Are you able to define a 'real man' or a 'real woman' without using the opposite gender as part of the definition and...

not providing characteristics that aren’t things that can be applied to all genders…?

I’ve been thinking more and more about how arbitrary gender definitions are (well I’ve always thought this but it’s been a slow day) and how each person will have their own sense of what that’s like given what they learned growing up, given their cultural background, given their own sense of self, etc….

To me the terms ‘real man’ and ‘real woman’ are meaningless because (when separated from biological sex, since gender doesn’t equal sex, for the purpose of this discussion) there is no one set definition (and it doesn’t matter what the dictionary says, we don’t consult it when we think of these things) and because I find it difficult to define either without using the opposite gender in its definition…maybe you don’t find that to be a problem, but I find it then that no gender can stand on its own if it needs its ‘half’ to define it

So, is it possible to come up with these definitions without saying ‘a real man….xyz…in terms of women’ or without saying ‘a real man is someone who…’ and then use an action that anyone can do…same for ‘real woman’...people say things like ‘now there’s a real woman’ and ‘I’m a red blooded man’ and presumably they have some notions of what it all means, yes? So what does it mean, to you?

This has a little to do with me because so many times people will say ‘well you’re a woman after all’ even though I say I don’t feel like one and then their reasons for this ‘discovery’ are all different and equally not plausible, to me…

So if these things are pretty arbitrary and subjective, why are they still so commonly used as fall-backs to explain some sort of ‘truth’? and again, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s not define gender in terms of biology as clearly there are many people out there living as some other gender from the one they were given at birth because of their sex and no one is the wiser