But what does "non-transgender men" mean?Originally Posted by ReineD
As far as I have been able to tell from the way people use the word here, "transgender" simply means a man who is doing (or wanting to do) stuff that is not considered appropriate for men. Since you seem to consider "wanting to feel pretty" to be something "men don't do", you're making your statement true by simply excluding anyone who would make it false. I think this is a case of No True Scotsman
I can't speak for Sue, but I certainly would never make such a bald statement, because almost any blanket statement like "men would want to feel pretty" is going to be false simply because men are all different.
However, "men wouldn't want to feel pretty" is equally false, for the same reason.
Some men do want to feel pretty, despite the social conditioning against it -- just look around Crossdressers.Com. It's hard to imagine that there wouldn't be more of them if there weren't all that social conditioning and stigma against it. How many? Nobody knows.
It's also hard to imagine that there wouldn't be plenty of men, maybe even the majority, who would [i]not[/] want to feel pretty, regardless of how society tried to condition them. (After all, a large segment of the female population isn't interested in looking pretty, either, despite the social pressure on them to meet those beauty standards.)
For any reasonably large group X, (almost) any statement "X's are Y" is going to be true for some and false for others. To go on and insist that "X's are Y" is to implicitly erase all the X's who aren't Y. Giving the exceptions a label Z and throwing in the occasional "except for the Z's," doesn't make it any less of an erasure.
This isn't just academic for me. I've had too many experiences where people simply ignored some significant aspect of me because they couldn't be bothered with exceptions to their "X's are...." statements. Or had people insist that I was something or someone other than who I thought I was, simply because they preferred. their theories to my reality. For instance, I've had people in the CD community insist that I was "really female" because I like to wear skirts and dresses.
