Valuing relationships, wanting to get on with people and liking autumn are not exclusively feminine traits. They’re not even particularly feminine traits.
Most of your problems seem to stem from your having a narrow, constricting and caricatured view of masculinity: if I value close relationships over quick easy sex, I must be somehow feminine.
I appreciate you taking the time to write about how your gender is expressed, AHunter3. Hopefully you don’t feel like you’re on trial here, But it’s great that this time there’s an actual discussion rather than just a lecture.
You listed a lot of traits that, in their totality, contribute to your identity as “one of the girls”. What you’ve told us, however, is that you are not transgender; I infer you consider yourself male in some fundamental way that trans woman does not. Your post didn’t really explain this part of your identity, though.
So I have two questions:
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How significantly different is a “male girl” from a trans “girl”? If femininity could be quantified in a biological male, with 0 representing the macho extreme and 100 representing Blanche Devereaux essentially trapped in a man’s body, would a “male girl” be like a 75 and a trans woman be a few points higher?
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Do you understand why most people would consider some of this to be hair splitting? If you’re talking to people who are open-minded enough to accept the existence of transgender individuals, they probably already understand the idea that some people might strongly identify with the opposite gender while not quite crossing into trans territory. So is this distinction really in need of sounding off about?
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I think we should invite trans women to weigh in on this question as well, but my take on it is that SEX is one thing and GENDER is another. A trans woman (or trans girl) does not merely have the gender normally associated with the other sex, she also has the sexual identity – what trans author Julia Serano refers to as subconscious sex, essentially a wiring diagram in the brain that insists that there ought to be female parts. Serano distinguishes this entirely from all of the complex mess of behaviors and personality characteristics I was writing about above.
So I think I am as feminine in the gender sense as a typical trans woman is, but I do not have that wiring-diagram sense of “hey, this male body is all wrong”.
I think of it as an utterly different thing, in other words, the embrace of the gender identity versus the disphoria about the body itself.
Well, I think your question was an excellent question, and the asking of it and your phrasing thereof indicate to me that hairs must be split. I need to make the distinction as I just did here, between physical dysphoria and identifying with the gender other than the one that normally goes with the body you do have – as two separate things, not as a “lesser than” / “more than” points on a continuum sort of thing.
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Most of your problems seem to stem from an absence of reading comprehension. Plus, perhaps, an excess of hostility.
Yes, excellent!! Sorry I missed this part in the process of being dismissive of the first part that you wrote.
Or (to split more hairs) they are all combinations of gender and sex identity, where “male” and “female” are sex and “girl”, “woman”, “man”, and “boy” are gender terms.
Hanging a lampshade on it doesn’t make it not true.
Thank you for providing a more clear view of what you are talking about.
It is my observation that you are battling what you perceive as fairly rigid gender roles. If I may ask, was their any imposing influence on your childhood who shared this view, or who lived by some extreme gender role? In other words, who taught you how boys and girls “normally” behave?
My reading comprehension is fine; it’s your ability to express yourself clearly that is woefully lacking. I’m about through with this anyway since you’re clearly only interested in repeating how special it is to be you. You don’t want a discussion, you want a soapbox.
I don’t really agree with that; I think most people have internalized at least as pervasive a set of gendered expectations. No one in particular taught me how boys and girls “normally” behave so much as everyone and everything, collectively – the ongoing “background noise” of the entire society – did so.
I actually lived in a sort of pro-androgyny denial of how pervasive those expectations were, dismissing my difference from them as relatively meaningless because only sexist fools believed there were real differences between the sexes and I was onboard with feminism and the dismissal of all that. After all, I knew I was male and was fine with the idea that I was an exception, hence exceptions existed and it was OK for us to exist. But the boys – not as I was taught that they behave but as they actually, in real life, in general, did behave – was different from how the girls behaved. My generalization, my experience. Call me sexist if you want. I did know it was only a generalization.
As a scientist, I like my generalizations to be informed by facts.
Is there any empirical evidence that most women have the traits that you describe and most men do not?
I am imaging how I would feel if you were a woman describing all the ways you’re a “man”. Like if you told us, “All my friends are guys. Long-term relationships aren’t my thing. I just want to have fun and have sex, not settle down. I love to goof off and tell jokes, the raunchier the better. I’m super competitive and prefer working alone. I like my movies to be full of violence and explosions and thrill, none of that mushy romance stuff. Besides my necklaces and bracelets, I can’t abide by any jewelry. My last boyfriend told me I walk like a lumberjack, even when I wear high heels (which I love by the way, don’t ask me why). I don’t get along with other women, so I consider myself one of the guys. Aren’t I special?”
If I heard a story like this, I’d feel the exact same way I feel about your story. I can concede a woman with such a story is probably not within one or even 1.5 standard deviations of the “average woman.”
But I wouldn’t think she was that special.
And I wouldn’t be curious enough to probe deeper into her personality. Because I suspect she isn’t going to tell me anything I haven’t heard before. I suspect she’s got tales of woe from childhood about how mean the kids were to her on the playground–especially the girls. I suspect she will tell me about how the grown-ups in her life scolded her for not being “lady like” and how they would outwardly expressed their worry about her being a lesbian, despite her obvious heterosexuality. I suspect she will tell me she rubs people–usually women–the wrong way with her frankness and assertiveness. I suspect she will eventually tell me she can’t stand being around women because she finds them too catty and petty and silly (of course she will hasten to add the “not all women” disclaimer so as not to offend).
I hear bits and pieces of these stories all the time. Sometimes in real life and almost everywhere I turn on the internet. “I’m not like other girls,” these women like to say. Sometimes I wonder who the “other girls” are since no one wants to be one of them.
No, men don’t do this to the same degree. It is still cool to be “one of the guys”.
But I still question whether a guy who plays the “I’m not like other guys” card is as special as he thinks he is.
Think carefully about exactly how a sociologist or social psychologist would go about operationalizing those variables.
Yeah. You see the problem, right? You quickly end up with layers of interpretation, not only at the variable-defining stage but at the example-recognizing stage. You can still express an opinion when you’re done but it’s not going to be appreciably more detached from the matrix of social mythologies and belief systems about gender differences than statements made by the people being studied.
I myself can’t separate out what I actually observed from what I was socially conditioned to anticipate observing, and I daresay neither can you, or anyone else.
I have, at no point in this thread, made the claim that these, or any other differences, exist intrinsically as differences between male and female people.
As Elizabeth Janeway once said,
If you’re trying to convince me that men do not actually have traits from Set A and women have traits from Set B, intrinsically as opposed to some percent of them having internalized the notion that they’re supposed to, exacerbated by my tendency as observer to see their behavior skewed in those directions because I’ve been socialized to do so, you’re really preaching to the choir here. I’m already on board with that.
But social beliefs and expectations are part of reality. Social reality. And if you want to claim that, no, nearly no one in our society harbors any beliefs that men and women have differences, I think that would constitute an extraordinary claim you’re unlikely to be able to back up.
Yeah, but what makes you so special?
Science is all about interpretation. People can interpret the same data in different ways, but that is a problem in all scientific endeavors. Not just sociology. That’s why we have peer review and take classes in experimental design.
I’m not asking for unassailable, irrefutable proof. I’m asking for empirical evidence, and I’m asking for it sincerely. Not to be argumentative, but so I can get a broader understanding of what you’re talking about.
Except for wearing jewelry and skirts, none of those traits you described describe me. I don’t think I’m very womanly, and yet I don’t feel the need to tack on a “boy” or “guy” descriptor. Indeed, I feel little kinship with guys. Now, I don’t have a problem identifying as an exception to the gender rules. But I am curious if I really am an exception, and if so, how much? Do you think I’m an unusual woman? If you were to read a description from a woman that sounded like what I posted above (“My last boyfriend told me I walk like a lumberjack, even when I wear high heels…”), would you think “Oh, a fellow gender gueer!” Or would you think, “This woman is one those annoying ‘not like other girls’.”
I don’t know what this means. Almost sounds like you’re saying there are no such things as facts and findings, just opinions and feelings. I can’t agree with that.
But you are arguing that because you exhibit a list of traits, you are more like the latter than the former. Intrinsically or not, you are positing that men tend do it like this, while women tend do it like* that*. Gender differences certainly do exist, there’s no doubt about that. But if we were to discover that many of the traits you describe don’t cleanly break along gender lines, how would this affect your self-concept? Would you feel any less “man girl” if we were to find out that, say, 40% men are relationship nurturers, despite what stereotypes may portray?
Let me come at it from a different way.
A lot of people believe that black people are different from white people. Whether they believe the differences are intrinsic or not doesn’t matter. They look at a black person and expect them to be into R&B and hip hop, to speak Ebonically, to be athletic and sensual, and to be more emotional than intellectual.
So let’s say you’re of African American descent. You like classic rock. You can’t get the hang of the habitual “be”. You’re a klutz with no rhythm, no swagger. And you’re as icy as Mr. Spock.
Does this make you any less black? I mean, sure, “black” is just a label, and if it doesn’t fit, you have the right to swap it out for something else. But “black” isn’t the problem. The problem is that black has been narrowly defined with bullshit generalizations.
Now, I wouldn’t have a personal problem if you decided to eschew “black” and make up your own label. It’s a free country and I’m all about self-identification, even if it doesn’t make sense to me. But defying generalizations that I don’t even believe wouldn’t make you interesting to me. And I don’t find a guy who is into nurturing relationships to be a fascinating creature since I don’t presume that this is some kind of anomaly.
I think that something that would change ( or would have changed) my perception would be if quite a few more guys were posting in response to my self-description “Hey, I’m male and except for not identifying as a ‘male girl’, a lot of what you said is true for me as well”, and shared more about their own experience, and if throughout the board guys posted from that kind of vantage point in threads about dating and being a man and so forth. And that my voice didn’t perpetually sound to me like a really rare one.
I spent 20 years basically approaching this as a “men’s libber”, not expressing it in terms of me being different but as a male rejecting the narrative about what men are like. I tried to find like-minded folks who were angry about the hostility and dismissive contempt directed towards those of us who don’t embrace the “masculinity” act, and I assumed that either men in general were not like that or that only some were and that a significant portion weren’t, and that either way there had to be a contingent of guys like me who had been through what I’d been through and wanted to speak back to it. I used words like “masculinized”, describing it as a political process. I claimed words like “sissy” proudly, but with the notion that it had nothing to do with BEING different so much as no longer being silenced about it.
It’s not that I never hear “You are like me” from any other male people but a) it’s rare and b) rather than correcting me about my silly notions about feeling like it practically makes me one of the women they say I’ve given them a lot to think about. They say things like “I never ran into ideas quite like this, it’s an interesting way to look at it, it kind of fits although I’ve never considered it in quite those terms”.
When I was a sociology grad student I tried to pursue a dissertation on it, along with research into the specific experiences of sissy/femme males who were hetero. I’d like more empirical evidence myself, shine more light into that room. The professors I sought to be advisors discouraged me, saying that so much of it (masculine versus feminine) boils down to nuances of behavior that are very difficult to define and operationalize in ways that folks reading the research would agree (“Yeah, they measured masculinity in that study and found that men are only more marginally more masculine on average…”) and that vast chunks of it aren’t directly manifested as behaviors at all and could only be self-reported or attributed.
You fail to explain why these hairs must split, though. It’s clear you think these distinctions are of extreme importance, but to everyone else? it’s like watching someone debate the difference between purple and magenta. Yes, these colors might not be precisely the same but on a practical level, their overwhelming similarities make it hard to care about their differences. Which goes back to the first critique I made to you: you presume we care about what you call yourself, and then argue from that position.
Recent posts suggests others don’t buy the “male girl” construct as you’ve presented it. But the existence of disagreeing opinions regarding your gender identity should not be conflated with mass interest in being lectured to on your gender identity. If I think magenta and purple are simply next door neighbors on the color spectrum and not vastly distinct on a practical level, I have little incentive in poring through a wall of text that tells me I’m wrong but fails to convincingly explain why being wrong even matters in the grand scheme.
Wow. You need to get over yourself.