https://hazlitt.net/feature/between-spaceAn outstanding essay on 'in-between' gender.
I feel like my entire life has been spent as an intellectual. Per the definition:
1. relating to the intellect.
"children need intellectual stimulation"
synonyms: mental, cerebral, cognitive, psychological; More
It has nothing to do with being intelligent. I have met people who were actually not bright who were fascinating intellectuals, with whom I could share knowledge theories and so on. It's really a body of interest.
But being an intellectual, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, made you suspect as a male. The strong gender typing was nothing like it was in the 1950s but still worse than the 1980s where 'gender bending' came into vogue in pop culture, and the 1990s when taboos around homosexuality broke, and eventually there was a galaxy of recognizable types of masculinity/femininity and sexual preference.
Today's world of incels and TERFs is probably impossible for someone older than me to understand, and most men my age just shut up about it. But to me, the issues around gender are defined around freedoms and unity, ie. how to allow freedoms and also unity. Liberalism seems like the natural place from which to grow unity, but the conflicts come when freedoms come into conflict.
I wonder what the world will be like in 20 years.