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i’m not talking about gender affirming posts for trans guys designed to offset actual dysphoria. i’m talking about the more general ones like “you’re still Manly if you have depression” or “taking care of your health/asking for consent/cooking/etc is actually Super Masculine because xyz”

it’s the same phenomenon as people reassuring straight men that Physical Affection Isn’t Gay, like yes you’ve identified the symptoms of the problem, that men won’t discuss or do certain things bc they are terrified of not seeming Manly Enough™ but it isn’t getting to the root of the problem

which in this case is that patriarchy draws a line around women and anything associated with women and calls it tainted, lesser, weak, foolish, crazy, worthless. And so men don’t want to be associated with those terrible Womanly things because maybe that would mean that they were just as tainted, lesser, weak, foolish, crazy, or worthless as women are.

and insisting that some of these ‘tainted’ things are actually Manly After All doesn’t solve the root problem. even if you succeed there will always be other important things men are cutting themselves off from because they don’t want to be tainted by the association with women.

so like even if your only priority is men being whole and healthy people, even if you don’t give a shit about women, if your goal is to make it okay for men to cry and be vulnerable and seek help and live full and happy lives as complete human beings who aren’t constantly dividing and subsuming and destroying vital pieces of themselves they don’t think are Manly enough –

if you want to let men just live without the pressure to constantly prove themselves Manly Enough –

targeting misogyny is just the only viable way to do that.

hegemonic masculinity requires a ‘lesser’ thing to set itself up in opposition to, something that’s hated and despised and demeaned that men have to be trained to try to not be like. Without misogyny the whole thing collapses. There’s no pressure to be Manly™ if there’s no shame in not being a man.

That seems fairly pointless from a liberation standpoint; it challenges nothing, and adds very little. Men in this perspective are still entitled to power over women, but the things they must do to maintain that power are slightly different and perhaps a little less violent.

The idea that men are and must be masculine, the concept of gendering certain traits as Manly and others as Womanly, is inherently a patriarchal construction and any attempt to expand these categories or salvage some kind of healthy way to use them is doomed.

Courage, integrity, kindness, all these things people are currently championing as “healthy masculinity” - these traits can and do exist in people of all genders. When we urge men to behave in prosocial ways, it’s ultimately counterproductive to appeal to their desire to identify with hegemonic masculinity, because we’re still, in that case, working with and upholding the gender hierarchy.

Men are capable of doing good without being rewarded with the power that comes with a higher station in the gender hierarchy, and it is both unnecessary and counterproductive to promise this reward by identifying good behaviours as “masculine”.

It is unnecessary and counterproductive to gender the traits required to engage with others in a positive way. And it’s ultimately more useful to think of ourselves as human beings trying to live our values, instead of trying to redefine divisive and hierarchical gender roles into something healthy and progressive.

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To be somewhat hyperbolic, it’s a belief that males and females are fundamentally different animals somehow— this often accompanies a belief that people with different skin pigmentation are also fundamentally different animals, unsurprisingly, which is why so many transmisogynists are also staggeringly racist.

I point out the TERF connection specifically because that ideology is deeply rooted in the belief that women are inherently physically inferior and inherently morally superior to men. Men are natural predators, women are natural victims, but also if women ruled the world there’d be no war because they’re biologically better at statecraft I guess.

Human beings are some of the least sexually dimorphic mammals on the planet. There is next to no actual physical difference between the traditional sexes that cannot be linked to culture— ie girls are widely discouraged from doing sports, especially sports which require upper body strength, and thus have less upper body strength on average. But female athletes who spend time developing upper body strength close the gap created by cultural upbringing and will have the same upper body strength as men.

There is no skill where the least skilled male will still match or exceed the most skilled female. There is no “biological advantage.” Just different skill levels and weight classes. That’s why feminists were arguing so hard for getting rid of gender segregation in sports back in the 90’s, before transmisogyny (and especially transmisogynoir) dragged the conversation back to the 50’s.

The few differences there actually are between a male sexed and a female sexed body can be almost totally reversed by influencing ONE hormone. Our bodies are so similar and so ready to switch sides on a dime that people sexed as female can straight up grow a phallus. It’s so easy to develop breast tissue that 35% of men experience gynocomastia— people sexed as male developing breasts— at some point in their lives, and estimates show 70% of adolescent boys will experience it during puberty.

We have no idea how prevalent most intersex conditions really are because they generally have so little influence on the person’s life or health that unless some other condition causes them to get a full body mri or similar, they will never know! The mortician embalming your dead body may be the only person who ever knows you had fully developed ovaries or internal testes.

We are the same animal! Our bodies are the same!Our brains are the same! Our bones are the same! Even our organs are largely the same!

Any road that starts from the assumption that you are fundamentally, biologically distinct from another nearly identical member of the same species will lead you nowhere but pseudo scientific justification for bigotry.

Once you have accepted the premise that your own opposite sexed sibling is a different kind of animal than you, you are primed to accept that explanation for any other demographic group that it has historically benefited someone for you to despise.

Bioessentialism is bullshit pseudoscience.

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