A man by nature is gender conforming. He has to change nothing about himself. To be gender nonconforming he has to do something—wear makeup, put on restrictive clothing, adopt a less manageable hairstyle, buy jewelry, shave his body.

A woman by nature is gender nonconforming. She must change herself to conform. To be gender nonconforming she just has to be—throw on comfortable clothing and forget her razors, makeup, styling appliances, and jewelry in a drawer somewhere.

For men, conforming to gender is passive, natural; nonconformity is an active choice. For women, the opposite is true. Her natural existence itself revolts against demands of her gender.

To draw similarity between gnc men and gnc women is to misunderstand the nature of gender itself—it is a set of shackles for women. This means that gnc women are freeing themselves of their chains. But does it not also mean that gnc men are trying on our shackles for fun, with no awareness of the role they play in our lives and none of the pressure to chain themselves in this way that we endure? Do they feel so entitled to our experiences that they can experiment with the most brutal of our feminine beauty rituals and have the audacity to say it validates them? To the point where they demand access to everything women have to ourselves, including but not limited to our spaces in which we can be vulnerable, our anatomy and our language for it, our shared experiences, our names, our very words—women, female, she?

Is a gnc man any more than a mockery of the cages in which we are born?