Gender in USAmerican culture is a funny thing. I was thinking about masculinity the other day; the extent of what is/can be considered "emasculating" and therefore embarrassing and gay is amazing if you think about it. Most of the things involved in being a human being are considered somewhat effeminate; hygiene, cooking, feelings, art. Wearing clothes that fit, having furniture, liking your wife. Being straight is kinda gay, even; liking women, respecting women, and enjoying the company of women is considered unmasculine beta cuck shit.
I think men immersed in straight culture who gain some small amount of cultural awareness about this often assume that this is 1) being done to them by women and 2) it must therefore be easier to be a woman, because they are "allowed" to do all of these things that men aren't "allowed" to do. Men realize that it is literally impossible to be perfectly manly and still be alive, and assume that women just don't understand how hard this is. Having not actually put much thought into sexism or gender as systems of power, let alone put any effort into deconstructing their assumptions about women, they think, "but it's so easy for women, since femininity comes naturally to them!" They're unable to extend their understanding of gendered expectations to femininity and start inhabiting this strange world where women are to blame for patriarchy, a system which they feel that men are the "real" victims of. ~Women are only expected to lounge around the house all day while men do all the working and dying and suffering! Obviously this is a system that benefits women and disadvantages men!~
A lot of people seem to really think that it isn't sexist to expect all women to be unfailingly kind, patient, and caring, infinite wells of goodwill and forgiveness, effortlessly skilled, hardworking but soft and humble and gentle, 24/7 on-call caretakers and housewives and homemakers who are naturally and inherently capable of solving any problem put in front of them without complaint or hesitation. Women should do all the housework and childcare and cook, of course, and they also ought to have a job. Women can and should and must conjure more hours in a day than exist by virtue of their natural femininity. And when they're done doing all of that, they must also provide every man they meet with any and all emotional support he might require, and sex as well, and they should look good doing it. They should be always wearing makeup but never put on makeup or care about makeup or enjoy makeup.
These aren't unreasonable asks, men think, because all of these are easy and natural for women. For men it might sound unreasonable and difficult and horrible, but that's because it would be those things for a man!
These types of men become deeply entrenched in misogyny out of resentment and stubborn ignorance, refusing to intake any actual information about gender or sexism because they think their personal grievances are all the data they need. After all, they're men; they're logical, not emotional, and could never be wrong. They believe that recognizing their own hardships in relation to gender makes them enlightened on the subject in general.
Independence, solitude, the outdoors, confidence, work, strength, anger, thinking, travel, creation, education, boundaries, preferences, making noise, taking up space - these are not fundamental parts of the human experience which are denied to women, they are seen as simply fundamental parts of the male human experience. It's normal to deny women those things, because women don't need them!
Gender, in its ultimate cishetero form, dehumanizes everybody. No one is allowed to experience their own humanity in full, and everyone is perpetually inadequate. Depressing!
~This is the point where a lot of gender critical TERFs diverge from trans people in their thinking about gender, actually. In terms of criticizing gender.
The GCTERF sees the dehumanizing brutality of the binary gender system and says to trans people, "of course you feel disconnected from your assigned gender; everyone does, because no one can be truly 'gender conforming' under the system of gender as it currently exists. Gender as a system is inherently alienating!"
They think that trans people are reinforcing and upholding gender roles, that our concepts of gender are juvenile and reductive and that we are buying into it. In the minds of the GCTERFs, being trans is the same thing as declaring women with short hair "not real women" - it's insulting and narrow-minded to suggest that just because a "man" likes pink and dolls and dresses he must be a woman. And a trans man is a "woman" who hates "herself" because of internalized sexism, a hatred of womanhood and femininity ingrained into "her" by cultural misogyny.
Trans women are considered misogynists mocking women and femininity; since a trans woman is viewed as "a man," everything she says about her gender is viewed through that lens and feels offensive and obnoxious. How dare she try to give an opinion on what being a woman is like! She doesn't know!!
Trans men, however, are victims mired in self-hatred and internalized misogyny. A trans man is pitiable, because he hates his female-ness so much that it hurts him, and the appropriate thing to do is to help him heal from that self-hatred and develop a more expansive understanding of what it means to be female.
Since gender is fake, for GCTERFs the only thing that matters is how you grow up and move through the world - did you grow up with everyone treating you as a girl or did you grow up with everyone treating you as a boy? Those experiences - the ingrained biases, the effects it had on your development, the advantages and disadvantages provided to you in key parts of your formative years - are, they think, a distinct binary rooted in cultural gender structures. A boy-child is beaten into the shape of "a man" by his environment and a girl-child is beaten into the shape of "a woman," and the intensity and cruelty of these rigid upbringings permanently impact your mind and your body. It is thus not possible for a trans woman to be "truly a woman" to the GCTERF because to be "a woman" is to experience girl-childhood in this specific way; and the reverse is true for trans men. You can't redo your entire infancy and childhood with medication and surgery; the foundation has still been laid in a specific way, regardless of what you build atop it.
This analysis is, much like the aforedescribed "hurt man" perspective, limited by a stubborn refusal to actually listen to other people, intake new information, or believe that other people's internality or experiences or perspectives matter. They have developed an idea of what trans people are like and come to conclusions based on that, and refuse to believe that they might be wrong. Anything that women (in the first case) or trans people (in the second) say, any evidence provided, any phrasing or information or experiences that don't align with the structure they've invented is just dirty rotten lies and propaganda presented as part of an insidious agenda.
(In this mode of thinking the more convincing the argument the more suspicious and diabolical it is, and in this respect sexism and transphobia are a lot like evangelical Christianity. The people arguing with you are agents of Satan out for your soul, not human beings, and you can't trust anything they have to say. Everything they touch is corrupted by their sin and is, by association, Of The Devil.)
One of many things a GCTERF does not account for in the "what matters is how you grow up and move through the world" setup is that there are not, in fact, only two ways that children grow up. There are not only two gendered upbringings! A lot of TERFs - not all, but a lot - are white, and think of white USAmerican cis girlhood as the universal girlchild experience. It is not.
GCTERFs do not account for trans children; both those who are transitioning and those who remain closeted. They don't seem aware that all children exist in the same society, that a girlchild who grows up being told that she is a boy over and over again is still going to be taking in information about girlhood and cultural ideas about what it means to be a girl from the environment around her. Her experience of girlhood is not the same as that of a cis girl, but it is still an experience of girlhood.
There are many experiences of girlhood. Being a girl in a culture where arranged marriage is common is not the same as being a girl in a culture without it. Growing up in poverty as a girl is not the same as growing up extremely wealthy as a girl. Being a fat girl and being a skinny girl are different. There are points of similarity and there are points of difference between different experiences of girlhood, and these similarities and differences are both meaningful and important. Misogyny manifests differently in different contexts, and there's a lot of personal, demographic, and cultural factors that influence various experiences of womanhood/girlhood/sexism.
~It's sad that people so often want to make themselves feel powerful by finding a group they can wield power over. Rather than seeking solidarity with people who've also experienced hardship and forming a united front against the system harming them, they insist that their potential allies are actually their enemies so they can justify being cruel to them. I dunno. I can't think of a better way to put it than that it's sad.
The Folding Ideas video about NFTs has this bit that I think about a lot;
It's a movement driven in no small part by rage - by people who looked at 2008, who looked at the system as it exists, but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn't provide enough opportunities to be the boot. And that's the pitch: buy in now, buy in early, and you could be the high-tech future boot.
That's how these people approach gender. They want to be the boot.
I just think it's so awful to be unable to imagine something better than that. To feel trapped in a feeling of powerlessness, to let your rational mind become overridden with resentment, to cut yourself off from any hope for compassion or understanding.
A great example: there is no "male loneliness epidemic." Men and women are equally lonely. Study after study indicates that everybody, people in general, are experiencing high levels of loneliness. But lonely men want to feel that their loneliness is somehow special and uniquely male. Women, after all, have it so much better than men - women, after all, are naturally in touch with their emotions, naturally sociable, naturally nurturing and caring. It's easy for women to make friends. How could women be lonely? It makes more sense for only men to be lonely, for only the loneliness of men to really matter, for the loneliness of men to be a unique and special type of sadness that women couldn't possibly understand. After all, women are at fault for men's loneliness. Someone has to be to blame.
~Plenty of hurt men and gender critical TERFs are, of course, simply lying about what they think. They're just misogynists and transphobes and they have no particular attachment to any specific line of reasoning or argument. You can disprove and counter their arguments all day and all night and it won't matter one bit because they don't care about any of them. I think that's actually the majority of them, to be honest; they're operating first and foremost based on how they feel, and they feel bad.
On the other hand, some of these people - from both groups, to be clear - are trans themselves. They are transmuting fear and dysphoria into rage and disgust and resentment, and lashing out at the people who make them feel uncomfortable. Namely, women and trans people, most especially trans women. That's a whole other can of worms, it just seemed important to mention.
...All that and I didn't really talk about what I think about gender! Or even what mine is. Ha ha. I mean, it's not like it's a secret. Seems pretty obvious. Plus it's not interesting to me. Other people's thoughts on gender are much more novel.