#I'm not claiming to map out how gender as a whole operates here lol

[gothhabiba]

this kind of thing is also really necessary context when people start talking about "gendered socialisation" and claiming that "men" (often unclear exactly whom this includes) "aren't taught to communicate their feelings," with the implication that "women" (ditto) are...

in fact no one is taught to openly communicate much of anything. and "socialisation" is not a bifurcated process that ends in adolescence and produces two different "types" of people, but is better thought of in terms of a web of shifting, contextual responses of different people in different situations to your behaviours (due to how they read them against a framework of various gender categories including not only "man" and "woman" but "failed," "approximate" or "non-" versions of each that are also impacted by race and class...).

people are responded to differently (socially / economically 'rewarded' or 'penalised') in different contexts for different types of "communication"—

but basically never is this communication expected to be truly "open," on the part of anyone. communication can't be thought of as an on/off switch where you're either "communicating" or "failing to communicate," but must be considered in terms of, like, what are people communicating and how? how do the strategies they use in their communications align with or resist gendered expectations (and which ones)?

a lot of what people's responses to various communications is 'aimed at' is keeping various gendered systems and patterns in place (enforcing the performance of gendered and racialised labour in the home and in the workplace under threat of being thought of as lazy / a nag / not a team-player / being fired &c.; the social disposability and financial precarity of trans women, the expectation to accept abuse or else to be blacklisted that comes with exclusion both from "manhood" [whatever people claim to believe about trans women] and from the policed and protected category of "woman")—

why, in these types of situations, would women be "taught to communicate their feelings"? should we really frame precarious and fraught navigations of communication strategies that may or may not backfire on us in any situation as "open" communication? like, come on now.