as small as a world and as large as alone, clatterbane: wolfhoundboy: explosives-b: If...

1:51pm July 30, 2014

wolfhoundboy:

explosives-b:

If you seriously think masculinity is always upheld over femininity, just look at women being put into mental institutions simply for not conforming totally to an extremely strict gender role up until the 1960’s-ish.

The reason it’s more acceptable for women to be masculine now is because of activism from the feminist movement. And truly, it is sad that male gender non-conformity has not seen this activist push that leads to greater societal acceptance, but that doesn’t mean it’s some function of masculinity being prized over femininity. You’re apply anachronistic post-structuralism to a fact of activism history. Stop it.

Very important post.

And in a lot of cultures, a lot of communities and a lot of families it still isn’t seen as acceptable to be a masculine female.

Believe me my sister, my cousin, multiple friends who were tomboys as children had that shit beaten out of them.

Being a masculine female was not remotely acceptable in the community and family I grew up in.

That last point? Very important on its own. There are an awful lot of people who want to assume that things like this are exactly the same everywhere, and make universalist blanket statements that just don’t allow for many people’s experiences. Especially people who are coming from sufficiently different cultural backgrounds, who may as well not exist sometimes if their experiences conflict with some ideological widgetry.

I mean, I am personally coming from a background where the expectations there have never been that rigid. And in the social environment where I’m living now (about as mainstream Western as you can get), part of the xenophobia I encounter on a regular basis is in reaction to doing gender “wrong”—i.e., in a way that is totally acceptable for a cishet woman back home. I do not actually fit that description, but yeah. People will make their own assumptions and decide how to treat you based on their own ideological baggage. I am also not doing anything that I would ever describe as “masculine femininity”, but that’s how a lot of outsiders want to interpret it. When they are not deciding that the conflicting cues they are reading instead add up to someone they should throw the t-slur at or aggressively “sir”—which does occasionally happen, and all of this is concocted in their own heads. It has precious little to do with anything I am actually doing or even thinking. The reactions tend to be hostile, even when I “just” get read as deliberately butch.

To muddy the ideological waters even further here, I am also coming from a culture which until fairly recently was matrilineal, matrifocal, and matrilocal. We’re still not placing high value on some kind of “masculine femininity”. That idea doesn’t even make sense in context. AFAICT, a lot more is still allowed to be neutral instead of getting assigned to “masculine” or “feminine” boxes. But, yeah: ‘Written documentation of our past is often based on European colonists’ reactions to [our] gender, who thought that *all* of our genders were “variant.”’# IME, that is too often still true.

But, though my own experiences are different, I am not even wanting to insist that what other people are dealing with must really be exactly the same, in a blanket ideological way. That’s bullshit, and an entirely too common brand at that. I have absolutely no trouble believing that elsewhere girls face hostility for being perceived as “tomboyish”, to the point of getting beaten. That is a huge problem in itself, and shouldn’t get brushed off because it doesn’t fit into somebody else’s notions about how things are supposed to work.

And you can maybe understand why this stuff often feels like more of the same continuing pattern. Because it kinda is. (See also: one link above.) I doubt it feels much better to anyone else whose experiences just don’t fit neatly into this ideology, to the point of keeping getting told that they’re just wrong and Not Doing Feminism Right either. That is abusive behavior in itself.

Just want to comment on the original post: A good friend of mine was institutionalized in the seventies and one of her diagnoses was “maladjustment to the feminine role” (also “childhood schizophrenia”, diagnosed by a colleague of Bettelheim, which she considers as close to an autism diagnosis as you could generally get back then, given that autism wasn’t in the DSM except as a brief mention under schizophrenia in children). So it didn’t stop in the sixties.

And I know this still goes on to some extent, it’s not totally gone. Generally when people say a practice died out at a particular time, what they mean is that it stopped being obvious general practice. It still goes on now. Right now. I’m certain of it. Because some things don’t change so easy.

I experienced psychiatric practices in the nineties that everyone says died out in the seventies, and I got nothing but disbelief from some people because they don’t understand how things like that work, how it’s not like the entire profession goes in lockstep instantly from one practice to another. There are still professionals today who believe that autism is a form of psychosis caused by bad mothering. Today. Right now. I’m lookin’ at you, Peter Breggin. There are still professionals today who use the 1980 DSM-III definition of autism when diagnosing children, whether they use it officially or unofficially. (In that definition, if you communicate in a way that the doctor acknowledges as communication, you’re not autistic. I ran into one of those doctors in an emergency room in 2000, even though the definition had changed since 1987. He asked my friend why I typed to communicate. She said I was autistic. He said “She obviously can’t be autistic, she’s communicating.” I said “He obviously needs to read up on some medical journals that have come out since the year 1980.” He said “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?!” and became infuriated that I was talking about him in the third person, just like he’d been talking about me.)

But anyway, to get off of that tangent, I am dead certain that there are women being institutionalized for being too masculine, right now. Right now. In the USA. And in other countries. And I’m also dead certain that there are people who aren’t actually women (for instance, DFAB transmasculine people) being institutionalized as if they are “overly masculine women”, because that’s how lots of our society sees DFAB trans people who are (or are even perceived as, whether it makes sense or not to perceive them that way) masculine in any way. And I remember that when I was institutionalized there was a focus on getting some girls to be more feminine. Also there was a girl institutionalized for being pregnant. When they found out the pregnancy test was a false positive, they let her go. IDK WTF that was even about, other than I’m certain there was misogyny involved.