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My personal feeling on the matter is that male and female are just descriptors for the greater unifying, "human being," and we all lean more towards androgynous behaviors and desires more than Hollywood would have us believe. Most of us, male or female, want satisfying work, emotional validation, friendship, intimacy, leisure, a sense of being appreciated. The rest is just details, and those details can vary widely from woman to woman and man to man. It shows just how socially conditioned we are when a cisgendered male would say something like, "I've never liked sports and I've always enjoyed shopping. Do you think I might be trans?"
This is true, but there are significant and real differences between men and women. In fact, if one looks at brain development between men and women, it is starkly different at almost every stage. The male and female brains are different in real ways because the hormone levels in each are drastically different. As such, thinking, learning modes, memory storage and retrieval, etc. are all different in real ways.
That doesn't mean that a guy who doesn't like sports is really supposed to be a woman, but it does mean that gender differences exist. We just create many artificial societal differences that have no basis in biology.
But that aside, I wonder if there's not a subtle sort of transphobia going on behind complains that men aren't "acting like men" and women aren't "acting like women" as if that were somehow a bad thing. Maybe that girly-acting side character is a transgender woman instead of a writing mistake on the writer's part. Even if an author isn't consciously thinking about making a character trans, anyone with their eyes open can notice that there are plenty of outliers to gender stereotyped behaviors--manly women and womanly men--even if these role-benders wouldn't self-describe as trans.
Thoughts on any of this?
I agree with this 100%.