Fandom Snowflake 2025 Challenge #6

[scrubjayspeaks]

Challenge #6

Share your favourite piece of original canon. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've been revisiting The Lord of the Rings books, and I recently finished Two Towers. This was previously the section I found least interesting, but this read-through hit different.

Éomer and Faramir both have speeches about what they will decide to do when they capture, more or less, members of the fellowship. Éomer has to decide if he will let Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli go on their way--with loaned horses, even--when he has orders to detain and bring back to King Théoden anyone he hasn't summarily killed. Faramir is under similar orders from Gondor when he meets Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.

They monologue their way through the moral dilemma, weighing options and motivations. Both of them invoke ideas of manhood and honor in a way that really grabbed hold of me. They ultimately both decide that trust, and compassion, and solidarity are more important than blind adherence to rules and authority. It's not that they're disloyal to their leaders. But they decide that their honor will not let them betray vulnerable strangers.

I've been paying particular attention to what being a good man means in the series. It's full of men who recite poetry, and speak tenderly of friends, and feel deeply the sufferings of their times. They're brave and steadfast, prepared to endure terrible things. They don't glory in the terrible things, though, or even in their ability to bear up under them. It is strength without hardness. It is strength that longs for, and works toward, the days when it will not be needed.

There's a lot of advice floating around about how to pass as a man. And a lot of it amounts to "wear drab colors, be less expressive, be harder and more withdrawn." Which all seem like a wretched way of defining manhood. They might be necessary to pass, since those do seem to be the expectations of men in our current overculture. But I keep looking for models of manhood that don't settle for this flattening of a person.

Comments

[gingicat]

That’s a great observation. Thank you for sharing.

[trepkos]

There's a lot of advice floating around about how to pass as a man. And a lot of it amounts to "wear drab colors, be less expressive, be harder and more withdrawn."

Indeed, that is deeply depressing. I think I have spent a lot of my life looking for a male role model (my dad being absent through no fault of his own) and I settled on Mr Spock! And then Spike! Weird polar opposites. (Not that I am transitioning or anything like that, but I have never felt especially happy to be a woman.)

[hamsterwoman]

It is strength that longs for, and works toward, the days when it will not be needed.

That is beautifully put! And a very neat observation overall.

[trepkos]

"There's a lot of advice floating around about how to pass as a man."

Also, isn't the whole point of transitioning to be able to be more true to your authentic self? Not to have to ape the habits of one stereotype or another?

[scrubjayspeaks]

Broadly, I would say yes, it is about being more true to your authentic self. But how that manifests can vary. There are aspects of transition that focus on how you feel about yourself/your body, and there are aspects that focus on how other people perceive and interact with you. For some people, being Just Some Dude to other people is very affirming. I'm a bit too eccentric to achieve Just Some Dude, but I get it.

A lot of advice around passing is about things you can do to more closely match what your culture expects to see in a man. That can be valuable on multiple levels. It's safer, for one, because even cis men who perform manhood "wrong" can be in danger. It can make medical professionals and other gatekeepers more accepting that you're a "real" example of your gender and thus deserving of access to HRT/surgery/name changes/etc. It can also teach you the unspoken habits that signal "man" to other people, which you might not have internalized if you didn't have a traditional (or any) boyhood.

The problem is when this advice starts to replicate the most restrictive social ideas about masculinity. I generally prefer suggestions that are framed around learning to *recognize* how gender is performed in one's culture and then choosing what parts to adopt and how. Less a set of rules and more a set of building blocks.

[trepkos]

It's just terrible that people are made to feel they have to perform as one gender or another, especially when treatment depends on this. Coming at it from the other direction, I've always wondered about how much of wanting to transition is to do with not wanting to or not feeling one can fit the behavioural norms ... I mean, if women and men were treated exactly the same, would that result in fewer people wanting to transition, or exactly the same number? Hoping not to cause offence! Like, I feel I'd have been happier as a bisexual man rather than a bisexual woman, but would this be different if everyone was treated the same? I don't know ... If it's a physical feeling, then you shouldn't have to behave in line with masculine cultural norms to be eligible for treatment. It seems like putting the cart before the horse.

[scrubjayspeaks]

I'm sure that if you ask ten trans people to explain how they know they are their gender, you'll get ten to fifteen different answers. And there are also a lot of perspectives on what gender is, how it functions socially, and what, if anything, about all that can or should be handled differently. A lot of the philosophy and theory on that is outside my wheelhouse, I'm afraid.

On a certain level, my answer is, I just know, and everyone's going to have to trust me on that. I can expound on certain feelings and wants and interactions that feel like evidence. But sometimes that is just treated as a list of things for a person to poke holes in to "prove" that I'm wrong. And life is too short to waste time on that sort of person.

There is, however, a metric I have found useful in approaching your question regarding gendered treatment/interactions and one's identity. Is this behavior something that would bother you if *anyone* was on the receiving end of it, or does it only bother you when directed at you? For example, a waiter addresses my hypothetical lady friend as "ma'am." Being addressed as ma'am makes me feel skin-crawlingly awful. But it wouldn't bother me for my friend to be addressed that way. It's not a disrespectful way to be addressed in this interaction. It's just wrong for *me*, because I'm not a woman.

On the other hand, a mechanic tells my lady friend that women just can't understand car maintenance, so there's no point in explaining what he needs to replace on her car. That is a shitty, sexist thing to say, and I would be mad on my friend's account. Likewise, I would be angry if *any* man was told "boys don't cry, suck it up," so I don't see why I should aspire to never cry as a way of proving my manhood.

Not all of gender is about other people's perception and treatment of you, though. That's when I get into my second useful metric: the end of the world scenario. If the rest of the world disappeared tomorrow, and I'm the last person left and I'm going to go live in a cave by myself, what would I choose? I found this useful when deciding on top surgery. Because if the whole world disappeared and I never saw another human, I would still be happier to have a flat chest.

And as far as being eligible for treatment goes, well, I'm a radical--I think people should be able to do anything they want with their own bodies, because our bodies are the first, last, and possibly only thing we will ever truly possess. I don't have to understand why they want to, and I sure as shit don't think I should be doling out permission based on how well they can argue their case to me. I'm just aware that this is not a view currently governing the medical field with which I must live. *shrug*

[trepkos]

Great metrics! Thank you! For me, I find it irritating that we need to be addressed per a gender. I would prefer to be "citizen" or "comrade" ... (As an aside, I often get called "Mr" on the phone (and not bothered by it), and my (male, bearded) SO and I are constantly being addressed as "ladies", for reasons I have not been able to determine! ...)