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Clay Bonnyman Evans's avatar

Thanks, Lisa, as always, for your thoughts. You so often sum up where I am on these questions.

And thanks, especially, today, for this term, which I've never heard before: psychological androgyny.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! Eureka, that's it, a perfect capsule phrase that expresses what I have long tried to describe in a series of fumbling, rambling half-sentences ("I seem to have certain, um, emotional and communicative characteristics that, um, are considered by society to be more 'female' and, um...."). My wife, with her usual succinctness, just tells her friends that she's married to a man who is "part chick."

But the "chick" elements are all entirely interior. There is nothing about my "presentation" or demeanor that would ever lead anyone to say, "Oh, that guy is kind of androgynous." On the other hand, I have all these supposedly "female" traits—I'm the verbal processor, the communicator, the lover of words, written and spoken; I like therapy, for real (my wife is not a big fan); I am effusive, perhaps even "flamboyant" (but not in a "gay" way); I love colors (though I couldn't care less about fashion, and am very much a dirtbag/surfer type, I really do care about "all the pretty colors," as I like to say); I need more touch/nurturance/affection; and on and on.

So again, thanks. Nobody has ever, or would ever, mistake me for a female, but honestly, I relish the above and other so-called "feminine" traits in myself.

I'm one who believes the current trans mania is inherently misogynistic and anti-gay. It is, more or less, Christian conversion therapy dressed up as the new progressive orthodoxy.

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Sad_Mom's avatar

Thank you for this lovely piece Lisa.

My daughter, now 19, has been IDing as a male (now a gay male!) for about five years now. Pride month, which I didn’t used to mind so much, has become a horror. Especially in Toronto Canada.

It seems to be that the argument in favour of Pride has been that the other 11 months of the year are, by default, a celebration of heterosexuality.

But Pride feels different now, with its celebration of gender dysphoria and transition.

I work at a “progressive” employer. A few years ago, we had a Pride fundraiser for an organization that runs an Underground Railroad for people fleeing countries where homosexuality is illegal. This year, the ask is for us to donate makeup for trans youth (surely not the trans men though, right?)

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