Behold: an umbrella term
Oh good, even more nonsense to keep track of.
But what does gender expansive mean? According to national LGBTQ+ advocacy group PFLAG, it’s an umbrella term for individuals who don’t align with traditional gender categories, or who expand ideas of gender expression or identity.
“It might be used because someone has identities outside of what’s socially accepted,” said Mackenzie Harte, PFLAG’s manager of learning and inclusion, adding that the term is one they’ve increasingly heard used by parents and educators regarding to youth. “It’s where someone is not conforming to social ideas of what gender should be.”
Geddit? It means they’re special and rebelly and fascinating and original and above all better than you.
Gender expansive is not synonymous with nonbinary, PFLAG notes; even cisgender individuals can embrace the term. Instead, it’s another way of saying gender non-conforming — the more preferred term, according to the group.
Yeah but any old prole can be gender non-conforming. Gender expansive is for the special people, the ones who soar above the rest of us like gender angels.
Oh, this is tiring! When, do you think, it will simply collapse under its weight!
Oooh, how inclooosive of them.
Now we’re getting somewhere. I assume on that basis that the PFLAG term would include giraffes: male, female, and everything between. And naturally, it would have to be a big umbrella. For all those giraffes.
But can I expand the traditional gender category of men to include men who dress like women, or is that still forbidden?
They’re going to need a bigger flag, what with all those additional colored stripes.
Do they need reminding that PFLAG stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays? If they are dropping their core focus, maybe they need a new name.
@Sackbut #6
Just like GLAAD: Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. They’ve forgotten who brought them to the dance, in favor of All T All the Time.
“Breaking gender stereotypes” is the ultimate thought terminator for many.
Far too many people have been encouraged to just turn off their brains and feel the heavenly transcendence of the contradiction at the heart of gender identity ideology. It’s a holy confusion. Like the Trinity: how can three gods be one god at the very same time? That’s just it! They can’t! You can’t think your way through this; you just have to feeeeeeeel it.
Likewise with the conflation of sex and gender. How is reifying gender stereotypes breaking them down? How is obsessively promoting gender stereotypes erasing them? That’s just it! You can’t think you way though this.
The appeal is in the enigma. It’s an act of loyalty to the tribe to obstinately not sit down and think it through.
And I swear, this is precisely the psychology that I detect among so many gay people and their purported allies. Any critical inquiry conjures crippling anxiety and feral defensiveness. They’re very aware that gay people can feel both trapped by gender stereotypes and drawn to them at the same time. They’re sensitive that there’s a lot of hurt and pain among gay people to do with this confusion around gender and sex. And they’ve been lulled by gender ideology to believe that the solution to this contradiction is to make it sacred and to equate anything but turn-your-brain-off-and-give-in-to-gender-chaos as an existential threat. Anything to do with parsing the difference between sex and gender, anything to do with defining the boundaries between the sexes, any critical thought about these topics is as blasphemous to many gay people as pointing out the inherent contradiction in the Trinity is to devout Catholics.
They’ve built up a whole identity around not knowing the answers to some fundamental questions. Rather like Christians and their three-but-one-but-three-at-the-same-time god.
I see this even among some gay people who have become critical of gender identity ideology. They’ve figured out that there’s a problem with gender extremists’ views, but they still get hostile if you apply too much scientific inquiry into the connection between gender nonconformity and homosexuality. Questions like, why do so many extremely gender nonconforming children grow up to be gay in adulthood, and why are gay men so drawn to gender stereotypes in other men while we’re so averse to applying them to ourselves? These kinds of questions are held as taboo, even though from where I’m standing they look like exactly what we need to be asking in order to understand why gay people and their allies are so susceptible to gender identity ideology.
They — the science-hostile gays — are also of the mind that the topic should remain a sacred mystery; they’ve just drawn the lines around it a little differently.
I think we need to fling the doors wide open and let the sunlight in. This means that no topic is off limits to inquiry. No wonder the activists call “gender expansive” an “umbrella” term — they’re all about blocking the sunlight.
Look at the horrors hiding in the shade of that umbrella: young gay people are suffering from a mental health crisis and they’re being medically experimented on! It’s time to shut the umbrellas.
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I remember when Trans Activists took great pains to establish that trans people WERE NOT cross-dressers or tomboys. There was a huge, critical difference between just being gender nonconforming — refusing to follow stereotypes or naturally preferring activities or interests more common in the other sex — and being trans. Lumping the two groups together basically denied the existence of trans people. Educate yourself. Don’t confuse them.
Unless doing so seems to support their claims, or surrounds them with a beneficent glow.
And those new stripes should be in ultraviolet, infrared, and X-ray because, like the “identities” they would be representing, they are invisible to the unaided eye.
Ha!
I swear there is a label-generating service that feeds our modern society with all these gender-related terms, and the labels are accompanied with some sort of adjuvant that has the effect of stopping people from questioning the source so that we just “accept them.” If you’ve ever looked at the “72 genders” list you find that they are all nearly identical and describe loosey-goosey descriptions of gender expansiveness, and they seem to be denser in the early parts of the alphabet but fewer as you get down to the zeds as if whoever was making them up lost interest. I’ve never seen any actual sources for them in the scientific literature.
Shine a light, and they’ll disappear in a puff of logic.