Very well said.

I think this really hits the nail on the head.

Putting emphasis on the importance of prescribed gender roles can do a lot of damage, especially when one gender expression is regarded as superior. This is sexism at its finest. We should focus less on comforming to strict gender roles and focus more on being ourselves.

Thank you for bringing attention to this subject.

Let’s boil down our distaste to what it is: annoying people are annoying people. The same behaviors represented by the “appropriate” (pomo quotation marks gender.

Those who obnoxiously display grating personality traits and behaviors are annoying regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. Likewise, boasting, self-deluded, over-confident people are socially inept regardless of what gender/orientation combo is their identity.

The root of this is not cross-gender presentation nor hyper-gender presentation. There’s probably some naturalized insecurity or other longterm psychological fragility explaining those negative behaviors, just as would be the case when straight people exhibit them.

Writing your distaste on their gender presentation is unfairly blaming classes of identities for what are, ultimately, individual failings. When I meet people I don’t like, I don’t blame their gender presentation any more than I would their culture, race, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation.

Please don’t try to use Taoist and natural principles as a sort of excuse, especially when you misrepresent them in such a manner.

Basically you’ve downgraded concepts of yin and yang to the over-tired Christian catchphrase of “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” when there’s really much more to it. It’s not all about “opposing pairs” coming together, because they really aren’t all that opposing. If you recall basic yin yang symbolism of a half-white and half-black side, you’ll no doubt notice the spot of the opposing color in either half. Why do you think that’s there? To show that there’s always a part of the opposite in the same. There’s always femininity in masculinity, there’s always masculinity in femininity. It’s the spot in each that keeps them from killing each other like the Western Good/Evil system.

Relational harmony doesn’t come from two opposing people balancing one another out, but two balanced people coming together.

I was born in this body, and I will die in this body. Just because I’m considered “effeminate, or a bottom”, does not make me any less of a human being or different class. I’m gay, and that doesn’t make me any less of a man, than it makes of “obama/bush/reagan,carter, or swarzenegger being a man.

Is Jack over the top? Yes. Is Will self-evidently gay? Without a doubt. Does anyone cite Karen as embarrassing to women? Probably not.

Do some men adopt self-consciously effeminate mannerisms? Sometimes. Do some men (many? most?) adopt self-consciously butch mannerisms? Most of the time, but we are blind to this because we have imposed on ourselves a specious definition of “normal.”

We Americans are unusual in our overemphasis on masculinity. The author already mentioned the example of Europe as a place where there’s a broader range of behavior that falls into the “acceptable” category of masculinity, but I’ve found from my experience that Asia (specifically China) is the same way. Guys in China are also more affectionate with each other; their mannerisms aren’t as gorilla-like as Americans’; and they place a lot less emphasis on being all big and burly than Americans do. That doesn’t mean there aren’t delineations of masculine and feminine behavior, and there’s a preoccupation with height among men similar to women’s preoccupation with weight here, but it’s just not so rigid and confining there. Even though I had to stay in the closet, I remember feeling a lot freer there in some ways than I do here.

When I was in my early 20s, I had a lot of conversations with gay men my age about norms of masculinity and femininity in the gay community. A lot of young gay men had very strong opinions about how gay men should act. Now that I’m older (early 30s), I don’t have those conversations anymore, and I don’t hear other gay men my age having these conversations. I’ve come to think that negative views of feminine gay men (“They’re making us all look bad!”) or of masculine gay men (“They’re putting on an act!”) is a sign of immaturity.

Random fact: a hundred years ago, pink was the color for boys and blue was the color for girls. The switch took place between World War I and World War II.