Apr 19, 2025, 8:24 AMI remember sitting in the car and I was thinking about something and possibly acting it out.
Apparently my physicality of that was hilarious.
So there's that as well.
Bigots have an idea of their norm. Often it's not just one thing they are against.
So you have to consider if they are transphobic are they homophobic, racist, ableist?
Are they secretly sexist? Who are their allies?
@onepict I also think that the phobic culture hijacks people's natural ignorance plus curiosity.
I remember at 17 I would see this person at the bus stop and they were very non-binary. Visually they had equal traits that hinted masculine and feminine but it wasn't in the way of someone like David Bowie where there's a performance quality. This was just a person casual in appearance.
And, it intrigued me that this was also a type of person that existed. It expanded my understanding of gender...
@onepict It opened me up to ideas I'd eventually learn in science classes.
But, I also felt self conscious staring from a distance because, yeah, people are trained to take that curiosity and smash it into their ignorance to make a judgment on ideas that don't fit into their existing framework.
It's shitty for many reasons but I'm most sad that it makes the world so narrowed into the limitations of the smallest minded people.
Apr 19, 2025, 8:59 AM@clarablackink yeah I think it depends on background as well.
I grew in a household where the gender roles were mixed. So I could like dolls but also tools.
My father can sew and mend things, he cooked. But he also fully supported me studying Computer Science at university.
So I had no reference for traditional gender roles. I didn't understand them.
I had no confusion I knew I was a girl. But I had no frame of reference for Non Binary folks until I got onto Mastodon.
Apr 19, 2025, 9:00 AM@clarablackink which is the beauty of this part of the fediverse.
There's room to learn about other folks experiences and frames of references.
But we also have to want to learn and listen.
Apr 19, 2025, 9:07 AM@onepict Very much this.
One of the things someone on this place mentioned, which hit me hard, was the story where someone asked their uni prof something about whether there are more nonbinary folk now than there used to be.
And the prof supposedly said something along the lines of, no, but they used to call themselves goths.
It hadn't really occurred to me that parts of goth culture were perhaps to provide a kind of space for gender expression experiments.
And...
Apr 19, 2025, 9:10 AM@onepict... not seeing that until it was pointed out, even if just as a possibility, that taught me more about my own blind sides than I knew I needed to learn.
Plus, perhaps, why I never truly minded goths, though some of the melodrama amused me.
@jens @onepict @clarablackink I think about this often when I see teenagers in baggy gender neutral clothing that deemphasises their body shape, or groups of girls that have sort of converged on a group uniform.
So much about gender is a public performance that is based on what we think society expects of us, essentially a reflection instead of our own image.
Some folks reject that costume early, and a lot of folks just never question it at all, continuing to perform gender like they perform having opinions about the world around them; adopting someone else's broadcasted idea of how they should express themselves.
Apr 19, 2025, 10:29 AM@sindarina @jens @onepict @clarablackink
I remember in wider 1980s popular culture and there were many attempts to push gender boundaries (also even in school girls were actively encouraged to study computer science and the "heavier" bits of craft/design and technology like metalwork), but there has been a backlash against this starting in early 90s (Susan Faludi wrote a book about this, albeit more US centric)
Apr 19, 2025, 10:35 AM@vfrmedia @sindarina @jens @clarablackink I remember as a teen in hospital briefly we had a lovely male nurse and he got bullied out of the profession by his female colleagues.
Gender stereotypes hurt everyone.
Apr 19, 2025, 11:42 AM@onepict @sindarina @jens @clarablackink
there's also the opposite in automotive and skilled trades, where its still hard for anyone female to succeed there particularly at the frontline they either get pushed to admin jobs or those who have genuine skills get promoted to quality/compliance monitoring work and are thus hated by everyone on site as they often pull up male workers for poor workmanship or customer service..
Apr 19, 2025, 12:55 PM@sindarina @onepict or in some cases (where the ladies are doing frontline mechanics work) their male partner is often also a co-owner of the garage, which would create an awkward situation if the relationship goes sideways..
I did hear of an all women run garage run in 1980s by lesbians in Sheffield, but even then they ended up selling up by the 1990s..