Men with boobs.

[Bob]

Originally Posted by betenoire

So you're saying it's fair to run about policing the identities, labels, what-have-yous of complete strangers who are more "masculine presenting" because their identities, labels, and what-have-yous have the potential to paint another completely unrelated "masculine presenting" person with a brush that they don't like?.

No, that's not what I said. What I said is that certain types of language are intrinsically demeaning, regardless of who it's applied to and whether or not that person likes it.

I fail to see how demeaning one group of people empowers another who may share (for the sake of convenience) the same 'label'. Such as 'butch', for example. Butch has come to encompass such a wide variety of personas, presentations, and gender identities that it's almost become meaningless in any real sense. Regardless of whether you're male-id'ed or female-id'ed, language that implies that women who are masculine are somehow less than is wrong.

Or to use a slightly more inflammatory example, most people would probably agree that regardless of its use among certain musical genres and subcommunities, it's not okay to use the the N word. We recognize that as word that is fundamentally and in and of itself meant only to harm.

I fear that misogyny, unlike racism (random teabaggers aside) is so ingrained in people that they don't recognize it when they see it. It's not about policing others' identities, it's about policing ourselves.