TLDR: how we bound things matter, most of society is social constructs. biologically relevant bounding (gender binary) is both not absolute (intersex) and individually contextualizable during development and social reification (genderfluid). deciding as law that there are only two genders is a purely social reification move, and not actually representative of reality.

constantly gendering/bounding things for no reason does weird bad things for the social construct people build and make socially real. again, this is a vulnerability for divide and conquer tactics. we don't want louder general voices to dominate over important signal of groups experiencing systemic problems, but that is a different issue from defending unnecessary and unhelpful framing that continues to be used against us with very real effects.

-- "A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men" what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half? the entire point of gendering is lost if we recognize this. please understand i'm very generally against unnecessary bounding for what i see as important reasons that affect us all.

"black lives matter" is a very american movement, "all lives matter" might make sense to say, a pakistani-american who also experiences systemic problems and would like to join a collective effort for change, but is being excluded. in this context, most are willing to ignore that plight because of the redneck/corpo american using "all lives matter," as a signal to their white supremacy group is actually enough of a problem that the backlash towards ALM has weight in that setting. personally i think "black lives matter too" would have been a better and more inclusive bounding that isn't abusable by opportunistic bad actors. but we can't cooperate for that level of nuance around the words we use i guess, it's too 'annoying' i guess. although comprehending framing is a much more important use of energy than people seem to believe. entirely unnecessary progressive exclusivity is literally harming us all.

my emphasis is on progressives unnecessarily being -weirdly- exclusive about every issue, even very general issues, and then cause a fuss when any of the 'wrong' people want to take part in the bandwagon and affect change. "divide and conquer" is THE rule for stopping collective action for change.

why i brought up the feminist/atheist stuff. the fact that progressives aren't allowed to cooperate is a huge problem. if the post was "men get made fun of for everything, might as well do what you want." i would have NO issue with women/NBs going "why is this being gendered lol? that's such a general problem."

and instead of people going "ha ha yeah i guess that is a pretty general experience." you get a big ol' "if you feel excluded, too bad."

"why does it always need to be about men" is generalizing a lot of vague unrelated contexts to one that we defined very specifically.

there's a reason i stated "there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with" because not all problems do need to be generalized, and sometimes gendering it could be relevant for some actual reasons.

"men are from mars, women are from venus." kind of thinking is just... classic patriarchy? why are we defending it so hard?

at this point i'd get into social constructs, and how we frame things is incredibly important for things like, stopping progressives from unnecessarily being divided for stupid shit that doesn't matter while fascist chuds are enabled in enacting systemic violence towards women (axing sciences and women's health stuff, as stated,) and everyone else. while everyone is spending all of their energy trying to navigate the fucked up framing that divides people unnecessarily and encourages those groups to be antagonistic unnecessarily.

when "this applies generally" could easily consume as little energy as "ha ha yeah this is unnecessarily gendered." which, in recognizing, allows us to hold a better general idea of the complexity of the world and experience.

again, the inertia of really bad social constructs are still implanted in society. isn't deconstructing that supposed to be a big part of feminism? that youtube video essay i linked is actually pretty good, on emphasizing around this issue, but as i pointed out with the atheism/feminism thing, this is a very real and tangible problem that i'm trying to address while also noting the context of not deflating some actual specific issue that is being made salient.

that being said, if you build a system for dealing with a problem that mostly affects one gender, being exclusionary is going to cause unnecessary friction, you cause inevitable tension as your group bounding become less reliable at full scale. ignoring the edge cases doesn't make them disappear, and leads to subgroup antagonism that was entirely preventable.

there's nothing wrong about making a post about girls, but there's also nothing wrong with going "that's a weirdly gendered framing on a very general experience."

group specific "do what you want," also causes weird problems, because to some people this message could be easily read as gender specific (else why gendered?) and "do what you want" becomes what it does for the least thoughtful and most aggressive of any group, usually leading to more division and antagonism because we've weirdly bounded our interactions to be so strictly group specific that we just aren't allowed relating to each-other, and we can now define punching down as punching up because context doesn't matter, only the salient boundings we've defined as truth. anecdotally, you get things like a manager telling their employee "you're lucky you already worked here when i was hired because i don't hire men," which is just one of my personal experiences. this doesn't mean women aren't systemically disadvantaged in some hiring areas, but i don't think getting at the pan-demi-autistic barista(ask me about my thoughts on gendered languages,) who grew up in poverty is really "punching up." it does make fighting for equality more disheartening when this becomes a general experience in progressive areas.

i really REALLY don't care to be defined and seen as "MAN" whenever people start their assumptions about me, and the less baggage we randomly invent in people's minds the better. anyone who has been ill-treated purely for group association rather than their actual behaviour knows this feeling. if you feel unnecessary gendered/grouped doesn't harm you, then maybe you aren't so familiar with the oppression of systemic framing, and the people actually affected by it. all of whom i think deserve to be free from this really shitty framing tools we seem to be incapable of growing out of as a species.

remember, most of our world is socially constructed. a lot of what is "absolutely just how the world is" falls apart more quickly than the MAGA "two genders" very inaccurately framed argument under any scientific scrutiny. AKA, it's not that simple, and pretending it is hurts everyone that doesn't fit your neat low-energy boundings, and failing to properly frame and interact with the complexity of the world leads to systemic failures that harm us all.

i'm just trying my best, and have been while people spent the past two decades fighting rather than stopping the heritage foundation and other such actual problems that are actually affecting us all, which we need to be able to successfully collect and communicate around without devolving into different preferred boundings over-ruling the shared reality that we are all creating and growing into.