Naah.
Nobody seriously wonders if Billy Eilish is a lesbian, and she dresses exactly like that.
Sure… whatever you say. So androgynous :
Again, something I never said…
You do get how the sum total of androgynous+feminine is not equal to masculine, right?
Naah, “TLC were masculine” is not “noncontroversial” for anyone who grew up on the videos for Creep and No Scrubs and Waterfalls.
Another young woman in the music industry whose look is, at least in part, deliberately taken to reduce her sexual attractiveness.
Actually, is she a lesbian? I dunno.
This is an interesting analogy, and it helps me understand your position better, I think.
But actually, if you were referring to a relatively butch straight woman, for example, I actually do think she might be quite honestly interested in the unconscious attitudes of gay men. Misogyny in the gay community is a topic that comes up every once in a while (altho I know essentially nothing about it). I’m not saying she has license to cast aspersions if she quite naturally gets rejected by someone she’s attracted to. I’m not saying she should jump to any conclusions.
But I mean, yeah… it seems like it would be a pretty natural thing to wonder about, especially if there were a couple otherwise gay men she’d slept with before, like if she was the only woman they’d been with among a larger number of male partners. Some curiosity here would be pretty normal, I think. Not necessarily healthy in all possible circumstances. But pretty normal.
I don’t see why this person has to bring up stark disbelief in “gender ideology” to justify a perfectly reasonable preference.
Even if there’s fully justified suspicion about all the roads that this movement is currently taking – and yes, there is – it still strikes me as rather extreme to doubt the entirety of the experience, root to branch, as if it were mere ideology and nothing else. Every group has their crazies. That doesn’t mean there’s no there there at the core.
People hold up Annie Lennox as the quintessential androgynous female rock star. Probably because they have only one image of her in their mind:
But she also looks like this:
You don’t understand what “androgynous” means if you don’t understand how TLC fits the bill the same way that Annie Lennox does. Stop biting my ankles, @MrDibble.
It really is confusing, isn’t it? In that video, TLC went out of their way to contrast themselves with the ultra coifed and high-heeled runaway models…so you’d think that he’d pick up on the not so subtle subtext.
If masculine and feminine gender expression is so subjective that @MrDibble scoffs at characterizing TLC’s image as masculine/androgynous, then WTF is gender expression? And why is it a social justice issue if it’s so nebulous?
And why is he seemingly aware that every time he attacks an argument, he removes one more block from the gender Jenga tower? His side should tell him to quit already.
The internet is full of “Is Billy Eilish a lesbian?” chatter? I don’t even know anything about her and I’ve seen these discussions. What are you talking about?
I know people wonder about Billy Eilish’s sexuality 'cause you’ve got folks who seriously thought that Alicia Keyes was a lesbian when she came on the scene. Alicia Keyes is much more feminine-presenting than Billy Eilish. Nonetheless there were rumors. Because apparently a woman has to act a certain way to be perceived as straight. If she deviates from this certain way, she risks coming across as something she is not.
*Billie
I dunno where you guys are finding that because any Google search is dominated by references to a song she did called “Wish You Were Gay,” which despite the title actually suggests she is NOT gay, if you take the lyrics as being literally sung in her personal voice and not as a character.
Anyway she’s just a teenager, so who knows, and one suspects this sort of chat is normal for any female celebrity who is not really open and public about dating men.
If you google “Is Billie Eilish a lesbian?”, you will find folks asking that question.
There is merely wondering and then there is publishing essays about it and raising the question in this fashion when interacting with members of the community. Try as I might, I can’t imagine a straight woman doing the latter ever, but I see a lot of content like this from transwomen.
If there were a couple of gay men who’d slept me, I’d see them as exceptional cases. So exceptional, in fact, that I would question whether they were gay. Especially if they had lots of fun with my female bits. I guess you could say I don’t believe in accepting someone’s self-identity at face value when contradictory evidence is right in front of me. “I’m a gay man but my penis enjoys your vagina” does not compute for me. I totally get that others probably believe differently.
I don’t see why this person has to bring up stark disbelief in “gender ideology” to justify a perfectly reasonable preference.
That’s interesting; why not? The only reason a transwoman thinks they could have a chance with a lesbian is because of the ideological belief that a male who identifies as a woman is more similar to a woman than a man, correct? Why wouldn’t it be relevant for a lesbian to say she doesn’t believe in this precept? I actually see it as a concise way of saying a bunch of other related things: sex is immutable, same-sex attraction means same-sex attraction, woman means being an adult female, and gender is a social construct but biological sex is not.
Even if there’s fully justified suspicion about all the roads that this movement is currently taking – and yes, there is – it still strikes me as rather extreme to doubt the entirety of the experience, root to branch, as if it were mere ideology and nothing else. Every group has their crazies. That doesn’t mean there’s no there there at the core.
But this still doesn’t help me understand what the difference is between an unconscious bias that is worthy of investigation (and presumably, intervention) and a justified preference that should be left unbothered.
Well, I’m a woman, but I’m also a Jew, an actuary, and lots of other things. You have also said you are asexual, if I’m not confusing you with someone else, so there are multiple groups you could be referring to.
How they decide? Damned if I know. I would guess it’s somewhat different for each person.
At least one friend was close to suicide and then stumbled across an excellent therapist, who helped him explore the options (transwoman, nb, etc.) and he ultimately decided to identify as a non-gender-conforming man. He always wanted to dress like a girl, but never felt he could get away with it. He didn’t dress as a girl in public until he realized that his friends would still accept him. He was kind of startled when he was stopped by TSA and they assigned a woman to pat him down.
He’s the one I’m closest to, and I worked on a volunteer thing with him that took place right after his therapy sessions as he was going through a lot of that. So he’s the one I know the most about, by far.
There’s less stigma on women dressing like men, and I think all the transmen and nb’s who were assigned female at birth were somewhat butch in their appearance prior to coming out. Although… I can think of one with a very feminine appearance who has worked hard to appear less feminine since coming out as NB.
A lot of them seem to signal the change to their friends by changing their names. (Not all, but a lot.)
I know one person who identifies as gender-fluid, and does dress differently when she wants to be called Katie than when he wants to be called John. I gotta admit that I find that a little challenging. And to go back to @monstro wanting to roll her eyes, I have to admit that I find it hard to think of this particular person as anything other than “a woman”. And I might say that in private, but I certainly won’t say it to that person, nor in any way that I think might get back to them. From my perspective, this person could just be a woman with a butch streak who sometimes likes to let that flag fly. But… you know, I don’t know his/her innermost feelings, or why it matters so much, and it really doesn’t cost me much to try to avoid being an asshole to this person.
Well, I’m a woman, but I’m also a Jew, an actuary, and lots of other things. You have also said you are asexual, if I’m not confusing you with someone else, so there are multiple groups you could be referring to.
LOL. Tell me, my would I be bringing up all my other identities in a conversation about gender? My racial and nationality and my professional identities aren’t relevant to this discussion. My asexuality is only tangentially related. But my gender is super relevant. I don’t want the meaning of any of my groups to be deformed into a loose assemblage of people with self-identified feelings or behaviors. But I especially don’t want that to happen to my gender class, because I believe my gender class has fought hard to keep “women” from being reduced to a caricature. As a first-wave feminist, do you sympathize in any way with this position?
Asexuality seems pretty relevant, especially since you keep saying that gender performance is mostly for the point of pursuing mates.
I do sympathize a bit with it. I wonder if people will decide that “getting mansplained” is part of performative femininity, and if you want to identify as female you just have to put up with that. But in practice, I really don’t see this happening. I find that transfriendly people (and trans people) are at least as accepting of me and how I want to live my life as any other identifiable “group”, and a hell of a lot more supportive than traditionally masculine males who want to defend defenseless women from the evil transwomen out there. (And that’s the most prominent group I’ve run into that rejects the existence of transwomen.)
Has anyone else watched “transparent”? It’s a tv series about a guy who comes out as female in his advanced age.
One poignant scene takes place between the main character and a woman whose professional advancement had been blocked (years previously) by the main character, who used his masculine privilege (at the time) to advance men and hurt women. She doesn’t forgive the main character. She’s not super accepting of the person’s newfound femininity, either.
Yeah. I read somewhere that masculinity is defined negatively, so women express femininity by wearing clothes, and taking part in behaviours coded as feminine, but men express masculinity not by positive actions but by avoiding anything associated with femininity. And so a woman dressing in a masculine way does not threaten her identity in the same way as the reverse. Dunno how true it is.
Yeah, I feel the same way. I certainly have no desire to rub whatever feelings I may have about their identity in someone’s face, but I find it hard to take ‘gender fluid’ as seriously as a more stable identity. Even non-binary… I can understand not fitting in, and I can understand wanting to present as the other gender if you find it a much better fit for your personality, and have body dysphoria too. But being non-binary means standing out anyway, so what does the identity add that just acting and dressing in a way that is comfortable to you doesn’t?
Is it? Full of? Not that I can tell.
We’ve already established you have your own filtered internet.
Thanks for the correction.
I don’t think anyone posting in this thread would advocate doing that either, even if someone was acting like a jerk to us.
I think we really need to draw a distinction between 1) social etiquette and interpersonal courtesy and 2) treating biological sex and self-identified gender identity as equal things in the eyes of the law. Fulfilling the first asks very little of us as a society and actually is in line with gender critical “live and let live” principles.
But the second means “woman” becomes anything that Tom, Dick, and Harry can claim to gain access to single-sex spaces, like women’s sports and women’s prisons. It also means encouraging society to punish anyone who doesn’t disavow the very views feminists fought for.
“Woman” is not a constume. It is not a performance. Conforming to set of a gender norms does not actually make you the opposite sex.
If you google any leading question you’ll find some people asking it. Doesn’t make the question serious, doesn’t make the internet “full” of it. When I google that exact question, like RickJay said, the first hits are all about “Wish You Were Gay”. Which, incidentally, is a song all about liking a boy.
My asexuality explains why I don’t act like a stereotypical straight woman. But it has absolutely no role in how I see my own gender classification (asexuality also isn’t a political identify of mine. I only bring it up when I feel it is relevant, like when we are talking about sexuality. I am OK with bringing up my womanness when I just want to describe who I am as a person, because it is a big part of who I am. I used to be reluctant to admit that, but I’m not anymore. I am a woman and I am proud.)
I am a woman due to my biology, not due to how I act or don’t act. I act the way I do because my biological realities, as soon as they were identified, took me down a specific path of social programming. I also believe think that some of those biological realities have directly shaped me behaviorally. It’s just that I don’t think those biological-based gender-correlative behaviors are all that remarkable. I mean, sure, I’m not an aggro person. I’m not going to throw hands just because someone said something bad about my mama. I wouldn’t be able to fight myself out of a paper bag. Estrogen is a powerful drug . But lots of men are naturally like me. Men have to be socially programmed to fight and want to fight; it’s just that testosterone makes it easier for them. Quite a few men would join me in screaming and running away from a fight over our mamas. So I don’t think we should make a big deal over what we perceive to be gender-nonconforming behaviors. I think gender noncomforming behaviors are what we should be encouraging out of everyone, instead of pulling the kids with the special labels out of the class and giving them special privileges. Like being able to access whatever spaces they want, with no one saying anything negative about it.
I’m OK with giving transwomen who are blending in with the norms of women access to women’s spaces. I’m not OK with giving that same level of access to people who want to retain most of their maleness but who still insist they are women, who think that this self-ID entitles them to dictate the norms of women, and who aren’t at all interested in conforming to anything. That’s the point where gender ideology becomes oppressive to me, so that’s why I’m so opinionated about this stuff. I don’t trust people to implement gender ideology non-oppressively without going all in on it. I think we can be treat trans folks fairly and respectfully without buying into gender ideology.
I know people think this whole time I’ve been hatin’ on trans folks. I’ve been hatin’ on an ideology, though. I think that’s what JKR has been doing too.
So… You are specifically saying you don’t want people who look like they might be men in ladies restrooms?
Or?