Whether or not we as queer people believe in that kind of “masculinity,” or aspire to it, it’s gunning for us. In the hopes of understanding the enemy—and restoring some kind of nuance to a conversation that desperately lacks it—I set out to talk to transfeminists about what they think “masculinity” is and what it could become.
Our current masculinity discourse—and oh, boy, is there a lot of discourse—is muddled and unenlightening, in part because the word “masculinity” has no set definition. Every op-ed writer and self-help author and influencer who invokes the term does so with the confidence that they’re referring to a specific thing, and that they know what that thing is, but press them for details, and things get hazy: “Most people have a tendency to hem and haw and pretend that ‘masculinity’ is some nebulous, arbitrary collection of positive attributes such as ‘strength’ and ‘leadership,’ and stop replying when asked why feminine women cannot embody them,” wrote transfeminist Talia Bhatt, author of Trans/Rad/Fem: Essays on Transfeminism... read more
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