Most of the time, the inability or unwillingness of people to understand the difference between sex and gender is simply a low-level annoyance for me.[1] But, over the past few days, I have been increasingly irritated by the bigotry that this confusion is facilitating.

Unfortunately, many cultures, including our own, put pressure on people of a particular sex to adopt a particular gender; this is bigotry of one sort. Unfortunately, people of a sex who don't want to be of the socially prescribed gender often develop an active hostility towards those of that sex-gender combination; that is bigotry of another sort.

People who want to be of a given gender but who are not do not represent a toxic expression of that gender, because they are not of that gender. Claiming that a non-masculine person were toxically masculine or that a non-feminine person were toxically feminine entails a logical contradiction, regardless of whether the person were a male wanting to be masculine or a female wanting to be feminine.[2] And when toxicity results exactly from the fact that a person is not of a gender that the person feels that he or she ought to be, the illogic is especially acute.

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen was certainly toxic, but he lacked at least one of the core attributes of masculinity. His desire as a non-masculine male to be masculine contributed greatly to his toxicity.

Whether intentionally or merely thoughtlessly, to use toxic masculinity in describing Mateen is a slur against masculinity.[3] And that slur will come most naturally to those who are implicitly or explicitly hostile to masculinity.

He simply wasn't of my gender; no one should speak or write as if he were.

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[1] Sex is a condition of the structures of the body, and associated with reproductive function. The term gender is sometimes used as a foolish mincing term for sex, but I mean here to refer to the set of behavioral characteristics (including rôles) that are associated with sex by expectations at the social, familial, and personal level. The term gender is taken by analogy from grammar, as are the terms masculine and feminine.

[2] There are sexes other than male and female and genders other than masculine and feminine, but traditional social expectations have included correspondences amongst such sexes and such genders. Instead, people who do not fit neatly as male or as female have been expected either to seek some sort of treatment to become one of those two sexes (with a masculine gender for males and a feminine gender for females) or to withdraw from society.

[3] It would be accurate, but misleading, to instead describe his condition as one of toxic non-masculinity.

Tags: toxic masculinity

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