When identity is about embodying your privilege, they are the same thing - and I think the men who don't want to give that up don't want to lose that privilege. They've been told their whole lives that they are better than girls, and they don't want to have to accept that they aren't. The fact that a man needs a gendered identity - where it's not enough to be a good person - is the problem. Assumptions that there are fundamental differences between men and women (rather than differences between individuals as they embody their gender) is what led to 5k years of the oppression and marginalization of women.
I'm not trying to be belligerent here, but I don't see any way to create a gendered identity except in the loosest sense that doesn't lead to dysfunction - either for women or for the men who don't happen to fit into that identity. Many, many of the increasing numbers of people who are identifying as non-binary are doing it to reject restrictive and somewhat arbitrary gender boxes, and I think that's a great thing. As I said, I'm very clear that I'm a woman, but I don't want people making any assumptions about me for good or for ill based on that alone and that's all gender identity is mostly really used for by modern Western people.
Nobody is stopping men from being good dads. Men are just discovering that they have to actually show up and try in order to get the respect and privilege that used to be theirs for being born with a penis. I think they need to step up and do that - or find that they have increasingly less value or place in society, which is kind of where we're headed right now. I don't have any patience for "I don't know who I am if nobody tells me how and who to be." Do the work to figure out who you actually are and stop relying on other people's acceptance of whether or not you have met their metrics. That's a huge, huge factor in patriarchy - the insecurity that comes from always taking your identity from where you rank against others rather than from inside yourself. It's unbelievably dysfunctional and destructive. We don't need new boxes - we need people to embrace their individuality at the same time that they recognize their interdependence with those around them like most pre-patriarchal peoples did. We aren't hunter-gatherers so we can't live exactly like them, but there sure are some cues we really ought to take.
"Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference."
(And I’ll add, that although these tribes have gender roles, mostly people don’t pay all that much attention to them because autonomy is way more important than gender roles. In many of these cultures, both men and women hunt and both men and women gather. I personally think that’s a much better way to live — as a person who is a part of a culture.)
Women are working to become whatever they want to be regardless of what is coded for them. Men need to do (and be allowed to do) the same.
Edit: Any place where I’ve said “you” obviously doesn’t mean you personally — it means one. I know that you value equality and figuring out a way forward together. I guess I’ve just been oppressed by male fragility for far too long to want to accommodate it. Women have had to struggle for thousands of years to be respected, to be heard, to not be treated as property, to get to vote, to be treated as equals under the law (if not in actual practice a lot of the time), so if men have to struggle to figure out how to find themselves in the face of old norms of masculinity going by the wayside, I guess I don’t have all that much sympathy. 🤷♀️
