Talking with (which means listening to, a lot of the time) ms. neighbour is adding a lot of flavour to my perception of gender and concepts of genderedness.
A different perspective is opening up when I take account of the possibility that in a lot of the different sectors of being (somatic, mental, sexual, spiritual etc.), humans might have pretty much equally big and full potential to live as a woman or as a man. The presupposition I appear to have accepted ’til now is that people inherently ‘center on some point of a 1-dimensional scale of gender’, which I often thought to be unconsciously (genetically, environmentally, socially) determined; and that just isn’t very compelling at all anymore – it still feels pretty ingrained though. E.g. (now when I think it out loud it’s kinda obvious) you can live somatically as a woman even though corporeally you’re a man. You essentially don’t have to do anything to prove worthy of this label, as long as your somatic being isn’t being a man, and it’s just an intellectual desire for you to have it be called feminine, in which case you’re just playing word games. This is possible because that’s how big genders are.
Now, I still suppose that it’s possible to call things womanly or manly, but one of the benefits of this perspective is that it seems impossible to me to judge a majority of the stuff we think about when we think about gender on the aforementioned linear scale, because this is quite emphatically not a linear scale anymore, femininity and masculinity are much more like two potentially completely interpenetrating clouds of sense and meaning and desire and good stuff, really.
