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I think you’re on to something and it does kinda dovetail with something I’m noticing on the other end of the spectrum— what they think a woman is, or what it feels like to be an “internally female being”. The thing I’m seeing is a conflation of the trappings of femininity— dresses, domestic activities, an femininity in the aesthetic choices of media and decorative art. Now, there are women like that, and women who aren’t. Most natal women don’t do that stuff, and certainly don’t do it all the time. And for that matter, a lot of women like and even play sports, like masculine-coded media, wear t-shirts and jeans and skip the makeup.
What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender. And it’s really weird because we don’t do this with any other identifying choices. I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with (I can even identify with the cultural aspects of other ethnic groups and still keep my racial identity— nobody has ever questioned whether an Americanized Japanese descended person was still Asian, or whether an Otaku was White). Gender somehow is a uniquely binary situation where you either identify 100% with all the trappings of culture and aesthetics or you surrender the man or woman card.
But then I think a lot of how modernity has commodified identity bears some blame here. Identity in the West, outside of race is largely a set of choices to be made, which isn’t how identity worked for most of human history. For most of history, you were given almost everything in your identity, then you lived up to that. You didn’t save the princess because you wanted to be a knight. You were born into that warrior caste and thus behaved like a knight. And even if you didn’t, you were still a knight, just a bad one. But if you have to be a good knight, perfectly chivalrous and brace and awesome with a sword to be a knight, then what do you do with a bad knight? And if being a knight is a choice, might a bad knight simply go be something else?
One thing that applies to those who transition into gender or into Christianity is that the convert must demonstrate zeal, while those born into a religion can be lax. I'm going to use Islam because it is more racialized in America. There is nothing in the Quran about race, my blonde hair and blue eyes qualify me for Islam as easily as my Pakistani friend. But our behavior will be judged differently. If we both move through the same mosque community, I obviously a convert and he obviously born into the faith, I will be held to a higher standard before being taken seriously. If he drinks a little, eats some bacon occasionally, misses prayers sometimes, people might say he is a bad Muslim but they will not doubt that he is a Muslim. If I convert, and then I keep drinking and eating pork, most people would say I never converted at all, that it's all a farce, a put on.
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FWIW this is basically the exact rift between people who are "trans" and people who are "gender nonbinary" (or queer or otherwise gender nonconforming) in the LGBT world. I remember back on tumblr around 2010 a lot of gay/queer people were quietly shading transgenderism because being trans basically reinforces the gender binary whereas being queer/NB is something outside the binary. You don't hear about it much these days because trans is such a mainstream issue and people who aren't fully on the trans positive bandwagon are labeled TERFs or whatever, but the issue isn't really fully resolved.
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