selacious I can see what you're saying re narrow gender constraints but in using a phrase like "masculine woman" you are buying into these stereotypes yourself.
Personally I am very very against the idea that "men are like this and women are like that" and that frees everyone up to be who they want to be and do what they want to do and personally I am pleased if the sum of human happiness is higher by a person feeing free to express themselves as they feel they wish.
There are a lot of issues around this, and I can realate to sakura's view quite easily that if men can be women without any of the things that make us biologically female, and without the experience of growing up as a female, then what actually is a woman. People say being a woman is a state of mind. I don't go around feeling like a woman" all the time. I don't think about it that much. I think about otehr women, I think about the children, I think about the environment, all sorts of things. But I don't go around thinking "I am woman". Does this mean that I am not one?
I am also confused as to how someone can know that they "think like a woman" when they don't know what a woman thinks like. I totally accept that some people want to be the other gender, and that is fine. I admit that I fail to understand how people know what the other gender actually thinks like though. I know that I think very differently to a lot of other women, from conversation. Is it from conversation with men and women, that it is possible to say that you are more one than the other? But then what of people who enjoy the company of the other sex and don't really get on with their own sex? I don;t really understand that - and I probably never will as I have not experienced it. Still I accept that people feel like that, and that is fine.
I still feel that the root of what is going on (again as sakura said) is that society is too gendered by far and thus people feel they have to conform to certain ways of being, there is not freedom to be anything else. If we were all totally free and there were no sexism, things would be very different for everyone, and I thnk that is teh society that I would aim for.
And what I said earlier "I am (in many ways) very stereotypically male in my outlook and the things I like and so on. It doens't mean I am a man. In our society I have no desire to be a man. If I lived in a society where women were forced into extremely proscribed gender roles and I was not allowed to follow my interests then maybe I would consider myself to have a "male brain" and wish I were a man. Certainly in previous centuries girls passed off as men in order to do the things they wanted, which as women they were not able to do. It has been mentioned that this still happens in Iran. If the woman mechanic who was described earlier lived in the UK rather than Iran, it is perfectly possible that she might not feel the need to live as a man, as she would be able to be "herself" as a woman."
Is there a point in that, do you think, or is that an idea that a trans person would totally reject?