As a man, I have never been “proud” to be a man, I mostly feel ambivalent about it, it is who I am, I’d rather be proud about my actions than my gender.
In case you get any odd responses, while many people use ambivalent to mean they don’t care, it actually means you have contradictory feelings, i e., you are both for and against something.
Which is true, there are parts I like about being a man, and there are parts I dislike about being a man.
In general I am comfortable
Which is true, there are parts I like about being a man, and there are parts I dislike about being a man.
…and these days there is probably some specialized label to describe that that isn’t merely “man” because that would be too easy.
This. I think it’s kinda ridiculous to be proud of something you haven’t done anything for. I’ll much rather be proud of the thing I did than about shit like where I’m born or as what I’m born.
The only time I would say that doesn’t apply is when you’re part of a traditionally marginalized group. Black pride, or queer pride or indigenous pride all make sense to me. Because it’s a collective pride thing more than an individual pride thing.
And in that case I think it’s best to think of the pride as coming from the action of resilience. When the term gay pride first appeared it was controversial but the argument was that society had been telling us to be ashamed for so long and we weren’t going to take it anymore and in fact we’ll be proud to be queer instead. And I maintain that if queer phobia had stopped before I grew up it would definitely be very emotionally different, because there’s also the pride of just being different from the norm. You can see that in stuff like in people who are proud to be a redhead or people who are proud of the area they come from but aren’t anymore (I’m planning to move out west and I’m already noticing myself get more Midwestern in anticipation).
I will make no secret about how I don’t really understand transgender people, it used to annoy me, but since about a year or two ago I realized that it doesn’t matter to me, and it apparently matters a lot to them.
So I stopped caring enough to be annoyed, I realized that if they are happy and it doesn’t hurt others, then I have no reason to make their day worse.
To all trans people, I may not understand what you feel, but I will not be a dick about it, my confusion is my own issue and I will do my best to not make it yours.
I wish more people were okay with not understanding other people or what they do to express themselves and their identity, but accepting them regardless, so you have my commendations.
People way into body piercing confuse me, but if that’s your thing, go for it. As long as you are doing what makes you comfortable in your own body, that’s the important part.
That’s fair. It took me years of living with it and trying to sort through my feelings to understand it. I’ve long liked to use the analogy of appendicitis. I have no idea what my appendix feels like, maybe I’ve felt it but it’s just somewhere in my guts and there’s no reason to notice. But when someone develops acute appendicitis it apparently hurts so bad they struggle to think about anything else. Gender dysphoria is kinda like that. Most people have a gender, but so long as everything is going right they won’t really notice much of it unless they’re seriously looking to. But for some of us it hurts like hell and we had to do some figuring out and treatment.
But beyond that, the older I get the more I’m feeling like the basic unit of freedom is the statement “I don’t understand but it clearly matters to you.” For more things more people need to learn to think that way, and it can go all the way from things like people being trans to how people 5 years younger than me decided to start growing mustaches that I associate with cops to all sorts of things. I’m a city girl, I don’t get why people want to live in rural areas, but they do and it’s not my place to judge them or stop them.
Huh, I’ve been banging on about this for awhile in isolation after talking to a lot of cis people about gender and it’s really weird to see it in an article by someone else.
Weird and validating.
No one should be proud of a demographic quality like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. You should be proud of accomplishments .
Depends on your context of “proud”. Pride movements for instance aren’t nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says “I am a proud gay man” for instance the statement does not imply “I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it” what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "
The movement has it’s own language and “Pride” specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.
True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.
