Yeah, I never think of myself as "performing" being a woman. But thats just the difference between someone who identifies as a woman vs. someone who is a woman.

I've had some 'truscum' tell me that they would have sex dysphoria no matter what. But that's an incredibly hard thing to prove...

The concept of gender meanwhile makes absolutely no sense when divorced from social contexts. The whole trans movement isnt about living authentically but forcing everybody else to play-act in your fantasy.

We didn't get off on wearing make-up, though.

They definitely get off on wearing a womanface and treat us as accessories for their fantasy, so I wouldn't count on it.

You're right, I see this with "queer" people too. They're all in straight relationships, so they come to LGB spaces demanding that the rest of us validate them for their orientations. They get mad when we talk about things that they haven't experienced just like TIMs do with women.

I think so too, as a Gen X, this drive to perform identity and make others see is utterly bizarre to me. Isn’t “performing identity” as oxymoron? Your identity just IS, it’s who you are, I argue that if you need to perform it so everyone else validates it, it’s not real. A performance is an ACT.

What happened to “live your life, who cares what everyone else says”? This isn’t just the genderspecial people, it’s everywhere and I can’t relate.

I think you've hit on something here.

There's the whole idea of having a personal "brand." Everyone has to have their "brand." People don't even know who they are anymore so they just develop this carefully curated brand, an "identity" to show off to the world.

Yea. We used to live in reality where everyone else knew who we were and held us accountable. If someone was a jerk then everyone knew that person was a jerk even if he denied it. If someone was kind yet always apologizing then everyone else knew she was kind. Same for self-deprecation. If someone constantly lied people would learn not the trust them. If someone was an idiot people wouldn't give much consideration to their opinions. If someone was super smart people would listen. etc. etc.

Two things have changed -- 1) People can curate their online presence to misrepresent themselves. 2) People interact with a far greater number of people that they don't know irl and can't keep straight everyone's history. The combination of these two rewards people for behaving like con-artists. People who have never known differently now feel entitled to everyone falling for their grift.

I misread that as "Austic Self" at first. If the "isn't" was changed to "is" then it would work.

real_feminist linked it in another comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/opinion/transgender-nonbinary-pandemic-transition-.html

My favorite thing at the NYT is always the comment section. In order of upvotes...

It is difficult to share how remarkably self-indulgent this piece feels to me without signalling that I have an issue with transgender folks. In truth, I probably do have some issue, but it is born not of dislike but of lack of exposure. Still, the obsession with gender, the thought that the waitstaff is even remotely interested in your gender pronouns, the whole world-view that everything revolves around your gender, how you define it and how others may define it, seems to me to be painfully unhealthy.

Gender dysphoria must be very challenging. So are many conditions. But I wish we could dial back the drama a bit - dial back the need to feel victimized. Because the truth is, Alex, that anyone you would want as a friend in your life really doesn't care how you define your gender. Just live your life, dude.

-Shelby, 1444 upvotes

It would appear to me that the current cultural obsession with gender and how one identifies with it is a distraction from true self-knowledge and understanding of each person's unique personality. The current ideas around "gender identity" pigeon-hole people into behaving certain ways to signal their "gender" but what does it even mean? When I was a kid, we were "free to be you and me" regardless of sex. Now it seems like things are going back in the other direction. Girls like pink and boys like blue and if a boy likes pink, he must have something different about his gender identity? It is regressive

• Kate, 1296 upvotes

One sentence from this piece really struck me: "No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither “he” nor “she” applied to me..."

I'm willing to bet a considerable sum of money that the author has never worked in a restaurant. If they had, they would have known that actually the people working there are really busy doing their jobs and have their own lives and issues to worry about. And while those people would like the author to have a good time while eating in the restaurant, they're also probably not spending much - or any - time wondering about which pronouns to use with their customers, they're more interested in getting their customers, moving on to the next ones, getting paid, and going home to their own lives.

Which is a nice illustration of the piece as a whole. There's a certain navel-gazing aspect to it that is very hard to ignore. The author seems to have not yet absorbed the valuable life lesson that while we are all the heroes of our own stories, we're lucky if we're even extras in anyone else's. A life dedicated to making sure that everyone else sees one exactly how they prefer to be seen is a life wasted.

• Mike, 957 upvotes

The next 29 most-liked comments are all along similar lines, the 30th comment is just a woman feeling happy she doesn't have to put makeup on for remote work, 31-39 are against calling out the stupidity and narcissism, and then finally, at comment #40 with 201 upvotes is the first related, non-critical comment which compares the feeling to black Americans visiting Africa..... and then it's back to straight callouts.

Yes, I read this too, I think it was a TIF? Someone who talked about having trans roommates as well?

Of course it does. Those TIMs never shut the fuck up!

Probably “Reeee!”