Are Men A Different Species

Magnify

After eight years of dating women (and two trans men), I’ve started going out again with what queer women like myself refer to as “bio boys”—people who are biologically born with male bodies they enjoy having. These people are known in the rest of the world by the common term “men.”

Things were relatively uneventful with my Chinese American bio boy, Steven, until we started having communication conflicts a few months into our relationship. Each conversation had me asking, “How do you feel about that?” and “What do you think about what I just said?” Naturally, I turned to my women friends for support. I expected we would do what we had done before, when I was dating women and trans men: drink smoothies and debate my lover’s motives, analyzing childhood-inspired neuroses and making plans of what I would do to make the relationship work.

Instead I was faced with a slew of female opinions—from lesbians, straight and bi women— which reduced the communication conflicts to this: “He’s a guy—they don’t talk” and “You can’t expect him to be emotional—he’s a guy.” And finally, my favorite: “It’s not like it is with girls.”

If I didn’t believe my women friends, I had magazines citing theories of evolution to explain the communication styles of men and women. My favorite, paraphrased from O magazine: Men don’t talk to create intimacy; they do activities together like back in the day when they sat in the quiet watching for a passing buffalo.

Wait, wasn’t feminism supposed to set us free from this kind of thinking about men?

If women of all sexual orientations are so certain about who men really are, how free are men to be themselves? To what degree are we complicit in teaching men that they are their biology? And the following question I can only ask of myself: What makes me so uncomfortable with silences in my relationship? My writing inclinations aside, what makes me want to fill up every moment with chatter?