and gender is one of those things where it's so deeply culturally ingrained that these categories must have overwhelming significance that most people are deeply reluctant to confront just how arbitrary most of our signifiers of them are. like there's no reason women should have short hair and men should have long hair, or that different sexes should wear different clothing or whatever, but there are still subcultures within our society today that would treat the idea of long hair on a man or a woman wearing pants as a transgressive sexual perversion. a lot of the really deranged behavior from the cis types, like confronting women with short hair when they try to use the women's bathroom, or the transvestigation conspiracy stuff on twitter, is, i really believe, a desperate emotional defense against the creeping awareness that without these arbitrary markers of difference, it would be really hard to tell men and women apart! if men and women generally wore similar hairstyles and clothing styles and had similar patterns of speech and posture and mannerisms, you might guess wrong twenty, thirty, even forty percent of the time! very awkward for you if your cisness and/or straightness is a load-bearing part of your identity. but your neuroses are kind of exhausting for the rest of us.
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
titsay
