It is ubiquitous: whenever someone on social media points their finger at a girly dressed boy and claims that boys should be dressed like boys, someone comments with a manly man from Scotland wearing a kilt. It is also a recurring theme with queer influencers like Alok Vaid-Menon that they combine anti- or postcolonial rhetorics with this trope. White male patriarchy would have brought the gender stereotypes to inherently gender-free societies where men always wore feminine clothing. (There is a lot of self-contradiction in this view. Let’s ignore it for now.) But it is not just a social media phenomenon from the “woke” left. I encountered the kilt as a reply to my feminine clothing all my life, predominantly from the men engaged with heavy metal music.

But these heavy metallers reveal the issue with this line of argumentation. It tries to stabilize the biological determination of gender roles. The argument boils down to the message: Don’t worry, men will still do their duty as men and women will still do their duty as women, even with different clothing on, because other and historical societies show us that it is so. The position suffers from the same foulness as transgenderism: it stabilizes the gender boundary rather than allows the sexes to move freely, if they wish. And I do wish. When I have been wearing skirts, makeup or long-fingernails, I was not trying to prove that men as men can wear skirts and still be no less of a man. This would be pointless. Because to the extent that “man” is a natural kind term, I cannot be anything other than a man whatever I do. (If you know Old English, then use “werman” in contrast to "wifman".) I could take massive amounts of hormones for 20+ years and do super advanced surgery from some sci-fi movie and still would be a man in this sense of the word.

Obviously, what this debate is about instead is signaling. My issues with feminine expressions would not be solved all of the sudden when the Baroque era comes back and I could wear massive amounts of makeup and high heels as a man, because in those settings I would wear a hoop skirt. And if Dervish skirts became appropriate for men all over the world, I would insist on wearing a toub as traditionally worn in Sudan. I do that to make a clear statement that I expect the society around me to treat me in certain cases like they would treat a woman in their society. This is a similar mechanics as the lexicographical effects of using she/her pronouns or referring to oneself by feminine-gendered terms. And there are those differences in behaviour towards women and men and many of them are remarkably stable cross-culture and through history.

It feels tedious but it must be stated explicitly that this is not an issue of safety or a reaction to exclusion by straight men. It became a red herring in the gay community to frame their natural acquaintance with girls during their high school years as some kind of refuge from homophobia by their straight peers. It is not. In fact, for me personally, being excluded by straight men is much more comfortable than when they would act towards me like straight men act towards each other. This is an important point in this debate related to the debate about “trans children”. It will not happen that one can identify a trans girl in distinction to feminine gay boys by the former tending towards girls and girl stuff while the latter would stay with their male peers if homophobia vanishes.

It should be clear therefore that what I am describing here is not transgenderism. No matter how certain trans positions understand “gender” as a term, what they all have in common is that they do not stop there but mingle with a supposed notion of womanhood  in order to give force to their individual claims. But here is the thing, I do not have to claim to be a woman or try to resemble a woman (visually or otherwise) in order to be treated like a woman in the relevant circumstances. Well obviously (obvious for me at least) these relevant circumstances do not include cases where “being treated as” is not the relevant factor but “being biologically female” is. Being treated like a woman is not the same as being included into women’s competitions or enter their bathrooms. Especially when there are facts and arguments unrelated to men being treated as women and speak against that.

In fact, the demand by transgenderism to resemble women or to engineer on the notion of womanhood is the biggest obstacle in the whole gender debate, which we have to get rid of in order to make progress. The claim of a biological male to be treated in the respective gender of a woman in his culture is individual. It is neither positively nor negatively affected by another male identifying as a woman, having done (more) surgery to resemble a woman or experiencing strong dysphoria. It should simply be possible for any man to claim the dominant notion of femininity merely by signaling it, without medical or bureaucratic requirements. However, if the ultimate goal is to get rid of differences in how men and women are treated by each other and the  administration, then the issue becomes continually less substantial as we get closer to that goal anyway.