“Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”

The question was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) to then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. It was a trap question, asked at a time where rising levels of hostility towards LGBTQ+ people was everywhere in the news and meant to, as the kids say, “dunk” on Jackson’s progressive stance towards LGBTQ+ rights and issues.

When the clip hit the news, I rolled my eyes at yet more political theater from the modern Republican Party and promptly forgot about it once Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. But a few weeks ago, the exchange came back to my mind when I was asked a question myself.

It was lunchtime at work, and as I grabbed my lunch box from the fridge, my coworker asked me if I thought he was feminine. Now, context: this coworker is openly gay. I didn’t want to pry, but I got the feeling he was asking me if he fell into certain stereotypes about gay men.

To prevent stepping on toes, I asked him, “[Coworker,] what do you mean by ‘feminine’?”

He wasn’t sure what I meant, so I explained.

There are a lot of different ways that men are masculine. In this exchange with my coworker, I used the example of the late great James Gandolfini, who despite being overweight, balding, and sounded like he came down with a nasal infection in college and never got better, exuded masculine energy, both as himself and as Tony Soprano.

You’ve probably heard the term “toxic masculinity” by now. If you haven’t, it’s defined as:

a cultural concept of manliness that glorifies stoicism, strength, virility, and dominance, and that is socially maladaptive or harmful to mental health.

Dictionary.com

I’m not going to deep-dive into the topic of toxic masculinity now (though I can in the future), but the ultimate point I made to my coworker was: despite these “man rules” that so many people try to treat as absolute, so many men who are unquestionably manly break this mold and never have their masculinity questioned.

Stoicism is supposed to make you a man, yet Walter Cronkite famously had to stop himself from weeping on-air when announcing the death of President Kennedy; nobody says Walter Cronkite’s not a man.

If strength is what makes a man, explain the popularity of K-Pop bands like BTS, where none of the members are beefcakes. Can you really look at their mega-success, see the hundreds of thousands of female fans swooning over them at their concerts, and say they’re not manly because they’re not benching 1,000?

Virility is defined as “the quality of having strength, energy, and a strong sex drive.” Stephen Hawking reached all kinds of academic heights, making breakthroughs in theoretical physics, was a professor at Cambridge, and wrote several bestselling books. And he did all of this while a muscular disease confined him to a wheelchair and slowly atrophied his body, to the point that at the time of death in 2018, the only properly functioning muscle in his body was one of his cheeks. Does the fact that Hawking wasn’t a strapping specimen diminish his accomplishments, make him less of a man?

Dominance is supposed to be manly. Yet when Roman soldiers came for Jesus, He not only submitted to the horrible punishment awaiting him, but healed a soldier one of His disciples attacked. Are you going to tell me Jesus wasn’t a man?

After laying out all of this, I returned to my question: if there are all these different ways to be masculine, then there were presumably as many different ways to be feminine. So, I needed my coworker to have a specific definition of feminine. I could see the cogs turning as my coworker processed that, and he nodded and accepted the question as moot.

So, to conclude: to my men out there, you are masculine. You’re a man if you’re straight. You’re a man if you’re LGBTQ+. You’re a man if you’re a pack of muscle. You’re a man if you’re a string bean. You’re a man if you’re rich. You’re a man if you’re poor. You’re a man even if other people call you feminine. Heck, you might be even more of a man then, because in a world full of posturing alpha-bros, a man who chooses to show vulnerability, to be in tune with their emotions, to be passionate and open, is a treasure.

To my ladies: you are feminine. You’re feminine if you’re a mother. You’re feminine if you don’t have/want kids. You’re feminine if you work. You’re feminine if you stay at home. You’re feminine if you’re straight. You’re feminine if you’re LGBTQ+. You. Are. Feminine.

To Senator Blackburn (on the off-chance she finds this): a woman is whatever she wants to be. Now, less transphobia and more acknowledging that Taiwan deserves independence, please and thank you.