Enough with the Gender Essentialism

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 88 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

Since Vibecamp, I’ve been actually using Twitter - sorry, X - to keep up with my friends and other people in the postrat scene. It’s mostly been great. Much better than anywhere else on Twitter, which before this I always found rather unpleasant and nasty. But there are a few things that bother me, one of which is the gender essentialism.

On the Left, you run into a lot of very stupid takes to the effect that gender discrimination is the only reason why every human activity isn’t 50/50 men and women. They like to pretend that there are no differences in the average man vs. the average woman, when the evidence is overwhelming that, in aggregate, men and women have different interests, capabilities, and temperaments, probably (but not necessarily) for genetic reasons.

But postrat Twitter takes this too far. In their efforts to reject foolish equity arguments, they end up pivoting all the way into stereotyping. I keep seeing takes declaring that men are one way and women are a different way, which just isn’t true at all once you get to an individual level. Lots of women are much closer to stereotypical men than stereotypical women, and vice versa. Not only does this pave over the experience of a lot of people, but it also makes the discourse around transgender identities very annoying by causing people to think that if you don’t conform to stereotypes around your gender, you must be a different gender. 

These takes especially grind my gears when it comes to dating. I keep seeing dating advice trying to tell men how women are and telling them to optimize for that. When it comes to dating, nobody should be optimizing for the average member of the opposite sex. You should be optimizing for people you actually want to date, and unless you’re a profoundly boring person, the people you really want to date are going to be exceptional. So instead of trying to change your preferences to acknowledge “what women are like” or whatever, just look for women who are outliers in the ways that matter to you.

I just Googled “masculinity” and the first image that comes up is a chart listing masculine and feminine traits. Guess what? I like women who are assertive, brave, independent, agentic, logical, capable, stable, responsible, and good with boundaries - all listed as masculine traits. And guess what else? I know plenty of women who I would describe that way, or at least more that way than the typical man I know. They’re not your ordinary, average women, but who wants to date ordinary, average people?  

This kind of thing really irritates me because these women I’m describing are some of my absolute favorite people. And when people say “women aren’t like that,” especially when it’s said as though the speaker is some kind of brave straight shooter speaking truth to power, it feels like it’s denying the existence of the people I love most in the world and then breaking for applause. I hate it. 

So I’m begging you, please stop making sweeping declarations about gender without acknowledging that there are tons of exceptions. We rightly recognize it as bigoted when people talk like that about race, nationality, sexual orientation, or other characteristics, and it’s just as bigoted when you say it about gender.