Thread by @LaraAdamsMille1

Trans-identified people aren’t the enemy.

Men aren’t the enemy.

Liberals aren’t the enemy.

GENDER is the enemy, and all of us can do something about that.

“Man” and “woman” must become ideas large enough to contain entire human beings.

Gender is the enemy.

I feel like I should clarify what I mean by “gender,” because that’s a word a lot of people use in different ways.

To me, gender = social expectations, rules, and norms assigned to a person on the basis of their sex.

I’m not suggesting we throw all the dresses and baseball gloves into a pile and burn them.

The dress isn’t gender. The idea that dresses and vaginas are intrinsically related? THAT is gender.

Society CREATED the association between dresses and women.

Gender is CONSTRUCTED.

Because I love losing followers, I’ll mention here that I believe there are some aspects of behavior that are influenced by biological sex. Women and men, to my mind, aren’t just human Mr. Potato Heads with different genitals attached.

But here’s the thing - We don’t know and CAN’T know what those differences are.

We can’t know because it’s impossible to create a real control group.

The best way I know how to explain this is by talking about airplanes, meteorology, and 9/11.

After the WTC was attacked in 2001, all civilian air travel was halted for four days.

This created an opportunity that weather researchers never get —

They got to take measurements of climate conditions in the absence of aircraft vapor trails.

And, according to their readings, there were subtle temperature differences when planes weren’t in the sky. But they never would have been able to test that if that extraordinary set of circumstances hadn’t come about.

People, we have a sky FULL of gender.

Sex-based expectations come into play before a child is even born. If you have nausea during your pregnancy, in the US they’ll guess that it’s a girl. Lots of kicks? A strong boy!

People treat INFANTS differently based on their sex. Girls are picked up more if they cry. Boys are played with more roughly, but dressed in more comfortable clothes.

All this happens before a kid can even speak or move about on their own.

Gender is their first food.

So where does a control group come from?

How much of that boy’s boisterous energy comes from his higher levels of testosterone, and how much is from his parents subconsciously encouraging him to take more risks than his sisters when he plays?

And even if we could determine with some degree of certainty what behavioral differences tend to occur between the sexes, that information would have no value in application, because trends across populations don’t necessarily break down to accurate predictions for individuals.

Because there ARE a great many timid men and tenacious women, it wouldn’t be useful to proceed as though a specific woman WILL be timid, or a specific man WILL be aggressive.

There’s too much variation within the population to apply observed trends to specific people.

So, all that being the case, the ONLY way to give both men and women the space to truly be their whole selves is to not make assumptions of what their sex will or won’t incline them toward.

Is a man doing it? Then it’s manly.

Is a woman doing it? Then it’s womanly.

I am a woman, so *I* get to demonstrate what a woman is like.

Men and women are WHOLE PEOPLE, and we contain ALL the things we are, regardless of whether our culture has learned to expect or allow them.

So, men in dresses? Sure, if you want to. Women fixing cars? Why not?

The only way to define the difference between men and women that doesn’t make insulting judgments or define narrow roles is by biology.

And we do actually have SUBSTANTIAL biological differences. It’s not just reproductive organs (although creating life is no minor detail!).

“All males are about 99.9 percent identical when it comes to their genomes, the biological entities that carry the codes for traits passed down through generations of parents and their children.”

medicine.yale.edu/news-article/1…

“That means that any two males differ by only 0.1 percent at the genetic level, and these differences account for all of the variety preset in males before they begin to develop in their mothers and then the outside world.”

medicine.yale.edu/news-article/1…

By contrast, women share “only 98.5 percent of their genetic makeup with men. That’s 15 times greater than the difference between any two human males, who are about as genetically similar to a male chimpanzee as to a human female.”

medicine.yale.edu/news-article/1…

That’s fascinating to me, and medicine is in its infancy when it comes to understanding how all those genetic differences between the sexes play out.

There is a distinct biological difference between men and women.

BIOLOGICAL.

Everything else is just politics and pheromones and bullshit our parents taught us.

I remember the first time I was on my own and had to assemble furniture. You’d have thought that a screwdriver required a penis to operate, how intimidates I was by the job.

When I bought my house, I replaced the pilot assembly in the water heater myself.

I learned to sharpen the blade on my lawnmower, and, when I drop my car off to be repaired, I generally can tell the mechanic exactly what’s malfunctioning.

And I’m a woman.

I also own maybe 50 dresses. I’m a fiber artist, and I sew my kids’ Halloween costumes. I’ve spent more than a decade pregnant or nursing.

I’ve run long races, lectured at professional conferences, planted gardens, braided hair, built furniture, and sold sex.

And gender never did anything but get in the way.

It made it hard to lead at work because, when women state things plainly, people think we’re bitches.

It made it hard to go to school, because girls are supposed to be thin and stylish, and I wasn’t, and I paid for it.

It made me afraid to learn things I needed to learn how to do (like assemble furniture).

It made me afraid to leave bad relationships because I thought I needed men for things I didn’t actually need them for.

It made me hand my power over to others.

And I know it hurts men, too. I know this because I’ve dated men, and the wounds they’ve been given for the sake of gender are things they carry forever. Those wounds hurt their relationships, their family, and their children forever.

Men who’ve been raised under burdensome gender expectations develop a NEED for women that isn’t any more reasonable or healthy than my fear of putting together furniture.

Women must act as mediators, almost midwives, for the emotions those men have been taught to fear.

And it doesn’t create some healthy, harmonious balance between the sexes.

There is no useful purpose for people growing up afraid and ashamed of themselves.

Gender - our sex-based expectations for ourselves and each other - it hurts people.

Rather than critically examine our gender beliefs, the modern trans movement codifies them. Worse, it does it without even DEFINING the concept, ultimately validating EVERYONE’S sexist beliefs without even the transparency of a list of what traits are attributed to men vs. women.