Today I learned my Italian father is performatively expressing femininity.

Redditor discovers that gay men are associated with flamboyant hand motions, then accidentally spills that he sees gay men as "woman gender" because otherwise why would thinking you're a gay man mean people don't see you as not, you know, a gay man?

To add to this, women are not associated with flamboyant hand motions. Just like how women also aren't associated with the "gay man" way of speaking (I don't know how to describe it, you know what I mean).

Not only this, but making hand gestures is encouraged as a thing that you should do as a good speaker. But for some reason, nobody's assuming all the great male orators are gay.

I just wanted to say when I saw "hand flapping" in the title the first thing I thought of was autism

Women are literally socialized to take up less space.... hence the less space when we emote. Fucking ay

So apparently all feminine gay men are expressing their inner woman. This shit is really regressive. A feminine man is just as much a man as any other.

GNC people don't exist according to this worldview. We're all the opposite sex, deep down, because we don't align with the stereotypes that society says we should.

It's actually insane that someone sat down, had these thoughts, and spent time typing them up and sharing them with other ppl

As is often the case with this school of social analysis, that's a lot of words around a simple idea: humans act like people they identify with.

There, said it in seven words. That said, to elaborate a bit, people act how they imagine humans they identify with act.

That's true. I think I've even seen psychological research to that effect, around the ways people strive, consciously and subconsciously, to conform to in-groups and distance themselves from out-groups. It's unsurprising in a social species. We do it with everything from religion to sports to fan clubs.

But just because you identify with a group, doesn't necessarily mean you are that group. Some groups are grounded in objective fact. If I started to sincerely identify as a cat, I can spend all day sleeping and licking myself, but that wouldn't make me a cat.

If we're going to insist TIMs have an ingrained neurological characteristic all 'women' share which ought to define the word 'woman', I'm gonna need some hard evidence for that beyond an individual's psychological issues.

Or, IT IS PERFORMANCE. I mean, performative IS performance. You can say it’s not, but whatever.

And, I think it’s about time we acknowledge that some gay men are FLAMBOYANTLY gay. They don’t perform like actual women — they perform like gay men.

There. Sorry people were mean to you for acting like the gay man you are, but

Haha looks at Donald Trump.

Everyone still knows you're a man.

I vote to rename "gender affirming care" to "hand flapping affirming care".

r/mtf

Archive link

Comment:

Gender isn't a performance, but it is performative.

The idea is that gender is something that exists because of interactions between people. The way that I behave is, both consciously and unconsciously, inspired by other people with whom I identify.

Speaking generally, for example, women tend to use plenty of expressive hand gestures whilst keeping their elbows in fairly close to their body. Men use fewer gestures, and those they do use are more sweeping, using the whole arm. These differences did not emerge in a vacuum: they self-consciously define each other as opposites (schismogenesis).

Someone who keeps their elbows in, and uses a lot of hand gestures, is performatively expressing femininity. That doesn't mean that it's a performance. Many women, cis or trans, will use this performative language without conscious thought. It's just part of the culture. Someone who sees and recognises this performative language will (consciously or not) respond based upon the knowledge it imparts. In the ideal case, the logic goes: performative expression of femininity = treat this person as feminine.

Many of us will have experienced the less than ideal case, where our performative femininity is recognised and denied on the basis of other markers. I was bullied throughout high school, and to a lesser extent during my undergrad, for being a gay boy/man, because people recognised that the performative aspects of my gender did not align with my assigned sex at birth. They recognised something in me, aged 10, that I didn't spot recognise in myself until I was 29. I met so many wonderful people who, within a few short minutes of interacting with me, concluded that I must be a gay man---and, looking back, I know that they had spotted that I had unconsciously and performatively expressed the gender that I simultaneously repressed.

Oh ya, this reminded me- I saw an autism faker the other day. She had colored hair, overweight, dirty colorful clothes and she went into "pretend to be stimming" mode right as she was about to get onto a ride at the fair. It was mega cringe.