Quote Originally Posted by MissConstrued View Post
Methinks you protest a bit much.
Lol.

I don't think Sheila was looking for a long, drawn-out discussion on this -- merely pointing out that from your pictures, which you linked yourself, that you don't look like anything other than typical male goth.
Theres lots of subsets of Goths, and certainly i'm far too oldschool to be remotely typical but thats beside the point, more importantly I have passed when less feminine than that! Indeed the more feminine I dress the less often I'm seen as female lol. The times when in public I've been thought to be a girl I've been in guy clothes and no makeup :D

But most importantly, the pics are from last year and I mentioned in my post straight after the link that my male expression is now much more feminine!

I said:
Though the last few months I've been wearing more purple and dark reds for lipstick. And dark red or a glossy metal purple nail polish.
And yes, thats what I'm wearing doing my weekly shopping.
The typical 'male goth' is more effeminate than the typical 'male-non-goth' simply because... drum roll... Goth is more accepting of gender diversity. And Androgyny and diverse gender expression is... drum roll... transgender! And believe me the acceptance Goths have now was hard-won.

If you traveled around the US like you look there, people would call you one of two things: goth, or faggot. And I suspect a lot of the male goths would kick your ass if you questioned their gender. If they had muscles. :D
I know lots of American Goths, from Cyber/Industrial-Goth body builders to effeminate Steampunks to genderqueer/FtM Emo's. And Goths as a group are one of the most gentle and peaceful subcultures ever. And every Goth I've come out to has been 100% supportive and accepting of Gender variance and sexuality.

As for the value of terms... they have been needed to define the sources of other groups problems. Internalised Racism was an important discovery as to many of the issues facing many racial minorities. Same things were learned by exploring Internalised Mysogyny. Its essentially the same thing occurring to different groups of people under similar conditions.

And terms like cissexual and cissgender allow us to reexamine things in a way that takes away the norm-compared-to-other bias of our Internalised Transphobia.