Accepting Gender Differences

It's a strange time when it comes to the reality of the differences between genders. It's a very strange time because it doesn't... No one's ever said like men are better than women or women are better than men. We're just different things and transgender people are different as well. We're all just different. We should be accepting of each other and loving of each other and give each other equal rights and laws and respect. When it comes to athletics, there's a reason why men don't compete against women. And I had this bizarre conversation with this guy once who has this TV show where he kind of debunks things, but when I got him alone to talk about these things, like without a team of writers, when you leave someone to just their opinions and he had these sort of very progressive talking points that he would kind of blurt out, but then when I started challenging him on these and going deep, I realized he didn't really think about this. He just wanted to appear that he was progressive, which I am. I am a progressive person. I know I look like a meathead, but I'm very progressive. I just look at reality though. I grew up with martial arts and with fighting, and I know there's a fucking radical difference between males and females. It's radical. It's not small. It's not subtle. It's radical. You mean it's physical strength or do you also mean it's psychological? It's physical strength and violence and psychology and attitude and competitiveness. It's radical. There's a radical difference. And also, there's a spectrum, and some people are far more feminine than they are masculine and they happen to have penises, and some women are far more masculine than they are feminine and they have to have vaginas. But it doesn't change the norm. It doesn't change, and it certainly doesn't change on the high ends of these spectrums. When you look at the high ends of these spectrums, ultra-female versus ultra-male, you're looking at two radically different things. Yeah. Yeah, and I really like what you said about—I'm getting emotional again. I like what you said about just accepting and understanding each other. Yes. That, to me, you don't have to accept bad behavior. You don't have to accept hurtful behavior. But it does help us to really work hard to understand it. And those are the extremes of behavior. But you're right. We're different. And I think it's interesting and it's exciting, the ways that we're different. And testosterone really does help to explain so many of those differences. So understanding that hormone helps us understand each other. And I want to help me, even though I have been teaching about this stuff for ages, writing the book and especially reading about the transgender experiences helped me to have sort of this epiphany so you can see how emotional I am. I'm like ultra-emotional. My husband is a British philosopher, and he is not—he doesn't get angry. He doesn't really express a huge range of emotion. He's a wonderful guy, and I love him. But I've always kind of picked on him and thought there was something wrong with him for not being more emotional, not being able to have these long conversations about emotions and psychology and what happened in his childhood to make him like that. And I have a temper. He doesn't have a temper. I cry during lecture and can't even—and cry at home and, you know, can barely control that. My epiphany was I'm not better than he is because I'm so in touch with my emotions. I have issues. Like, he probably has issues too, but he doesn't have to come to be closer to me in my way of being in the world. I need to work on accepting who he is. He's an awesome guy. And I was always trying to get him to be more like me, and I think women really want men, if they're in heterosexual relationships, to be more like them emotionally. But I had this epiphany, like, no, it's working out. And our marriage would be better if I just shut up about some of the—getting him to be more emotional all the time. I need to take the gifts that he's giving me. And I have to look at myself and where my emotionality—which I'm, you know, getting emotional yet. But that was all through learning about—like, learning more about this hormone and what it does. It's just who he is as a man. Not that all men are that way. But it did help me—just the understanding helps us to accept each other. And that's sort of one larger point in the book that I don't try to make so explicitly, but I hope that—and again, I don't mean we have to accept bad behavior, but we can try to understand these extremes of male behavior that are disturbing and more disturbing than extremes of female behavior. You know, I can cry and have a fit, but I'm not raping anybody. Well, because that's an extreme of—that's a bad extreme of male behavior that we need to understand. But let's understand, like, where that's coming from instead of shutting down the conversation or shaming men for just being men, who are all men are being blamed for the extremes of male behavior. That's ridiculous in my view.