Hey? For the record?

Gendered socialization doesn't exist. There is no "male socialization" or "female socialization".

Just like gender doesn't exist on a strict binary, neither does anything involving the socialization into gender.

Sometimes certain bits of the socialization is gendered, and certainly we're all socialized to gender in slightly different way, but there is no monolithic definition of "male socialization" or "female socialization".

This is part of why we have so much trouble coming up with definitions for the very concepts of "man" and "woman" that aren't essentially tautological. Because they're soft, loose categories, whether you like it or not.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of gendered expectations.

But to say that there is a "male socialization" and a "female socialization," we would have to be able to separate one from the other. Say "this is what girls learn" and "this is what boys learn." We can't.

All people are socialized into the structures of toxic masculinity.

All people are socialized into the structures of passive femininity.

The substance of what we learn about gender is fairly universal for both sides of the enforced binary.

It is in our relationship to the ideas we are presented that what people call "gendered socialization" lives.

However, unlike gender itself, masculinity and femininity (and to a lesser extent, androgyny) are externally defined, but NOT externally imposed.

What it is to be masculine or feminine has a fluid but communally defined nature. However whether a person FEELS masculine or feminine, is a largely internal process (though it can certainly be effected by external pressures).

Now, of course, we are taking gender itself here to be an internal process and not simply the sum total of other people's perceptions of you.

The latter is a wholly incomplete model of gender that cannot account for trans people in any meaningful way, so I reject it.

So, since one's internal relationship with gender is not externally imposed, the way we each relate to the socialization around gender we are all indoctrinated into is a highly individualized one.

It's almost obvious to say that the internal perception of gender doesn't exist in a simple binary, neither can our relationship to the things we are taught about gender.

Even if we remove non-binary people from our calculus in constructing a model of gendered socialization (which we shouldn't), we still come to this conclusion!

A weedy milquetoast nerd relates to the things they are taught about gender very differently than a thick-necked jock.

And we have barely even addressed the differences in what masculinity and femininity even mean across time and culture!

We simply cannot say there is a "male socialization" and a "female socialization" in any meaningful way.

Which isn't to say that those external pressures imposed on us by other people's perceptions of our gender don't have a lasting impact.

It's simply to say that looking only at the gender society imposed on an individual at birth gives no good ideas what that impact looks like.