Ineffable

https://hollylawford-smith.org/trans-men-are-men-but-transwomen-are-not-women/

Yes, this is TERF rhetoric. No, I am not endorsing it. But I am taking it seriously.

Please take it seriously, and if only for the sake of argument, assume that the writer arrived at her position from a starting point of radical feminist theory, not through abductive reasoning from a starting point of fear/hate of trans women.

The argument in the first half of this piece boils down to representation in media and literature, to the way pop culture accurately depicts what it’s like to be a man, and what it’s like to be a woman. A bold choice, for sure. One certainly could have tried to tie other feminist talking points, like the wage gap, domestic violence, to the transgender debate in a similar fashion.

It is not clear if the argument is just “men can’t write women but women can write men“ or also “men don’t read women“ or “women authors are not represented“. From there, it’s the next step to say “because male authors can’t write women as well as women can write men, most AMABs cannot know what being a woman is like as well as AFABs know what being a man is like.”

All I can think is “How do you know?“

How do you know that most women understand what it’s like to be a man who isn’t a Marvel superhero? How do you know that the pop culture you consume captures what it’s like to be a man? How do you know it doesn’t fail in the exact same way to describe what it’s like to be a woman?

What if this is a general failing of pop culture?

What if the world is full of women who don’t know what it’s like to be a man? What if the world is full of both men and women who know exactly and very specifically what the gender roles look like, how they want men to act, how they want other women to act, but still they are unable to imagine what it’s like to be a man living under those constraints? What if the world is full of men who feel like they have to be a certain kind of way because of women who say “I don’t know, you are free to live your life. I, personally, just don’t find it very attractive if men aren’t masculine.“

I think the world is full of women who have very strict, very specific views about men, but who are completely unable to empathise with men.

The weird thing is this: Feminists know this. If you talk about something rather banal and minor in the grand scheme of things, like shaving your legs/pubic hair, you’ll find lots of feminists who point out that the individual preferences of men and a status quo of women already mostly shaving creates some kind of Nash equilibrium where no woman can decide to not shave without risking something or making “not shaving” into a thing, into a statement. No man is obligated to feel a certain way about public hair. Even if we “normalise” not shaving, or not wearing make-up, no man is obligated to prefer one way over the other, in aggregate, this creates the reality under which women live. As the feminist argument goes, men are quite aware of their preferences, or their requirements for women. They just can’t imagine what it’s like from the other side.

And yet, women exist who have opinions about men driving big cars, men wearing suits, men having jobs earning more than women. Many of those women are completely unable to imagine what it feels like to live under those conditions.

Many trans people do know. If they don’t spend the rests of their lives in a tiny queer bubble in Portland, they experience what it’s like, even if they could not correctly imagine it before transitioning.

I think it’s possible for a trans man to know what it’s like to be a man because he lived as a man, not because I think he correctly internalised the male experience from a book of fiction. I know some trans men who describe experiences that track with my experience of being a man, and some whose experiences of gender roles are drastically different, because they don’t pass as men, and are instead presenting as some kind of “genderqueer”, never read as man, but read as “woman who is bravely defying gender stereotypes”.

I think this is the kind of experience of being a man that TERFs must be referring to when they talk about what it feels like to be a man. They don’t talk about fiction.

I find the idea that you can gain enough insight into what it’s like to be a man through pop-cultural osmosis, but not enough insight into what it’s like to be a woman a bit.. strange, because there is a lot of chick lit out there, and trans women could easily read that. They could be outliers in terms of their media diet. Or does chick lit not describe what it’s like to be a woman? then how do you know that mainstream media describes what it’s like to be a man? But beyond that, surely at least if you pass as male or female and live as male or female, you get additional insight, right? And that’s the kind of insight radical feminists/gender critical feminists care about, right?

There are people who transition and are surprised by what it’s like to be a man or woman, by how they are treated differently, in both directions. It’s like Mary’s Room. Nothing you can read about this can prepare you for first-hand experience. There are bisexual men/women who have dated women/men their entire lives and are surprised by what it’s like to date another man/woman.

Or maybe there is another quality of being a man that is accurately conveyed by pop culture, and I am a man, and I understand pop culture, and I understand what it’s like to live in a male gender role, but some men are the gender equivalent of a p-zombie, performing masculinity without feeling like what it feels like to be a man.

people really think testosterone is this supreme ruler over all other things and that having testosterone makes you evil, brutish, aggressive, able to physically overpower everyone, gives you a permanent unfair advantage in everything, i’ve been taking testosterone for 1.6 years and it just made my boobs smaller. i am no better at arm wrestling than i was before. have you ever considered that men want to point fingers at something they can’t control to absolve themselves of blame for their systematic violence and testosterone is extremely convenient for them and these myths still perpetuate around a hormone that literally everyone has in them

a couple of things that should be all distinguished (not just some of them):

yeah im four years on elfstrogen i can commune with the forest pretty well but my ear points are still coming in. One of my buddys is on tuskosterone for becomi an orc

3 years spironolactgnome

ohh i am so small and under a mushroom

if you are ever out here w the take "society LOVES feminine men and masculine women what about the poor feminine women and masculine men" I need u to know you have entirely submersed yourself in niche online communities and have lost touch w the very real world we live in and you owe every masculine woman and feminine man $100

on the other hand, there's clearly something still going wrong if weird-but-not-that-way people keep ending up lost this deep in microenvironments with, apparently, suffocating queernormativity.

probably for some sufficiently specific intersections, gender conformity is the small minority option, and probably some other part of it is "the classroom is claimed to be 'dominated' by bears when there's just 10% of them"; but most of this I think has to be due to people who are bad at navigating social environments taking too many wrong turns, and ending up somehow sorting themselves into GNC Positivity Bubbles when they had no intention of doing so

or alternately: people being bad at noticing society's background assumptions if they remain unstated — people who would, in fact, benefit greatly from even a moderate but explicit Straight Pride vel. sim.

wait isnt gender over today

buh-bye now

Gender identity is one of those arguments where the boring, traditional, normie answer is actually correct. But because of bad-faith actors making clever-sounding sophistic arguments, you now have to write a 10,000-word essay responding to spurious objections in order to prove it.

This was the thing that killed a lot of my respect for the “Rationalist Community.” They were going to develop the systematic use of reason to the point that they would be immune from the social pressures against clear thought. And the first time, the very first time, that a transparently false new belief system came along, but one backed by people that they have social respect for…bam! More than half of them fell for it.

There’s a point in this, but tbh inversely, my respect for “post-rationalists” or whatever keeps taking a hit every time people decide that “some of this stuff seems dumb and we would like to be able to discuss and criticize it” is not good enough and go straight to “actually everything about the ‘boring, traditional, normie answer’ is completely correct and there does not exist any more nuanced understanding to be had”. [You Are Not Immune To Intellectual Tribalism.jpg]

“Sexological phenomena” do actually show culturally mediated variability if you pay any attention to anthropology, and they do have etiologies or ontologies; this cannot be adequately accounted as simply “insanity” (which I also suppose further tends towards a lack of understanding that even mental illnesses have etiologies and ontologies; no one is ever “just insane” without further details.)

Do I need to write the 10,000 word essay, @tropylium ?

I see a point to what you’re saying, but I don’t know if there’s a way to resolve this without getting down to brass tacks. The following points strike me as beyond argument unless you’re engaging in motivated sophistry:

- Biological sex is a binary, as much as anything in biology is a binary. Biological development messes up occasionally because it’s not perfect, but the intended outcome is creatures who are either entirely male or entirely female. (And this succeeds about 99.8% of the time.)

- Obfuscation of the preceding fact is promoted solely to make the rest of the trans narrative seem less absurd.

- “Gender”, in the sense of a psychological or metaphysical essence shared by women and trans women, does not exist

- “Gender” in the anthropological sense of “social roles derived from biological sex” does exist, but crucially it’s based on SEX, not the nonexistent psycho-metaphysical “gender”.

- Similarly, the words “man” and “woman” are conventionally understood as references to the sex of the body. Normies are correct to regard it as a lie if you call someone with an unambigious male-sexed body a “woman”

- The TERFs are right about the fact that trans ideology is incompatible with classical feminism, since classical feminism held the dissolution of social gender as one of its core goals. Trans people, on the other hand, are invested in the continued existence of “woman” as a social role, since the main thing they want is to be validated as members of that category

I will, however, concede the following:

- The preceding are mostly targeted at the dominant “trans realist” apologetic, ie “trans women are real women”. There is an alternate apologetic centered on radical bodily autonomy, ie “I should be able to have titties if I want to,” which I’m not bothering to respond to for lack of time.

- Gender dysphoria is a real thing, and social transition is one way of relieving it.

(I used “women” and “trans women” throughout this post to save space; all of the same arguments apply with the sex labels reversed.)

Not calling for a 10,000 word version, no; already since I agree that the discussion atmosphere is over-polarised and not in practice, often not even nominally, welcoming of nuance.

As for this 300-word version, closer examination of #4 is where I think most further nuance would come in. #1 is not wrong but kind of has a naturalist-fallacy blind point that feeds into these issues (medical interventions, too, are "biologically real"); and #2 seems to be worded to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Disagreement is generally "obfuscation" and happens "solely" for one ideological reason?

But more to the point, it is already not the same as the 10-word version! The "traditional normie answer", depending also on which traditional normies we're talking about exactly, does not necessarily concede e.g. that gender dysphoria exists at all (may instead e.g. fold it entirely under "crossdressing" and/or "homosexuality"); nor that bodily autonomy does (I think it's obvious the core problem why LGBTQ discourse suffers from a lack of openness esp. towards traditionalists is that traditional normie policies go all the way out to "murdering deviants is fine"); nor that terms like "man" are "conventionally understood as references to the sex of the body", rather than some yet more prescriptivist take to the effect "this usage is the only correct one and no discussion about any other meaning will be admitted".

On locking down on the last point in particular, I can't even blame conservatives too much, as long as spurious sophistry is indeed a core rhetorical weapon of the uh, general anti-reality postmodernism movement; which is currently, for whatever contingent reasons, on the other side of the debate. (I would actually also like the LGBTQ side to generally understand that this is in fact contingent and not a foregone conclusion.)

Gender identity is one of those arguments where the boring, traditional, normie answer is actually correct. But because of bad-faith actors making clever-sounding sophistic arguments, you now have to write a 10,000-word essay responding to spurious objections in order to prove it.

This was the thing that killed a lot of my respect for the “Rationalist Community.” They were going to develop the systematic use of reason to the point that they would be immune from the social pressures against clear thought. And the first time, the very first time, that a transparently false new belief system came along, but one backed by people that they have social respect for…bam! More than half of them fell for it.

There's a point in this, but tbh inversely, my respect for "post-rationalists" or whatever keeps taking a hit every time people decide that "some of this stuff seems dumb and we would like to be able to discuss and criticize it" is not good enough and go straight to "actually everything about the 'boring, traditional, normie answer' is completely correct and there does not exist any more nuanced understanding to be had". [You Are Not Immune To Intellectual Tribalism.jpg]

"Sexological phenomena" do actually show culturally mediated variability if you pay any attention to anthropology, and they do have etiologies or ontologies; this cannot be adequately accounted as simply "insanity" (which I also suppose further tends towards a lack of understanding that even mental illnesses have etiologies and ontologies; no one is ever "just insane" without further details.)

ziz and zack of course have a serious object-level disagreement on what trans people are like and where they come from,

but their disagreement is about what men and women are like. What the natural categories are. Whereas ozy seems to say that who is a man and a woman is a policy, and not a judgment of natural categories. I tentatively disagree with ozy on that, and I guess agree with both ziz and zack about what the issue is.

I agree with Zack that “unnatural categories are optimized for deception”. With the caveat that privacy is included as a special case of this kind of “deception”. And i absolutely do not choose words to optimally communicate information about the people I’m talking about, and in fact regularly choose to hide information about them, and think I am right to do so.

Ziz, Zack and Ozy have all read way more about this stuff than me, but anyway policy-wise at my current state of knowledge is: believe people about what their gender is, and also describe their gender the way they want it to be described

Okay you nerdsniped me into reading a lot of blogs about gender.

And honestly I don’t think the lines between these categorization systems are all that clear.

Like, I don’t see “unnatural categories are optimized for deception” as obviously wrong. But I also don’t think there’s any reason to suspect that a trans-inclusive definition of gender is an unnatural category.

Like the Ozy blog post points out, trans people have way more in common with their chosen gender than the opposite. What pronouns they prefer (and what pronouns your mutual friends recognize), what clothes they prefer to wear, how masculine/feminine they look at a glance…

I’d argue trying to base the category on chromosomes or something is the unnatural category. How often do you do genetic tests on your friends? Versus how often do you use a pronoun to refer to them?

And, sure, privacy plays a role. The chromosomes are none of your business, and it just so happens that everything that is your business lines up with the trans-inclusive definition of gender. But what is your business is also what constitutes the natural category; that’s what makes it a natural category.

So I don’t think Ozy’s position and Zack’s position disagree at the level of these blog posts. Ozy is arguing that trans-inclusive definitions are good policy because they’re natural categories.

This all seems to project way more homogeneity onto trans people than there really is.

Given something like "trans people have way more in common with their chosen gender than the opposite […in…] how masculine/feminine they look at a glance" or, from Ozy, "trans women are overrepresented at lesbian events" or "if you meet a woman [with a shaved head and a fondness for cars who has cried twice in her entire life], you will not experience the slightest confusion about whether she’s a woman" — is this even trying to include people who are trans-but-closeted, or variants like only-out-online etc.?

and so it seems to me that any discussion on the ontology or etiology of transness won't go anywhere much unless we distinguish at least two distinct concepts: "transness-as-a-mental-condition" and "transitionedness". The former e.g. has not much effect on things like social gender (probably some avoidance of heavily gendered activities or presentation, if socially possible) except to the extent that it feeds into the latter. Zack for instance comes off as pretty obviously as having the condition but also as still mostly nontransitioned.

[sidenote: what is he talking about about "Z" only having one widely recognized personal name reading? sure Zacharias and its variants are probably more common, but at least Zoe with its variants is neither highly obscure nor ethnicity-aligned the way something like Zahra or Zaynab or Zoltan would be. per anecdotal evidence indeed also a Stereotypical Trans Name, presumably among the type of contrarians who notice that trans names in A- are overrepresented and instead starts browsing a list of names from the end]

Worth noting is that the corresponding distinction re: sexuality seems to be pretty well established, even if it still seems to be polite to avoid drawing too much attention to it; one can very well simply be gay (experience same-sex attraction), even be out about it!, without being a part of the gay community ("acting gay"); and this option appears to be asymptotically growing in popularity as the acceptance of homosexuality continues to proceed. I mean it's not clear to me if this works as an exact analogy — homosexuality has a primary expression, sexuality qua sexuality (ditto for homoromanticism), that can be in principle independent of its social expression, but by contrast "privately acting out gender" does not strike me as an obviously natural category.

Anyway my main Hot Take on this is that the natural category of "noncisness" not only exists but does not just include people currently analyzed as "trans"; it actually organically includes the entirety of "gender nonconformity" (and is thus basically not a distinct cluster in itself, but more of a bridge connecting pretty much any givn definitions of "manhood / masculinity" vs. "womanhood / femininity").

Gender Identity and Implicature

It is impossible to say that you are a man, that you feel like a man, that you don’t feel like a man, without making a statement about what it means to be a man. Either this is a label society applies to you, or there is a quintessential male experience and you have or haven’t experienced it, or you think other people think all men have experienced it, or “man“ is a political label and you are choosing to align yourself with or against that struggle/interest bloc.

i think this is a fairly common take, and i think it misunderstands the nature of transness? i mean like, whatever, the trans experience is varied, but i think trans identity is often simpler than its perceived. not all trans people are dysphoric, but i dont think i fully “get” the nondysphoric trans experience, so im just gonna talk about my experience

i (and i think a lot of other trans people?) dont “feel like a woman” (whatever that means). what i *feel* is discomfort when i think i am being perceived as a man, or when i am described as being a man, etc, and comfort when i think i am being perceived as a woman, or when i am described as being a woman, etc, and i dont know why. its like…theres no metaphysics here! theres no philosophy of gender here. theres just a phenomenon i cannot control, and which i would like accomodated

this is not to say that people cant or dont create a theoretical scaffolding here, but i dont think its necessary or essential to the phenonmenon of gender identity

Yeah, it’s kinda…I mean, I started feeling (what I later realized was) gender dysphoria when I was a young child and barely understood what gender was. I didn’t have any grand philosophies about what it truly meant to be a man or a woman, I wasn’t making any statements about whether or not there was a quintessential gender experience, I simply felt uncomfortable when people tried to force me into the role that was Girl. I was five. It wasn’t a decision I made.

This concept feels almost like saying “To say you are straight or gay or bi implies that there is some sort of quintessential gay or straight or bi experience” when…and I’m not sure how to phrase this…that idea exists on a totally different level than the level on which people just ARE gay or straight or bi. They’re not telling you anything about their grand unified theory of how sexuality works, they’re just telling you what their own personal experience of sexuality is. You don’t need to have any philosophy of how sexuality Inherently Works in order to just, BE gay and tell people you’re gay.

There's obviously a quintessential gay experience, which is just same-gender sexual attraction; ditto for straightness.

Gender-wise you and 2P are indeed following a different option, which OP has however already provided too, namely "this is a label role society applies to you" (and then disagreeing with that role). That's kind of the point! If you're "reacting to gender as given" then you're conceding that it is in some part externally given and not totally flowing from some kind of intrinsic experience. Not a very strong statement, but a statement regardless (and one that I have still seen many people vehemently disagree with).

Neither of these strikes me as "a philosophy" but they're still clearly worldviews.

[Image description]

Leonard Pollard

My mom was having trouble using they/them prnouns with some friends for a while. One day she said “I think the problem is that I haven’t changed the way I view their gender outside of their pronouncs which adds several extra steps in converting binary pronouns to they/them then conjugating it. So I need to shift how I see them as a gendered person entirely to make using their pronouns easier.” And since then she hardly ever messes up.

[End image description]

A lot of the cis people in my life need this

This is literally why people mess up pronouns and why it’s a problem.

Like the reason you’re not calling me “they” is because you still think of me as gendered the way you initially assumed. It’s not just the pronouns I want you to change, they only serve as an acknowledgement of the gender I want you to adjust your perspective to. If you did that, you wouldn’t struggle with it.

Makes sense, in the “he”/“she” cases at least; in the “they” case though, as a speaker of a language without gendered pronouns, I do wonder if “don’t use gendered pronouns of this person” can be really more difficult for English speakers to grasp than “this person is of the ‘they’ gender”.

Also, corollary: this should also tell you that people are going to have trouble with neopronouns as long as they are basically random syllables instead of conveying some specific meaning.

If you take “Gender is socially constructed“ to its logical conclusion, there are between two and five genders (but no more!) per culture, and a man from India doesn‘t have the same gender as a man from America.

Ok, that’s bizarre. But it works when you swap gender with “gender roles“.

Option #1 gets a bit less bizarre once you consider that the Indian person’s gender is in fact not “man”, in the median case it is आदमी (“his pronouns” are not he/him but वह, etc.) and we just translate this into English as ‘man’.

You’re angry about men dying in wars? Then protest against wars.

You’re angry about men dying on the job? Then demand safer working conditions.

You’re angry about most homeless people being men? Then demand that society help the poor so no one is homeless.

You’re angry about the number of men who commit suicide? Then protest against the belief that bullying is a natural fact of life. Demand that healthcare for disabled people be more accessible.

You’re angry about “ladies’ nights” at bars? Then demand that men stop lusting after drunk women. That’s literally the only reason why ladies’ nights exist.

You’re angry about circumcision? Then protest against the belief that children are the property of their parents instead of autonomous human beings.

You’re angry about men being the most common victims of violence? Then demand that people stop making fun of men for refusing to fight or for showing emotions other than anger.

You’re angry about men being labeled as dangerous? Then protest against racism, ableism, and homophobia. Men of color, disabled men, and gay men are labeled as dangerous on a regular basis and are frequently threatened because of it.

You’re angry about society not caring when a man is assaulted by a woman? Then demand that people stop making fun of boys for “fighting like a girl”, “losing to a girl”, or “getting beat up by a girl”.

You’re angry when women don’t trust men? Then tell society to stop blaming rape victims for trusting men too much.

You’re angry about society not caring when teenage boys are raped by grown women? Then tell other men to stop high-fiving each other and calling him “lucky”.

You’re angry about no one caring when men are raped in prison? Then protest against the belief that prisoners forfeit their basic human rights. Also demand an end to laws against victimless actions that put them in prison in the first place.

And guess what. You wouldn’t be alone, because those “evil social justice warriors” who you hate so much would 100% agree with you.

In short, if you think men’s rights are so important, then go advocate for them instead of advocating AGAINST women’s rights and thinking that’s somehow the same thing. Like, for instance, if you hate that men get drafted and women don’t, let me let y'all in on a little secret: drafting women does FUCK ALL to make the draft nicer to men. So maybe instead of going IT’S UNFAIR WOMEN DON’T GET DRAFTED, consider saying MEN SHOULDN’T BE DRAFTED? Look how much more directly that actually addresses the core problem! Stunning! Something useful might actually get done that makes things better for men! In short, you are NOT a men’s rights advocate when your actual focus is using men’s issues as a reason to dismiss and/or attack women’s issues. (Also, a lot of women’s issues AND men’s issues are caused by the same source - toxic masculinity and/or the patriarchy - and so it’s actually very easy to care about and address both. You know, if you care to.) * Note: despite the gendered language, this post and the person making it are explicitly trans- and nonbinary-inclusive.

“you are only ever allowed to care about men indirectly, no one should center men in their personal activism or talk about men being disprortionally affected or specifically discriminated”

even generously read, this is isomorphic to All Lives Matter

(which, yes, all lives do matter, but is anyone reblogging this post even going to have the same attitude consistently)

I carry this water bottle around on purpose because I know the kids will ask me why I have a pink one. This is how every convo has gone:

Kids: Mr.C Why do you have a pink water bottle?

Me: Because I like pink, why?

Kids: Pink is for girls

Me: Why?

Kids: ummmmmmm

Me: Do you know why it’s for girls?

Kids: No it just is

That’s when I go into a brief lesson about how pink is JUST a color (I am the art teacher so they think I am the authority on colors) for everyone.

As a teacher I am trying my hardest to re-educate these kids in the most non threatening way possible. It will take them a minute to understand that pink isn’t a “girl color”, but a color we can all love

I love you for this

erasing gender essentialism is MEGA IMPORTANT!

“I am the art teacher so they think I am the authority on colors”

Hello yes the color authorities are here we would like you to please stop gendering colors

I would think this is not really going to do much tbh: the kids are not being dumb, they’re picking up that there is indeed a de facto “pink is for girls” rule in society, and if (when) “oh I can too wear pink cos my art teacher said it’s for everyone” does not fly in other situations, there’s a decent chance the end result will be instead “art teacher is unreliable as an authority”

it’s not kids who are policing who is allowed to use pink

— there is a valuable unspoken message being communicated though: the art teacher does get away with using pink, and by implication so would some other people under some circumstances (status? faction? usage in heavy moderation? identity of pink item? willingness to break rules?); it might be more educative to state this case explicitly really, rather than pretending that discrimination doesn’t exist

my crackpot theory for the unnecessarily gendered products is that a lot of people experience gender euphoria and that using “MAN shampoo! for MEN!” is, like, he/him pronouns for people who’ve hedonically adapted to it

The masculine virtue of ‘toughness’ is, in truth, silence and complacency. From Spartans to Nazis to the US army, when you’re told “you need to be tough” what you’re told is “accept any order and any punishment without complaint.” What a great mocking irony that so many men associate “toughness” with independence and autonomy when it builds the lock-step following of orders.

sigh. when i talk about how leftish discourse doesn’t understand masculinity, fails to see it in anything but a negative light, and thus foolishly discards it, this is the sort of thing i’m talking about.

what toughness is, essentially, is tolerating your pain and discomfort without complaint. obviously this can go wrong in various ways, as has already been dissected ad nauseam by critics of toxic masculinity. obviously it’s paramount in the military, because it’s kind of essential in the military for individual pain and discomfort to be subsumed into the purposes of the group.

but even if we assume that no military ever did anything worthwhile, you still have athletes pushing through the pain to accomplish remarkable feats, scientists and explorers the dangers and discomforts of the wild, immigrants going to a new land with nothing to their name, and so on. not to mention the toughness that is necessary to resist overwhelming social pressure, if not outright physical attack, that comes with being nonconformist–which, by the way, includes soldiers who followed their conscience to disobey illegal or immoral orders.

Why is toughness a masculine quality?

Was I not tough when I endured (without complaint, although with a lot of anxiety) 72 hours of non-medicated labor with my firstborn child?

Was I not tough when I labored unmedicated for 14 hours to give birth to my second child, making no noise except for the sound of my breathing?

If women are routinely tough during the very experience that, some might argue, defines them as women, then I fail to see how toughness is a masculine quality alone.

That’s the problem with gendered “qualities” in a nutshell. I know far more whiny men than women. In fact, sometimes I think that policing men’s emotions from childhood became a thing because men are more emotional than women, not less. Yet women are the ones labeled “emotional” and “weak.”

All that said, yes–toughness is valuable. Enormously so. And like all personal qualities/attributes/goals, it must be tempered and balanced by other qualities.

honestly, you’ve read enough of what i’ve written on the topic to have gleaned that when i say “masculine” i don’t mean “exclusive to men.” i’ve said so explicitly a few times.

so why do i insist on gendering it? because masculinity and femininity still exist as conceptual clusters that underlie the way we think and talk about things. because there is a very strong current in leftish social justice that denigrates and dismisses masculinity as such, of which op is one small sample.

because when you say men are whinier and more emotional than women, you understand, on a gut level, that the insult is that much sharper because you’re calling men unmasculine.

The categories of “masculine” and “feminine” are inaccurate and unhelpful. They’re actively harmful, in fact, because so-called “masculine qualities” are over-valued and so-called “feminine qualities” are under-valued and yet _all_ of those qualities are valuable in some way, at some moment in time. All human capacity is valuable, if properly balanced and directed. And yet we punish men for being vulnerable and we punish women for being aggressive etc etc.

If “masculinity” is not exclusive to men, I think we need to liberate it from a term that relates exclusively to men.

you are overestimating our power to “liberate” these concepts. this shit runs deep. you can call it something else, you can try to degender your language, but you’re still going to run along the same well-worn grooves, and a lot more coherently than you realize.

and the people who you’d think would be the most “liberated”–the most “gender don’t real” people–are the ones who are reproducing it the hardest, and they’re pulling the center-left along for the ride. but imagining themselves above it, they fail to notice–or, when they do, fail to see that there’s something wrong and consciously embrace a rejection of masculinity.

anyway, i don’t suppose you’ll take my word for it, but i’m suggesting that you look out for it in popular media. for instance, this. it’s a bit of an outlier in doing so consciously, but notice how easily and naturally it dovetails with standard social-justicey talking points, because the latter are already coherently predicated on opposition to masculinity as such, in the sense that i’m talking about.

i’m not saying “let’s go back to the good old days when men were men and women were women.” i’m saying these concepts rule our lives today, now, even those who think themselves beyond them, and we ignore that at our peril.

I don’t think I agree with @anosognosic entirely about masculinity and femininity, but…

You want to know why certain traits are so gendered? Look at the words people have used to describe men who aren’t tough here in this very thread!

“Rather weak” “emotional” “whiny”. These are what immediately come to mind when you try to imagine a man who isn’t “tough”.

Notice how no one has yet said, “I know lots of women who are tough and lots of men who are emotionally open”. The opposite of “tough man” is still “weak man” to a lot of the people who say that they are trying to abolish gender.

What about the women who aren’t tough? Why would we need to talk about them? After all, toughness is a… What’s that word for things that are especially salient for men…

“Why is toughness a gendered trait when women are so much better at it than men and the men who are bad at it are failures?”

You just answered your own question.

I think a lot of it comes down to a critical error I see all over the place, this idea that something is “only a social construct.” Now, I think gender is a social construct, and I’m actually on board for getting rid of a lot of the modern understanding of gender; certainly at minimum taking away much of the de facto coercive power it exerts over people. My objection isn’t to the “social construct” part, it’s to the “only.” It’s to the idea that socialization is this silly vaporous little thing that we can just cast aside at a moment’s notice, that because we can’t touch or taste it, it has no real power or permanence. This is a load of crap. Socialization is incredibly powerful; in a variety of ways it pretty much rules our lives, and to uproot it, whether that means “pray the gay away”* or “decolonize your sexuality” is often incredibly difficult and painful. This is doubly the case when the socialization accords with the majority view within a society, meaning that most of one’s peers are going to be pushing back against one’s attempts to change one’s own mind and those of others.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t instances when it’s worth making that sort of change; as I’ve said, I think contemporary gender norms are in fact an example of such an instance. But realistically such change can often take generations; it’s not like you read one Judith Butler article and lo, you were blind and now you can see. Our internalization of gender norms happens over the course of decades; should we be surprised that changing the way we think about them on a fundamental level isn’t the work of an evening? Moreover, I think the pressure in a lot of left-wing spaces to present the appearance of total freedom from modern ideas of gender, while it comes from a well-intentioned place, is ultimately counterproductive. It doesn’t solve the problem, merely obfuscates it, and incentivizes people to make cases for why their thinking doesn’t really break down along gendered lines, so as to gain popularity and social capital, irrespective of whether it actually does.

*(For the record, the scientific evidence as I understand it indicates that sexuality is part genes/early biological developmental factors and part socialization; the point here is that even the social component isn’t just something that someone can get out of their head easily, no matter how sincerely they believe it’s sinful or otherwise wrong.)

One of the most useful sentences I have ever come up with is “Drought is a social construct, because there are no droughts in the desert.” Drought consists of not only a low quantity of rain, but also an expectation that there should be more rain. California spends half its years in drought, because we haven’t revised our baseline rain expectations for the state. The Sahara does not have droughts; it’s just always dry.

But equally, an unexpected shortage of water kills people, just as well as it would if it wasn’t tied to a social construct. You can’t explain away a drought and be free of dealing with it.

California is not experiencing drought, it’s experiencing desertification (the key difference being that droughts are expected to pass). Which is a word we indeed have, but which most people aren’t however experimentally familiar with and so they’re going to keep mistaking it for the nonsensical concept of “repeating drought”.

The moral for the gender discussion is that “toughness” is also not a monolith, even if some people will be worse than others at noticing the different contextual variants. E.g. one of them is called “resilience” (toughness against a major but natural obstacle), another “perseverance” (toughness against numerous small-to-medium obstacles), a third “resistance” (toughness against opposite human factions); of which the first two are much less masculine-coded than the last.