Comment by nicoburns

> For argument's sake, what if your subjective experience of being a man were just so ingrained in you that you never consciously engaged with it? That could manifest the same way ("i don't 'feel like a man', that isn't how being a man works for me"), but now would you have a place in the "feelings" model you've established as exclusionary.

I have considered this quite extensively because this seems to be what most people assume my experience is like. But I'm pretty sure I really don't have such feelings. One of the key things that made me sure of this is seeing other (cis) men and women justify or explain things in terms of their gender. I have never felt like I wanted to do something because I'm a man. And I've always hated when someone describes me as man and implies that means anything more than I have a certain physiology, even if the implication is a positive one.

This is very different to for example my experience of sexuality. I'm heterosexual, and I can understand what it is like to be gay in reference to my own sexuality. I have feelings of attraction towards female people, and even though I don't experience such feelings towards male people, it's pretty easy for me to imagine what that would be like.

My experience of gender seems more like what I imagine asexual people's experience of sexuality must be like: something completely alien to them that they can only come to understand through others' descriptions and explanations.

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> I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.

Because it implies that "being a man" has something to with masculinity. I am very much not masculine (I do have a masculine side, but so do even the girliest of cis women so that doesn't mean much - but if anything I'm more feminine). I am comfortable being labeled a man only so long as it doesn't come with an implication of masculinity, which in my lifetime thus far it largely hasn't (I was born in the early 90s). Now if I describe myself as a man people start making assumptions about how I feel inside (as you did in your comment!)

What I want is a label that I can use to describe my cluster of male physiological traits without implying anything about my feelings, behaviour or personality. I'm not hung up on that being "man", but I would like there to be some word to describe that aspect of myself and others.

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> Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable

Sure, I get that. But "people who present as feminine" isn't code for "trans and cis women" either. It would include men (cis and trans) who present in a certain way, and exclude women (cis and trans) who don't. And the distinction can be important. For example, one of the arguments in the infamous "bathroom debate" is that trans women can be unsafe in men's bathroom. And I think this argument has a lot of merit: it's important that everyone is safe while they use the bathroom. However, the group of people who are at risk in men's bathrooms is not actually "trans women", but "people who are presenting as feminine": a trans woman who was presenting in a masculine way would be perfectly safe because nobody would suspect that they aren't a man, whereas a cis man presenting in a feminine way (say wearing a dress and makeup) would not be because there are prejudiced people who are violent towards males transgressing gender norms, and these people typically won't stop to check what someone's gender identity is before attacking.

I don't see how saying "women" when you mean "people presenting as female" is any less egregious than saying "women" when you mean "people who menstruate". I feel like we probably shouldn't use "women" in either situation, but my opinion on that is not super strong. What does really get to me is the hypocrisy of people who cry bloody murder when "women" is used in place of "people who menstruate" but will vigorously defend their right to use "women" in place of "people presenting as female".

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> I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."

I think the conflict tends to arise when I'm not that interested in their gender feelings / label, or ask them to clarify what that means to them (because they don't correspond to anything in my own experience and thus aren't really very meaningful to me) but I am still interested in things like their hormone levels (because they still have an impact on perception and behaviour), and I think that trans people ought to acknowledge their physiologies whatever they may be, even if they don't like them. I personally don't see how that invalidates their experience. I'm not denying that they have the gender they say they have. I'm just saying that that doesn't mean much to me.

I'm all on board with a "whatever label works for you" model right up until people start arguing that we ought to organise society on the basis of those labels, or start basing our laws on them. Surely at that point we need to be working with labels which have a single objective meaning rather than labels which everyone interprets differently to each other.