[bjowen]

This is a weird way of talking about feeling. Do you correlate your sensations of happiness or impatience or satisfaction against normative models using objective indicia, or do you just, you know, feel them? When someone tells you that they are feeling one of these things, do you tell them that there is no objective way of understanding the words that they are saying, or do you refer to your own experience where you reached for similar words to understand them?

If you live in a society, you are surrounded by archetypes and roles and norms of gender - or of the performance of gender - which might be a helpful way to think about this post. Things like what clothing and grooming is appropriate are easy examples - and depending on where you are in the world, those standards may be radically different - in some cultures men are expected to adorn themselves to be attractive to partners, in some it’s women. But it’s also what emotions it’s appropriate to display, what kind of authority is afforded to a person, what physical strength and which ailments are reasonable, what kinds of body hair is attractive. We have words that describe a favourable performance of those gender roles (womanly, manly) and unfavourable words (effeminate, mannish). They are enforced, or at least patrolled, in all kinds of ways. Easy example is the kind of differential permissiveness around alcoholism. Why is that? If we have a social or a moral standard, why is it gendered?

You have without a doubt experienced this in your life - and if you’re lucky it’s been internal and not at the hands of the local bully. If you’ve ever checked or modified your demeanour or your outfit or your tone because you are aware that it is too girly or too butch or too macho or too slutty, then that is the sensation of being trained back towards the model.

[teakettle42]

> Do you correlate your sensations of happiness or impatience or satisfaction against normative models using objective indicia

Of course we do. It’s how we establish shared meaning about what it means to feel any of those things.

The rest of your post describes gender roles; as in, social standards and stereotypes of behaviors attached to sex.

We don’t use the words “woman” and “man” to denote roles or a social subculture, and we’ve never segregated bathrooms, or established segregated sports programs, on the basis of gender roles.

How I feel internally, even if you could correlate it to some objective definition of “feeling female” — which you cannot — does not change that I am a man; an adult human male.