I understand that gender is made up and doesn’t matter. There is nothing girly or manly.

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

You would think that, wouldn’t you?

In fact words all those words are a bunch of gibberish and neither the world nor reality works like that. I can just question the vague and often circular premises of that argument and we’re back to square zero.

Not against the sentiment, but you’re never going to get anywhere with that pseudoacademic bullshit.

Edit: hahaha just keep proving my point. You’re the same as them- dogmatic fanatics with no arguments that hold up for shit.

Truly. Thanks for being a decent human being.

So what you’re saying is, it will involve being painted, no matter what?

Hey that’s for real man

I imagine you’d also support her in being a man if she wanted to

You can’t gatekeep being nonbinary. Not unless you’re prepared to define it explicitly, which will exclude many people - and not everyone will agree with your definition either.

Nothing is anything, did people forget that these are all completely nonsense words with no connection to reality? No matter how scientific and very legal very cool semantic concepts you come up with it won’t change reality one fucking bit. Non binary… Nobody gives a FUCK, it has no correlation with ANYTHING in the Universe, it’s just another shit pseudophilosophical concept being shoved down everyone’s throat like it’s some kind of objective reality.

It’s metaphysics, and “you people” (yes, YOU PEOPLE) suck at it.

The shit you find in your belly hole while navel gazing is not worth shit.

Define ‘these people’?

Historically less so. Even back in the 80s lots of girls i knew and thought of as tom boys. Where forced to dress and act girlie by there parents. Further back you go more limits there were.

This is why I like it when I see men wear skirts/kilts, wear eyeliner and/or paint their nails. It’s not something I’m into but I think it’s cool when I see it.

I’ve had that discussion before.

Gender roles, and thus gender presentation, are cultural for the most part. Some are common enough to multiple cultures that it approaches being just human culture.

But even in western (us, canada, europe) cultures, there have been periods where the presentation of masculinity would be considered feminine in other eras. So gender roles & presentation aren’t fixed in a given culture.

If I, regardless of what my genitals are, present as a man, then I am effectively the same as whatever a man is in my culture. If that also includes taking on the gender roles of “man”, then that’s another layer.

However, this also means that when enough men shift their presentation and roles, anyone holding to the previous roles and presentation are now “less” a man in the cultural sense. It really, truly is a majority rules situation, and the minority are what get relabeled (usually).

The more men that reject an arbitrary paradigm of masculinity, the more we shift to an open, loose definition of what is and isn’t masculine, with the eventual possibility that gender becomes so loose in definition that masculine and feminine become irrelevant terms, if the labels also lose relevance to the majority. And I believe that if enough people reject fixed gender paradigms, the terms would inevitably cease to matter.

I mean, we’ve already started to add qualifiers. We have traditional gender roles as a specific thing as separate from current gender roles.

This isn’t to deny that hormones and genetics will push people into behaviors that are linked to gender because they’re mostly linked to sex. But even with those pressures, we usually have room how we express those behaviors.

It’s why I always tell folks, particularly younger folks, to not worry much about labels. Be who you are, as long as who you are isn’t a douche, and you’ll eventually find the labels that feel right. And there’s a good chance you’ll end up shifting your self over time anyway, which is fine. As long as you don’t fixate on labels as defining the person, the self, you can freely shift labels as the self shifts. It’s when you pick a label and think that you have to fit it in all ways, forever, that you run into trouble.

So, fuck yeah. If you feel “girly”, be girly. Enjoy that shit. Be your best self. It’ll eventually work out :)