Help me settle a bet plz
I voted 6 because to my mind being a man everything I do and am is what a man does and is
Yeah like I've defined my own masculinity, so I'm pretty cool w my gender.
If masculinity is 2000-2008 male gender tho, then I'd probably be a 4 or 5.
Oh yeah see, this is why I put 5. Still feel like nail polish (black even!) is so taboo
My comrade, we must praise the emo vanguard for normalizing that.
The macho man has cried and thousand times and he'll probably cry some more. He's flown with the eagles and slithered with the snakes and been just about everyplace in-between. Oh yeah brother
I've never felt like I'm anything but what was assigned at birth. On the other hand I'm still not sure I understand what a gender is supposed to be. What is a "man?" What is a "woman?" Can any of you define those things? Because I sure can't.
Think about the first time you heard your voice recorded. It probably felt wrong and you probably felt some sort of discomfort. There was nothing wrong with your voice. It’s how everyone else heard you all the time. But you heard it and you expected to hear yourself and you heard something that was just… off.
That experience, the experience of misaligned identity, isn’t something that can be recognized by analyzing the formants or resonance of your voice. It’s not a property of the voice. You might be able to pull apart the frequencies between a bone mic recording and a room mic recording of you saying the same thing and see what makes the resonance different. But the experience exists subjectively. You couldn’t look at a frequency and say, “that’s the one that made me anxious”
Actually I've never had that recording discomfort. My voice sounds different from inside than from outside just like everyone else's, but it has never sounded 'wrong' to me. Though I get that's a very common experience and understand where you're coming from.
That doesn't really get me any closer to understanding what a man is supposed to be.
Dammit, and that’s the first time I used that analogy too. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help
I'm trying to understand though. Do you mean that being a man is kinda just vibes like the unclear qualities which make someone happy or unhappy with the sound of their voice? That to be a man is to be content with the idea of being seen as a man?
Because though I can't speak from experience, I feel like I could equally easily accept being seen as a man or woman. Like if I grew up being told I was a man and that some men just happen to have my body parts and that I'm expected to be boyish/manly and take an interest in masculine things, I don't think that would ever have made me uncomfortable. I'd have the same mix of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine interests that I have now and probably have eventually settled on presenting my appearance basically the same way I do now. But I'd go by different pronouns.
That to be a man is to be content with the idea of being seen as a man?
I think that’s pretty spot on. Anything more specific is both culturally and personally contextual. I’ve said elsewhere in the thread that, as an AMAB person, I got a lot out of reading the writings of trans men. Just put my conception of masculinity into perspective.
I also personally wasted a lot of time early on in my gender exploration intellectualizing the concept of gender. Some of it was useful. A lot of it wasn’t. Gender exploration is both easiest and hardest when you’re just trying stuff out.
Ok but then my mind still loops back around to the question, what is a man? I guess me. By this logic I'm a man. Because I don't feel like I would have any discomfort being seen as a man.
But if that is true, then I don't think men are real. If I'm a man then man is a meaningless concept.
If I’m a man then man is a meaningless concept.
Yeah, it kinda is. There's nothing about your biology that assigns you pronouns or clothing styles or behaviour and so on. The division between "man" and "woman" is completely arbitrary.
"Man", "masculinity", "gender", these are just weird social labels. There's nothing real about them
Ok so if men and women aren't real and have no definition and no meaning then what is a trans person and why aren't we just advocating doing away with the concept of gender entirely
Like, currency is arbitrary and "not real" too but if you ask me what a dollar is its not hard to explain: a dollar is an arbitrary numerical unit often represented by a government-regulated piece of paper which I can trade with other people to acquire things.
So what is a man?
Admittedly I'm not an expert, but my understanding of gender is that it is a class hierarchy (possibly the first) that divides a population based on reproductive labor. Patriarchy--through all the usual suspects colonialism, capitalism, etc.--has become the dominant form of gendered relations. So a man is the the gendered class which--in Patriarchy--controls & benefits from reproductive labor while women are subjugated and perform the majority of reproductive labor (child-rearing and such). A queer person is an individual who does not fit this binary.
I've been meaning to read more about gender in particular lately, but this is a good resource for getting a breakdown of it imo. https://libcom.org/article/gender-accelerationist-manifesto
So a man is the the gendered class which–in Patriarchy–controls & benefits from reproductive labor
So trans men... aren't men? Because they dont control or benefit from any partucular structure of this society?
For transparency, I'm trying to find any definition of man which cannot apply to some women and does not exclude some men, or any definition of woman which cannot apply to some men and does not exclude some women. So far, this one doesn't seem satisfactory.
Okay, as I understand it mostly no and sort of yes. It's primarily due to the social element; gender is a socially realized phenomena that only 'exists' within each individual. For a Trans man, his identity has been realized to himself at the individual level this is fundamental for gender identity; however, because gender is socially created, they are only socially recognized as a man if the people around them do so. This will put them at odds with not only Patriarchy but capitalism (capitalistic production relies on reproductive labor of women for the purpose of more labor i.e. for capitalists, women exist to birth and raise workers) and, more often than not, bar them from society at large, subject them to violence, etc. Trans men want to and could perform the typically masculine roles in society (thereby becoming men or if we're being overly pedantic then possibly an adjacent masculine gender that is for all intents and purposes a man) you have certain societies that aren't a binary, such as having two masculine and two feminine genders, (see the Bugi people of Indonesia for prime example) that reinforce that the patriarchal binary is certainly bunk. Cis men have a vested interest in maintaining patriarchy so will tear down Trans men (and any queer person) as it disrupts the binary/their position, a portion of women have also sided with patriarchy/reaction for reasons that would take some getting into. As gender is socially realized, it can be pretty nebulous to pin down, but I think approaching it through a class lens as many feminist and queer theorists have is a pretty solid foundation you just have to be wary of terfs (as with many things radically feminist).
That probably didn't provide a satisfying answer for finding a definition, but I personally don't think there is a satisfying answer. It's possible there is one out there, but I just think women are women who say they are women and men the same, society has just barred some of them from performing their preferred set of reproductive labor.
this is the 'me rambling a little bit before I go to sleep' edit: I think it's also important to re-emphasize that the definitions I provided were for Patriarchy, i.e. how men and women are expected to operate under patriarchy and often do but not 100% of the time when living in said system. Such definitions don't operate so cleanly once different class oppressions meet. A bourgeois woman probably doesn't perform significant reproductive labor as they can afford to hire a nanny, tutor, surrogate, etc. but she almost certainly has a different set of gendered expectations that would be socially recognized as typically feminine. So an analysis of gender also requires analysis of race, economic position, disability, and so on to truly understand the 'definition' of one's gender.
why aren’t we just advocating doing away with the concept of gender entirely
:I-was-saying: im advocating for doing away with the concept of gender entirely
That doesn't really seem to fit the majority accepted opinion here though. If someone here said "I am a man" and you relied "no you're not that doesn't exist" I doubt you'd get very much support lol
I am also comfortable being a man, but I get along better with women on average and often get perplexed at "lad" behaviour when I encounter other men.
So I put a 4. I am a man, but not masculine in the way that my environment is. Never really had a male role model either, so I guess that is part of it.
I was like how the fuck does someone just have that emote on lock but then I saw it
If you imagine these as places, 6-land, especially masculine 6-land, is pretty bleak. Lots of sports bars and sports cars. Do I, a cis man, have to have some degree of identification with an abstract notion of womanhood to merit citizenship in 5-land or can I at least get a tourist visa because I see the extremes of dudebroness and can say that I'm at least 20% not-that?
This is where I'm at too. I feel like a man pretty thoroughly but the far end of that masc spectrum is so unappealing to me. I'm just a dude being bro, I don't care for many traditionally masculine things, I'm a goddamn nerd and I like it that way
I don't think the traits have to be "exclusive" to just any gender or sex. Similarly to how most passenger planes have wheels, but so do cars. But they still have their own features that make them what they are
if genders aren't different why do we have more than zero or one and how could anyone tell?
I don’t remember the proper name, but there’s a philosophical idea called something like cluster properties. Like think of a piece of cloth. There is no one thread that touches all the other threads. And no thread has exclusive contact with another thread. If you remove a thread, it will begin to unravel, but taken as a group, they pull each other tighter into a single entity.
they pull each other tighter into a single entity.
:cat-confused:
Well, traits demonstrably aren't exclusive. Being assertive, dominant and guarded against aggression are traits that are classically gendered masculine, yet women can have all of these qualities and in fact every woman has some degrees of these. It's just that this kind of confidence and defendedness is more pronounced in most men. And while being empathetic, open and nurturing are classically gendered feminine, men are absolutely capable of empathy, of opening up to people, of raising kids or taking care of their elderly parents. Some men even moreso than some women. It's just that women in general find themselves more at ease in these roles than men. These are sliding scales, not absolutes, and the prevalence of certain slider positions is not a clear dichotomy, it's more like two overlapping bell curves.
BTW, i've picked these traits specifically because they are massively affected both by hormone levels and gender roles. You always have outliers in regards to which people possess these traits, but thanks to me being trans, i could do a direct A/B test on myself and see how changing my gender role and changing my biological sex altered where i fall on this axis. When my egg cracked, when i realized my gender identity wasn't man and that i did never want to be seen as a man again by others, there was a very sudden, very complete shift from the need to guard myself against the outside world and hide vulnerabilities towards opening up to others and allowing myself to be non-threatening. That became even more pronounced when i got on estrogen and testosterone blockers and accquired a female hormone profile that way. Psychologically, that shift from a lone wolf mindset to a caretaker mindset, backed up by me fully feeling that shift on an endocrinological level, was the biggest change in both my medical and social transition.
And yes, sliding scale means there's a degree of mutual exclusivity here. When you want to become more open, you need to become less walled off from a potentially hostile environment. When you want to be seen as less of a potential danger to others and be welcomed and trusted the way women are welcomed and trusted, that means you need to give up a massive chunk of the security and respect that comes with being read as a man. When you want to become more empathetic, you suffer more when others around you suffer and are less able to remain level-headed and calming when friends experience distress, because their pain tangibly becomes your own pain. You literally need to let your guard down for this. And when you want to toughen up, you need to develop the ability to close yourself off from people. You can alter these stances to some degree, i'm obviously more open with close friends than out in public, but there's limits to that flexibility.
I think is a common approach, to list out exclusive characteristics of the category and then look for the presence of absence of those characteristics. It is, of course, fruitless for anyone who lives under patriarchy and isn’t interested in upholding oppressive gender norms. It’s so much more about recognition and identity, which is both easier and harder.
Another pitfall is to fail to differentiate between presentation and identity. There was a long time where I preferred to present as traditionally masculine, but my identity was always less binary than the presentation would lead people to assume. Gender’s just hard.
It would be interesting if anyone who voted 0-1 but still considers themselves cis could chime in
At least one person said they thought the scale was reversed and just answered opposite of their intention. I’m even surprised at the number of 3’s and 2’s, tbh
I can’t at this point. I forgot to change the options. Sorry about that.
Sorry if this comes across as rude, but i feel like it’s one of the easiest ways for me to explain to others how easy it is to be a trans ally.
As a cisgender guy who does not know many “outed” trans / non binary people , I think I just found it so obvious that it was legitimate as the issue came up.
We have evidence throughout history of homosexuality, people literally born with both genitalia, people with mental illness, people with disabilities both physical and mental.
But suddenly we’re gonna draw the line at people having gender fluidity? Like that is the one ‘mutation’ that can’t possibly exist outside of modern social concepts?
I don’t understand how people can’t see that it is legitimate and biological from the simple fact that millions of humans have been born slightly different from the norm in every corner of the world for the entirety of human history.
Also I am a movie nerd and “Paris is Burning” made me understand at a more emotional level.
I think I'd need a definition of what "completely aligned with assigned gender" means to be able to answer this. I'm definitely a woman and have never questioned that, not even a little bit. So a 6 would make sense, right? But then I start wondering what that means and if I have to be hyperfeminine for that to make sense, and then I feel like we're getting into gender determinism and I don't like that at all.
It’s really interesting seeing cis people wrestling with the same questions I’ve talked through with so many trans friends. Wish I had a definitive answer but I don’t. That’s why so much of it is about self-identification at the end of the day
Edit: maybe “comfortably aligned with assigned gender” would be a better phrasing
I think the closest I've ever come to understanding how a trans person feels was in a Contrapoints (I know, controversial) video where she responded to a TERF asking why she couldn't just live as a feminine man, and Natalie was like, "I don't know, why don't YOU life as a feminine man?" and I immediately thought "absolutely not."
Yup. That’s really all it is. I didn’t think I was trans for a long time because I had that reaction to being a woman. Then I realized I also had that reaction to being a man. Can be a little harder to recognize when you’re used to it.
One way to think about it is to try to imagine a world where you were the same person, but you had been assigned a different gender. Someone who's a 3 might be equally comfortable if they had been either AMAB or AFAB, and could live as a cis person in either case. Someone who's a 6 would probably feel a strong drive to transition to their current gender.
There should be an option for I don't think about my personal gender alignment ever and when asked to there's nothing there
It’s hard to capture this properly. There’s a big difference between an agender person saying, “I don’t feel my gender ever” and a cis person saying it, which happens pretty often, but for different reasons. The difference is that cis people are more likely to have their gender passively affirmed by society, whereas an agender person experiences the dissonance resulting from being treating as if their gender exists when it doesn’t. It’s kinda the difference between not being conscious of your kidneys because they’re functioning normally and not being conscious of your kidneys because they’ve been removed.
And then of course there are likely people with an agender experience who haven’t gone through that self discovery yet and consider themselves cis. Truth is the gender spectrum is a massive oversimplification.
Thank you for the effort-post, but I think you're missing my point maybe? Like I am aware of everything you wrote but that's not really what I'm getting at.
My point is there's a difference between thinking "I feel like a man" and thinking "the category 'man' doesn't have any meaningful characteristics or boundaries to me, beyond the understanding that some people impose their expectations of their conception of 'manness' on other people."
I think I relate to what you’re saying. When I used to try and think of manhood without patriarchal toxicity, it was literally an empty category. This was distressing to me, though, because I considered myself a man at the time. I found a lot of value in reading the writing of trans men. The way that trans men construct masculinity put a lot into perspective for me, I guess. It’s not a fence, it’s a beacon.
No, that's a perfect alignment with gender. I'm saying the concept has no valence for me personally at all.
To be honest I found this whole poll confusing as I thought 6 was what cisgendered meant.
That’s kind of the point. Anyone scoring 5 or below would be perfectly welcome calling themselves trans. Anyone not scoring a 0 or a 6 would be welcome to call themselves non-binary. But many people who consider themselves cis aren’t strictly aligned with their birth gender, either.
Anyone scoring from 1-5 is welcome to the label of non-binary if it makes them feel more like themselves :hexbear-non-binary:
Yes, anyone can call themselves anything. It would be odd for someone to call themselves non-binary if they feel they 100% align to a binary gender, but I don’t have a way to see into people’s heads to know that that’s the case and would never question someone like that. This is more a statement of encouragement for people who feel that they aren’t allowed to claim a label that would otherwise make them happy because they don’t see themselves as “non-binary enough”.
The amount of times a cis person has told me, “but I don’t feel like my gender either” 😭😭😭
I feel 100% like I match the gender assigned at birth but it would still be fun to try out the other side for a few weeks. It would be like The Holiday with Kate Winslet (you may know her from Avatar), except instead of moving to LA for a few weeks it would be having a dick and doing a helicopter. Like, it would be fun to know how the other half lives, right?
pros: being able to helicopter
cons: having to wiggle it like crazy to get the last drops of pee out at the urinal
truly the struggles of having a dick are immense
A man is someone who drinks a cold one with the boyz. If you drink cold ones with the boyz ....you might be a man !
