While I was reading that last post, I had a lot of thoughts. I didn’t want to clutter that post with them, as they are off-topic from the OP’s very important message so here:
Maybe it’s where I grew up. Maybe it’s when I grew up. Maybe it’s who I grew up with or maybe it’s what my parents taught me. Maybe it’s all of that and maybe it’s none of that. My memories of things before the accident when I was 12 are fragmented and hard to recall without something to trigger them.
One thing I clearly remember was another kid asking me if I’d had a sex change because I didn’t “act like a girl”. I was “too boyish”. I wasn’t the only tomboy around, but I was the one that most of the boys identified with, I guess. (At least until I discovered Sailor Moon. And then after I showed them pictures of naked transforming Serena, they were all on board with me again. …you know, that really should have told me something when I was a kid.)
I also remember a lot of detention. Why?
Because when a boy would “be a boy”, I wouldn’t take it. He harassed me? He embarrassed or humiliated me? I responded the same way any boy would.
I beat the shit out of him. I encouraged other girls to beat the shit out of their harassers. Because if boys can be boys then girls can be boys too. “Boy” isn’t a gender. it’s a fucking title.
It’s a title that says “I can do whatever I want because I am confident that I won’t get punished. And if I am? Well I’ll do it again and again and again until they get tired of punishing me.”
Did they ever get tired of punishing me? Eh. Kinda. When I started beating the shit out of my little brother’s harassers I actually got praised for standing up and protecting him. I still got in trouble and served detentions and the like but I got praised while doing it.
Even now, at 28 years old, my first reaction to something is violence. It’s been trained into me. I trained it into me. I don’t react quite so physically anymore (done too much damage to my joints over the years; I actually take the time to size up a person first now), but man oh man. I don’t even fucking notice I’m doing it until someone points it out to me.
I’m fairly certain it’s the same with a lot of men— they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. Unfortunately they don’t have the same experiences that I do because they don’t have the added experiences of being a woman on top. They don’t want to listen to the experiences of women, because they can’t understand that the experiences of women are different from those of men.
Because “girl” is a title as well.
It’s a title that means “reserved and quiet”. It means “needs to be protected”. It means “unable to do what I [men] can”. It means “use words instead of fists”.
It means everything that a man doesn’t want to be, and so he ignores it. Not out of spite, but out of disinterest.
[ the men referred to in this post are of the cishet variety. I cannot begin to understand the experiences of the trans* community and therefore do not feel comfortable trying to shoehorn them into this and (very likely) get something offensively wrong. ]