviet Union would launch a first strike ( The ownership class will tremble, etc! etc! ) so he could launch a retaliatory strike and bring about the eschatological events that Second Adventists like him were expecting. Sadly for Reagan, the Soviets never attacked but Alzheimer’s did, as did Iran-Contra scandals. In high school, being manly was about taking responsibility. To man up was to pay your bills (similar to pony up ) and to do the necessary tasks.
By the aughts, being responsible was just adulting and everyone was expected to do it… except, for some reason, our elected officials, who were already acting like immature, uncoralled children. At this time boys action figures featured Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker ripped like He-Man, and Barbie was getting criticism for looking like less than 1% of women in the world. In cinema, the Schwarzenegger / Stalone action hero was being replaced by the everyman counterpart… who still engaged in impossible action stunts. Except Tom Cruise who insisted on doing his own stunts. Tom Cruise was getting weird.
Also by the aughts, I had escaped my childhood and was no longer being expected to fight back bullies. (I remember myself being a wimp, but mom reminded me I was outnumbered by boys twice my size and sometimes twice my age. Dominance hierarchy was in full force in the 70s and 80s as much as it is now, which means faculty, administrators and dads did zilcho about curbing bullies. Ergo I was a disappointment as a boy. Also as a late bloomer, I was ace while the rest of my peers were swooning about proms and boy bands and getting simultaneously high and laid at the prom. I missed all that and listened to Yes playing Trevor Rabin, and FGTH playing Trevor Horn.)
In the 2010s – when the man-o-sphere was rising in full force on the web, when we were refusing to confront that We [the United States] tortured some folks, when consent was still not being taught in sex-ed… or in social ed, for that matter, and we were all signing click-wrapped EULAs and TOSes longer than King Lear in circumstances too awkward to read them or be advised what they say, when Christian nationalists being elected and appointed as officials and making disturbing policy choices allegedly informed by their faith – I realized I just have no investment in manhood. I don’t identify with any of these people who assert they are men or what men should look like. As The Chad meme rose to prominence, I didn’t understand the appeal.
(in my time Chad, short for Chadwick or Charles, was the name of an Izod-wearing fraternity-member sailboat-racer who lived on trust funds,
loadsloans (maybe loads too) from family and a lot of cocaine. He also tried to get women drunk or unconscious before having sex with them. Think Brock Turner, including getting a no-show job at Dad’s company.)Then there’s the thing that I played more women characters then men in my career as a tabletop gamer, which continued into my video gaming career once games gave me choice in the matter. I blame the latter partly on the surfeit of generic male bros that were the default protagonist. Gordon Freeman would have been more identifiable since I hung with the JPL / CalTech crowd as a kid, but he never does any actual science in his adventures. ETA By the time the Saints Row series gave me serious customization options over my character, and all clothes were available regardless of designated sex, I became the total fashion diva I never knew I wanted to be.
In my late forties I have zero interest in representing as a man… as being masculine or feminine. All the stuff that self-proclaimed alpha-males say on media sounds terribly dysfunctional. My therapist finally comes to the conclusion I’m ASD (which typically has gender ambiguities) and can I please give her permission to be her PHD case study.
I’ve posed a question to the world: Are there any character features we want men to have and women to lack, or vice versa? Because it seems we’d be way better off trying just to be ourselves, and to Hell with gender norms.
**Edit, 2024-04-17: small corrections, some previously-missed details.
I think about this question fairly frequently!
The very existence of masculine vs feminine trait sorting is driven by the question of “what would benefit the survival of a species for one reproductive caste to have which the other lacks?”.
The bimodal distribution across which various traits manifest in the population of a species (which we humans have come to label as “gender”) exist because of their utility as a survival strategy. The individual traits we usually organize into those two categories often indeed ARE mutually exclusive: Strength vs stealth, speed vs precision…
To be stronger or store more energy, one must be bulkier. Bulk often sacrifices stealth, precision, and finesse. Furthermore on the behavioral aspect one cannot both be a doting and attentive custodian of the young AND always be out and away in dangerous places confronting threats and taking risks at the same time. Specialization has benefits, but always a trade off; mastering some capabilities while sacrificing others.
But that’s the is and you asked for the ought.
Nature, as I expect you probably know, doesn’t have an interest in what “should” be; only what survived. Hypothetical potentialities only became available to we sapient beings as a byproduct of our victory over moment to moment subsistence. Once we achieved the luxury of having a choice, only then did a choice begin to matter.
In light of that, my position is that we all have business in choosing for ourselves. I for one think that while “masculine” vs “feminine” is itself kind of a contrived and arbitrary dichotomy now that our species is largely no longer wild, unthinking, and beholden to instinct alone… we still have preferences.
I, for instance, happen to find physical and behavioral traits commonly described as “feminine” to be more aesthetically pleasing and attractive.
(In many cases I kinda wish I had those traits myself…)
But I don’t think there needs to be a consensus about what actually “belongs” in a set, or which “set” an individual is “supposed to” get, on a prescriptive basis.Ideally I hope for a future where we will all have more say in our own design, so we can pick and choose which traits we want in ourselves, and the label of masculine or feminine will only matter in so far as one’s own advertisement to our peers.
Thank you very much for typing this all up, I reckon I’ll be chewing on it for a while
Yeah! Thanks, fellas ^_^
Patriarchy is bad for everybody. Some worse than others definitely, but for men there’s always the expectation to be “man enough” because anything not masculine is bad.
While I’ve never been one to exhibit toxic masculinity, I have had to make effort over the years to not feel embarrassed when exhibiting less “manly” traits. If I am watching a sad movie I try to remind myself that I don’t have to resist the urge to cry; it is okay to experience emotions.
I am a full ass adult and I bring my lunch to work in a Fallout lunch box because that is a hell of a lot more fun than worrying that my “manhood” is going to fall off if I’m not careful. I fully support trans people because “gender norms” are fucking stupid anyway.
Yes but can you read a map without turning it round?
