As I've said, "feeling like a woman / man" makes no intuitive sense. I don't feel like any gender, I understand that I'm female and the common term for that is "woman".
However, the feminine "role" has always chafed. So in that regard, (I think) I can understand dysphoria.
If I was born 10 years later, I think I would be strongly tempted to consider myself "really" a man, especially during my teenage years.
Although I (now) appear very feminine, in some ways my personality is closer to an aspy-male than a typical young woman.
That, combined with the restrictions by my religious upbringing, discomfort with the sexual attention I was now receiving, and a growing fear of male strength - I was envious of boys/men.
I wonder what I would have done if I had been told this was a mutable characteristic.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
In practice, this means that many of us can feel compelled by deep ties to protect the interests of Muslims as people, despite opposing their faith.
But Muslims are not bound in the same way to us--we are a minority + often closeted. They don't "know" us, as we know them.
2/
The ex-Muslims who don't make the believer/belief distinction are almost always those who have lost all ties with family--a rare (but highly platformed/visible) occurrence.
Most of us can and do--we have to. We are too intimately connected with Muslims to do anything else.
3/
I’m not sure if it’s obvious that “men want to control women’s reproductive functions”.
Men can more easily oppose abortion than women, but if the situation was reversed (ie: if men bore children), I think women would be *even more* against abortion than men are today. 1
In other words: the abortion debate is skewed by sex only because one sex isn’t directly affected, but one could as easily take that to mean that men vote *unencumbered* on behalf of the fetus’ “right to life”, whereas women must choose between that and their own well-being. 2
But all things being equal women care *more* about the well-being of children,even fetuses. It’s often said that if men could get pregnant we’d have full abortion access. I disagree. In that case, the sex divide would *widen*—men more uniformly pro-abortion and women more anti. 3
The idea that financial security makes people brave is true only when their surroundings are not a monoculture.
In monocultures, financial incentives can be one of the few reasons to veer away from conformity, especially when conformity produces real world harms.
Despite tenure, academics are *reliably more conformist* than many other professions.
Beyond what I discuss in the post above, many argue that tenure process itself filters for conformity.
It might be worth asking whether the practice does more harm than good, all in all.
One of the things that I find fairly off-putting about liberal politics is the drive to equalize all roles so that no one feels different, even if they literally are. Whether or not the difference is meaningful is a separate question, even then, MTG is more “mean” than “wrong”.
I know the responses to this will be a predictable “but my step parent was amazing / I love my step kids”.
Yes, sure. Can you look beyond your personal case? Do you deny also that step parents can bear their own *unique* challenges, therefore making their love more meaningful?
Carl, its not "racial particularism" to recognize that people from shared backgrounds can have a different kind of conversation together.
It is not a claim of exclusive knowledge that others *cannot* have the same ideas or insights, just a fact of life that they likely don't.
There is a lot you don't have to explain to your interlocutor when certain elements are shared, and that facilitates a discussion with a different layer of depth.
A group of women might have a diff discussion about menopause than a group of men. Not "ID politics" to seek either.