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The only thing I can think is the gender non-conforming behavior of some homosexuals, who perform the gender/sex roles of a sex they're not (studs, femme male homosexuals). I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there. They're not confused like transpeople who claim to be women, they're deliberately non-conforming.
If you remove medicalization the boundaries get much fuzzier, because there's really no sharp dividing line between these things and "trans". They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.
Seriously asking as someone who doesn't pay much attention to LGBT foundation myths:has it been that way historically? A transwoman didn't throw the first brick but does anyone deny that they were part of the same club of non-conformists (along with drag queens and studs and so on) that we now call the "LGBT movement"? I've not seen anyone debate Marsha P.'s membership, just his centrality (or self-identification)
Gay and trans were absolutely part of the same club back in the day, and coincidentally pretty much the only people who wanted to live as the opposite sex at that time were super effeminate gay men and super butch lesbians. Nobody in 1980 would ever have anticipated the modern phenomenon of straight men putting on dresses and calling themselves trans lesbians, nor the prevalence of the religious belief among young women that such men must be respected and treated as women in all ways.
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"Confusion" is just what a straight person calls it, because everyone is straight, obviously.
I have never been "confused" about who or what I am (even through the time when most straights 'wake up'- that time being puberty, which must naturally be why most straights believe that time to be "confusing" to them). I find the notion that I ever would be kind of insulting, but I keep that to myself because expressing that is not generally beneficial.
Once you hear that, you have two options- you can accept it and move on (maybe make up some academic-sounding term for people who do that), or you could choose to get turbo butthurt over it, cry to some under-worked authority figure, and take the word the neutral[ish] people used and use it as a weapon because it makes you sound as smart, which automatically makes you better than everyone else.
Which is why that cluster of non-straight behavior belongs together. I figure sexuality is probably made up of a bunch of modules, and sometimes some people do not get the "correct" ones. Personality may then either enhance or corrupt this (or indeed might back-fill sexuality if you either don't have one or are out of a situation where it's relevant); so what might be productive for one group to do might be extremely destructive if another group does it, and vice versa.
Obviously in 2024 a woman who wants to be in the professional workforce is normal and doesn't have a defective brain module. Can the same be said of the woman in 1950? Would people (you, or others) lump the 1950s woman in with queers and call her "confused" because she is non-conformist? Would people not lump her in with queers, because queers gross them out, but she's just a little weird?
The only wrench in my argument is there may not be such a woman in 1950 - or rather, any woman in 1950 that wanted to be in the professional workforce was probably also a butch queer.
Tomboys, especially the older ones, will complain to no end about people doing exactly this.
It's probably technically accurate based on how I've observed them to act, but it's obviously not particularly productive to say that (and they're certainly not "confused"; this is what I mean when I complain about the normies picking up descriptive/academic terms and using them as weapons). It's also not really non-conformist-with-intent, which is what most people mean when they say that; that is just the way they are, and that is fine.
This can cause some problems for men who want/need to be the only one filling the dominant (male) role in a relationship; we don't exactly publish "how to be gay married in a straight relationship" books... since the only people who would ever read them are the ones that don't need to.
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There were professional women in 1950, and nobody thought that made them men. This post has mostly women who were in traditionally female professions, but also has a "security sales woman", pharmacists in training, a machinist, and a sales engineer.
Obligatory: what's a man?
(If you consider a 'man' to be a 'human doing' rather than a 'human being' it... actually kind of makes more sense to consider women who do that men in this context- but there's a right way and a wrong way to do that.)
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