saw something on Twitter the other day that really rubbed me the wrong way
I stumbled across an artist on Twitter and was scrolling through their page and noticed they post art memes of “tomboy phenotypes”
some of these “tomboy phenotypes” quite literally boiled down to “woman who plays video games” or “woman who wears hoodies and forgets to shower sometimes” and it struck me as so odd.
a woman can play video games and wear hoodies and forget to shower sometimes and still be super feminine? if she wants to be? those things don’t necessarily make someone a tomboy?
the line of logic that playing video games and sometimes faltering on your hygiene are “masculine” enough to classify someone as a tomboy is kind of stupid and also begs the question — if you consider a woman a tomboy if she does something so innocuous and common as playing video games, then what are feminine qualities? would you therefore only grant the title of “feminine woman” to like, I don’t know, a barefoot tradwife whose only hobbies are cooking and baking?
it just kind of seems like a slippery slope, and very similar semantically to how people try to rob trans woman and woman of color of their femininity for what are otherwise nothingburger traits like “was angry once” or “has a deep voice”
I guess the point of this post being that gendering traits/hobbies/clothing are stupid and we should stop doing that, and instead focus on the unique experience of each individual and how they feel that their gender presents itself (and yes this includes letting people trans their gender, TERFs don’t even touch this post)