#bc you thought *everyone* deserved that‚ just inherently‚ and it didn't need to be earned via a medicalized excuse slip. what then.

[pansyboybloom]

I remember when some ppl on here got so mad at an innocuous post (that i think didnt even had to do with this) that they started posting "masculine men positivity" of just... cis men with beards and all that, and a bunch of people started making think pieces that if you read them you would have thought that men get beat up on the streets for NOT wearing skirts or pink eyeshadow... I can't belive that there's QUEER people that think that for some reason masculinity, specially on men, is under attack when men being masculine is what society expects and NOT being masculine is what a lot of people not just men get punished for, like if you didn't know these people were queer you would look at the way they talk about how masculine men are being oppressed and immediately think "this was written by a right wing bigot", like guys on here writting about how masculine men are oppressed... what separates their argument from homophobes commenting "make men masculine again" on posts of a man wearing a skirt, I think it's specially obvious when they get super mad at joke posts that are like "all men need to wear skirts or they aren't worth it" and take it as a personal offense and a real instance of the world??? Do they think men are getting jumped outside because they don't have their nails painted? I think it's specially horrible when they bring up butches, and black men to defend their argument of masculinity being "oppressed"

like, i absolutely wont pretend to know what life is like for all masc queer men in all parts of the world, but as someone who has grown up in Ye Ol' South, even in a safer area than most, the expectation here is 100000% that a queer man who is hard masc is inherently more deserving of humanity than a fem queer one, including trans men. 'make men masculine again' is written on real life bumper stickers that you can see in high school parking lots. while mike the jock is obviously still in danger of being queerbashed, if he presents as hard masc and plays his cards right, he is less likely to be than the 'dirty sissy' fem man. and it's the same for trans men-- being extremely masc won't make your gender respected, but you are slightly less likely to be beaten up than a guy like me who wears a skirt.

heavy irl example of a queer-bashing hate crime description below heads up:

when i was in middle school, there was one very, very fem gay boy who had his head bashed into a mirror in the boys' locker room hard enough to break the mirror and send him to the hospital. would the boys in my school likely attack a masc gay classmate as well? yes. but everyone, cishet and queer, knew that that was less likely to happen because the masc queer men were the 'good ones' who 'didn't shove it down your throat' and 'kept it in the bedroom' unlike the 'sissy fags' (GROSS stuff to say about a fucking middle schooler but ya know, homophobia!)

like i said, can't speak for everyone and everywhere! but my life experience? a lot of guys forced themselves to be masc for safety. i know guys who faced so much horrible rhetoric that they would google speech therapy to 'talk more masc' or join in on the queerbashing and bullying, bc even if they couldn't be 100% masc, beating up the other, more fem guys would earn them some basis of safety.

are queer women threatened for being gnc? for being butch or masc? yes. absolutely. but at least in my neck of the woods, it ain't the same for queer men. but like i said. just my experiences

[aeide-thea]

saw a post that got me thinking abt that whole 'yr brain doesn't fully mature until age 25 (at which point it abruptly congeals like an aspic)' pseudoscience fictoid again, and—

the other thing that gets me about it, besides my previously-registered complaint that the notion of a hard stop on plasticity at the quarter-century mark is depressing as fuck for those of us past that age who need to believe change is still possible, is that it's yet another instance of people looking to substitute a hard-and-fast rule for the active, careful exercise of their own judgment—life isn't a binary where pre-25 nothing goes and post-25 anything goes! you have to actively think about how to behave well and how to treat others well, whatever your age and whatever theirs!