"A Queer History of the United States for Young People" by Michael Bronski: people who don't fit into the molds society forces on them are queer

Brave women are not 'queer'.

Women who take on non traditional roles are not 'queer'.

Just leave us the fuck alone.

“gendered categories are descriptivist not prescriptivist”. That really is a thought terminating cliche which means “we can change the goalposts for what counts as gender non-conforming at will”.

In any case I’m trying to find a way of making your post make sense in the context of this woman’s life.

All I can come up with is “Because she behaved in a way which through today’s lens of the past we can label GNC, I will retroactively attach that label to her.”
It begs the question can you do what she did and still be a woman? What if she wore a dress?

Oops, Plan B then.

Give some thought to what the world Critical in Gender Critical means, no joke.

There are no socially gender categories, only social expectations of the behaviours for each category. GC has been pushing back on those expectations, a girl can play with Lego and still be a girl, a boy can play with dolls and still be a boy. A girl/women can wear whatever they want, do whatever job they want, have whatever hobbies they want because there are no limitations to being a girl/women, there is no one way to be a girl/women, there is no one stereotypical girl/women.
Compare that to GI, that's all about typical behaviours for women, you can 'identify' in or out of a 'gender' unless there's a baseline for you to 'identify' with.

GC says there is no one way to be a woman, GI insists there is.

I never said she did. And sorry to confront you all with reality but she is queer by socially constructed standards. She can reject that all she likes but it doesn't change the reality of social constructionism.

This isn't about what should be but what is. Do you understand the difference?

And I suspect it won't change because part of the human condition is to categorise patterns as a way of navigating the world. And typical behaviours create patterns that are used as reference points. So anything breaking the pattern gets its own category. This is how the human brain works so good luck with fighting the 'ridiculousness' of pattern recognition.

The perpetuation of the victim narrative by men who want people to agree that they are women is quite extraordinary.

Ditto the narrative of people who want people to agree that women doing something extraordinary means they're somehow not actually women and that we'll decide for them what they must have been.

I haven't misunderstood anything and I certainly don't act as if gender stereotyping isn't real, I've lived with it my whole life as a woman who behaves outside the female stereotype.

There is simply no need to retrospectively label this woman "queer" when there isn't the slightest evidence she was, unless you are suggesting that every woman who acts outside the female stereotype is queer, which they are not.

Regarding stereotyping, do you understand that the whole "men can turn into women" argument fails without gender stereotyping what it means to be a woman?

Honestly, I really do think people like to invent grievances to perpetuate victim mentalities.

Well you're right there. The perpetuation of the victim narrative by men who want people to agree that they are women is quite extraordinary.

Museumum didn't say she agreed with them; just what that means if you accept their rather ridiculous premise.

You now owe me a new laptop.

No joke. Welcome to socially constructed gender categories, you know what gender critical feminism is supposed to be upset about.

By that definition we are almost all 'queer' - certainly 99% of the women I know resist stereotyping in at least some part of their lives.

You are completely misunderstanding the point. Which is that stereotyping creates the 'queer' category otherwise it wouldn't exist. Just because socially constructed gender categories are wrong as they create expectations doesn't mean they aren't real. Because they are. You act as if stereotyping isn't real which is bizarre given its a gender critical feminist grievance.

The piece is just commentary on how gender non conformity was & is still treated.

Honestly, I really do think people like to invent grievances to perpetuate victim mentalities.

I do genuinely have a lot of sympathy for young people trying to navigate our increasingly gender stereotyped world. But as a child of the 70s it does drive me mad that everytime a woman does something considered 'unfeminine' instead of broadening out what it means to be a woman, a certain part of society looks to find a way in which they're not a 'normal' woman. It's soooo frustrating.

Try sending it to Google through the 5th dimension, but don't forget to press the Big Red Button first, if you don't engage the Flux Capacitor you could destroy the Universe.

I suspect your'e confusion here is the denial that socially constructed gendered categories are descriptivist not prescriptivist. Categorising gender non conforming people as 'queer' isn't saying gendered categories should exist but that they do regardless of their stereotyping.

I put this through Google translate and smoke came out of my laptop. Can anyone translate for me?

There is no confusion. She was a woman who wanted to fight for her country and the only way she could do so at that time was to pretend to be a man for the duration.

There is no need for any label for that behaviour to be applied retrospectively to her actions.

I don't understand why it seems to come as such a shock to trans activists that women do things that are more often done by men all the time, day in day out. It's normal.

If we had to choose a word to describe Deborah Sampson, we might choose 'queer.' This term is used today with pride as an umbrella term for anyone who does not fit into mainstream rules about sexuality or gender.

Why do we have to choose a word to describe Deborah Sampson in the first place? it's pretty insulting to decide that your (meaning the author, not OP) is one she'd would have accepted, agreed with or recognised, seeing as have we have no idea what she thought about her sexual role; or rather we do, as she married and had children.

I loathe with a fire of a thousand suns this habit of ascribing 21c opinions, attitudes and affiliations to people in the past. It's lazy and it's sloppy thinking.

I get so annoyed by things like this and it now happens so often. It shows a total lack of understanding of history and a simple desire to erase women doing remarkable things.

It also reads like a very dull book.

And yes please ignore our resident TRAs. Unfortunately they have been spoiling quite a few threads recently.

What's heartbreaking about all this is, at its core, they see qualities like bravery, defiance, determination, strength and resilience as uniquely male traits. For a woman to show these traits, she is subversive or in the wrong body or something.

I'm like, have you even looked at your own mother properly. Women have all those traits.

What these people do not realise is, they ARE the mould.

You see this all over fandoms (not necessarily the pinnacle of high culture, I admit). Anytime there is a strong unconventional woman? Must be queer. It’s almost like they have no model for how these kind of women can operate in a world as a heterosexual woman that’s not “feminine”.

I sympathise with your frustration, the Alphabetties are worse than the Mormons for hijacking dead people's history.

It took so long for womans contributions to the building of civilization to be recognised and now this batshittery is taking what little recognition woman have away.
This man's rights movement won't allow women to have anything of their own.
Ignore the spew from a previous poster, they just trying to get their money's worth from the Gender Studies degree they got in their cereal box.

There's a lot of difference between:
"I am a woman. I want to do X. Society thinks women don't and shouldn't do X. Society is unreasonable and I am going to find a way to do X, either by defiantly and openly doing it or by disguising myself as a man if defiance isn't realistic."

And:
" I want to do X. Society thinks women don't and shouldn't do X. Women are people who don't want to and shouldn't do X, so I am not a woman, I am really a man."

I don't know whether queer theory counts both of these options as "Queer". Arguably the first one is more subversive of social norms; and all pioneering feminists would be "queer" by that first definition.

The trouble with claiming past figures for this or that modern stance is that, unless they obligingly left a record of how they saw themselves and their behaviour, we don't know what exactly they thought they were doing.

• Dr. James Barry (Margaret Ann Bulkley):
• Rena 'Rusty' Kanokogi:
• Dorothy Lawrence:
• Billy Tipton (Dorothy Lucille Tipton):
• Charley Parkhurst (Charlotte Parkhurst):
• Cathay Williams (William Cathay):
• Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (Lyons Wakeman):
• Loreta Janeta Velázquez (Harry T. Buford):
• Sarah Emma Edmonds (Franklin Thompson):
• Hannah Snell (James Gray):
• Nadezhda Durova (Alexander Sokolov):
• Christian Davies (Kit Cavanagh / Christopher Welch)

None of whom were "queer" just women finding that to earn decent money, or be allowed to fight had to pretend to be male.

And I doubt any of them that they could change sex. But just knew that the reality of their female sex meant they were discriminated against.

But part of the point of queering as a male project is to erase woman. Just as they did back in the 70s and 80s when they got women's studies departments closed and replaced by gender studies.