War & Woo: Can't Relate to Either of You
The Latest Reason to Detest the Artificially Enforced Gender Divide
EDIT: This post was expectedly controversial. I’ve written a follow-up to clarify and provide some additional personal vulnerability.
Since first writing of the concept a few weeks back, I’ve been thinking a lot more about this idea of “Feeling Thinkers”.
I actively look for others who are deeply reflective and introspective, who want to understand and grow.
There aren’t really any pre-requisites to this, aside from curiosity, empathy, and intellectual honesty. Those factors can be true of any person, any gender, any ethnicity or culture.
But because North Americans/Westerners do live in a culture that is largely segregated by binary gender norms, some patterns understandably cropped up.
It has been nearly 9 years since I transitioned to living as a woman, and the last few years particularly I’m a lot more established in several women-centric spaces.
I’ve noticed a pattern in these spaces that has caught my attention and i’d been pondering it for a little while so I decided to write about it.
Women’s spaces tend towards a higher incidence of what some people call ‘woo’.
Astrology, human design, and manifestation to name a few.
There is a lot of discourse around the validity and legitimacy of these things.
But I also ended up wondering - why are these things so much more prevalent in women’s spaces, but I never hear men talking about them?
I did some digging, and talked through it with AI (which helps as a sounding board).
AI gave me this breakdown, which floored me:
Why Human Design, Astrology, Manifestation, and Similar Systems Appeal More To Women
It’s about social conditioning, safe meaning making, and the psychological infrastructure women are permitted to use.
Women are socialized to use relational ways of understanding themselves. Women, culturally, are praised for emotional attunement, self reflection, relational insight, intuition, caregiving, and community building.
Men by contrast are praised for logic, independence, proof, certainty, and self sufficiency.
Systems like astrology or human design offer identity, validation, and narrative cohesion in a way that is “allowed” for women based on what they are praised and rewarded for.
Men on the other hand reach for systems like science, ‘productivity hacks’, stoicism, self optimization, and rationality culture.
Both groups are ultimately seeking the same thing: A way to understand themselves and reduce existential chaos. But there is not one singular path to this, so men and women get sorted by which tools they’re ‘allowed’ to use.
Women Are Given Fewer Culturally Sanctioned Avenues For Power
Mystical systems offer:
• self permission
• personal agency
• language for needs and boundaries
• a sense of belonging
• identity clarity
• community
• meaning
These things are often withheld from women in traditional structures where they are told their whole lives:
• don’t be angry
• don’t be too powerful
• don’t be too analytical
• don’t be too direct
• don’t be too ambitious
And so spirituality becomes one of the only places where they can feel powerful, expressive, intuitive, and self directed without backlash. It is a result of cultural displacement.
Mysticism Offers Instant Emotional Soothing
“Feels true” vs “is true.”
Women are socialized to prioritize harmony and emotional safety over factual confrontation.
Mystical systems provide reassurance, identity coherence, a sense of destiny, reduced uncertainty, a feeling of being special, and narrative comfort.
It’s not because women can’t handle truth, but because society has not rewarded them for truth seeking in the same way it rewards men.
“Woo” Communities Offer Relationship-First Environments
They emphasize sharing, bonding, vulnerability, expression, belonging, and validation. These are things women are encouraged to seek.
To the contrary, men are encouraged to seek status, skills, tactical knowledge, and results.
This is why men flock to “Jordan Peterson logic dad” content while women flock to “human design identity blueprint” content.
Men are more often punished socially for using emotional or intuitive frameworks. Women are punished for being “too logical” or “cold.”
Which ultimately results in this split:
Women over-index on intuition to avoid being seen as harsh.
Men over-index on logic to avoid being seen as weak.
It’s performative conditioning. Same need. Different path.
As I was reading through that after AI spit it out, I was so gripped.
The presented logic really makes sense to me, but also makes me both sad and angry at the same time.
Sad and angry because yet again - the rigid gender binary forces people to adapt in ways that don’t honour or respect their full selves.
It’s pink and blue, Barbies and G.I. Joes all over again.
Just on a worldview (rather than just self-expression) level.
Men suffer because they don’t have a way to process and channel emotions, other than anger/rage. Women suffer because they’re pushed away from rationality into ‘woo’.
I will admit there was a time when I was more into astrology and personality tests (well before I even had begun to question my own gender identity), but at the same time, science has always been the foundation of my worldview.
Humans overall certainly tend to be emotionally attached to the answers we believe we have found.
Ligin’ and Re-ligin’
For many people, astrology is effectively a religion. A relatively ‘harmless’ religion, but same kind of idea. A system to ascribe meaning to the world where we don’t otherwise readily have meaning.
I recently saw an article via The New York Times’: Your Astrological Sign is 2,000 Years Out Of Date, and I filed it into my bookmarks because sometimes it’s easier to just point to that than try to explain myself why the ‘math wasn’t mathing’ for me anymore.
But there is also a deeper emotional issue at play for me.
It’s frustrating to be part of a community on a fundamental level (aligned via womanhood/female identity), yet to very explicitly NOT share the world view or belief system that many of your peers do.
We’re not talking about ‘does pineapple belong on pizza?’, we’re talking about ‘do we both live in the same reality?’
Back when the whole red-pill movement really kicked into gear back in the early 2000s, I had a moment of clarity.
Not much unlike how theists and atheists arguably live in 2 different realities, red-pillers and feminists effectively do as well. The implications of each respective ‘reality’ are simply not compatible.
It is both fascinating and horrifying to me to consider the logistics created and deepened by these contrasting world views.
We’re all human, and humans want and need to connect, but it’s much harder to bond with others and form community when you don’t have a compatible shared concept of reality.
I definitely want to connect, and neither my biceps nor birth chart have anything to do with it.
In-fighting exists in every group, but I’ve gotten to witness it from two different perspectives. The logic cage fights that tend to happen at cis male-centric events. And the woman-on-woman clashes that can result between women who value ‘feminism’ and those that do not (The ‘TERF wars’, if you will).
Both men and women can react poorly to getting challenged on emotional beliefs.
What do you get if you put a diehard astrologer and a diehard Rogan-Bro in a room together? You get a big ol’ human pretzel. Because I have seen both sides contort themselves into ridiculous knots to basically say ‘Nuh-uh!!!’
I recently saw this excellent video from Evie at Channel 100 News:
It further outlines many of the same issues that I came to identify, but struggled to address with people directly.
Though it’s worth noting that this video by Evie is specifically about how wellness women got hijacked by the alt-right. Here is an excerpt:
“Because the truth is, the wellness world wasn’t hijacked overnight. It was already built on distrust of institutions, the worship of intuition, and the fantasy that purity equals power. QAnon slid right in, rebranding it as ‘You’re not just healing, you’re awakening’.
That crossover between spiritual self-help and political paranoia is what scholars call conspirituality. It’s the fusion of new age mythicism with conspiracy logic.
Wellness culture already encouraged skepticism of doctors and of government guidelines. Listen to your body. Do your own research. You know yourself best. Q-anon simply remits those mantras into a political religion. It’s about seeking meaning in an uncertain world.”
(The above does not apply to most of the people I’m talking about in this article, but helps illustrate the point on a more extreme scale).
Along with this wellness/spirituality wave, there does tend to be a lot of push back against modern ‘western medicine’ (a lot of anti-vaxxers come from this space).
That wave helped fuel an extremely effective campaign against wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.
Of course, the Rogan-verse wasn’t any better, which is why I got a lot of satisfaction from Bill Burr putting Joe Rogan in his place with this banger quote:
Joe: “You want people to walk down the street with a mask on?”
Bill: “Let’s not start this Joe. Let’s not start this.”
Joe: “Let’s start it.”
Bill: “I’m not going to sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, acting like we know what’s up better than the CDC does.”
That sums it up right there.
What could otherwise be an hour long debate, boiled down to one sentence. Trust the experts.
“Both Sides”
As for the title of this blog, we’ve covered Woo, what about War?
There is that sexist running joke I’ve been hearing my whole life.
“If a woman was President, she’d just launch nukes every time she had her period.”
First off, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, and countless others would like a word.
Many cis men have a painfully insufficient understanding of biology in general, let alone menstruation.
When you think about what Women vs Men are socialized to value and prioritize, it is absolutely no surprise that male world leaders have consistently, for thousands of years, led us into armed conflicts.
Planet Earth is essentially one giant penis-measuring contest disguised as a Proxy War.
I used to attend Atheist social meetups (over a decade ago). They were very often so called ‘sausage fests’. And the women who did attend had to fight to be heard, and often were treated poorly.
Men aren’t thriving in this setup either, they’re funnelled into hyper-rationality and emotional austerity. That’s its own kind of spiritual cage.
This has been an issue in Atheist spaces and STEM spaces for longer than I’ve been alive. Globally, women make up only about 1/4 of workers in STEM jobs.
That’s definitely not because women don’t like science.
Where are women over-represented? In healthcare (including wellness spaces), education, and social services.
Men tend to dominate tech and fitness, women tend to dominate wellness, fashion, and food.
Chronicles of a Gender Traitor
I have a unique vantage point with all of this, both because I have ‘lived on both sides of the gender divide’, but also because I still enjoy hobbies and cultural institutions that are core to both.
On the ‘masculine’ side: video games, professional wrestling, heavy metal music, Atheism.
On the ‘feminine’ side: Fashion & interior design, the arts, therapy, and community building.
This is where war and woo came to collide: with my lived experience.
I began my own gender transition eight and a half years ago. It came after more than 30 years of never feeling like ‘one of the guys’, but also not being ‘one of the girls’.
I always felt more connected and ‘at home’ around women. Eventually, along with the encouragement of the people in my life who do care about and support me - I gave myself permission to lean into what felt like what should have always been.
And I think this is in part why I feel a mixture of pain, sadness, and frustration about this woo (and war) stuff.
When I finally got to embrace ‘womanhood’, I was so elated. Excited to take my place and have the bonds and connections and relationships that just never really felt possible before.
And then I joined women’s spaces and encountered more and more of this ‘woo’. And it did not resonate because my spidey sense and science told me ‘the math isn’t mathing here’.
Some readers might be thinking ‘well Lacey, clearly you were socialized as a male so of course you’re going to disproportionately value and prioritize logic and rationality at the expense of women’.
All I can say is that science is genderless. Yes, there has certainly been gender-based bias in the field of science, but the process of science is genderless.
It’s a process of controlled experiments to find repeatable outcomes so you can guarantee beyond a reasonable doubt what is causing what. That’s a level where all these ‘woo’ fields fall short at.
Woo topics like astrology and human design may borrow concepts and language from science, but borrowing vocabulary isn’t the same as real methodology.
On the same token, many cis men have mastered the art of being “confidently wrong”.
‘Male pattern pseudo-intellectual superiority’ is the masculine mirror of ‘female pattern pseudoscience spiritual manifestation’ in this cultural schism between X and Y.
I’ve mostly never felt like I had enough people to talk to in the depth and openness that I crave. I have ended up writing a lot over the years, and developed my ability to process that way. To better understand myself apart from any kind of mysticism or wishful thinking.
But I will always crave to connect and bond, and I will always relate more and feel closer to women than men. And to think that rigid enforced gender roles are causing this cultural schism that makes me feel out of place among my own gender - that pisses me off.
Rattle Them Cages
It’s not that women are irrational or that men are emotionally void. It’s that each gender has been punished for stepping into the other’s domain.
So I find myself awkwardly sandwiched between the two.
I just came across a video by Elle Michel Deran (they/she) on instagram, and I had to transcribe their words because to me this feels like the wake up call that everyone needs to hear:
Have you ever wondered why trans people are at the center of so many conservative talking points, why a group that makes up barely 1% of our population is treated like the greatest threat to society? It’s because our existence exposes something very fragile about this world we live in, a society that teaches us to build our identities on very flimsy things, a job title, a gender, a role in a family, labels that almost always point back to how we can best serve white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. We’re encouraged to see ourselves through usefulness, not truth, and nowhere is that clearer than in how womanhood is defined.
So a little history lesson - the idea that a woman is someone who can reproduce was never a universal truth. It was a part of a system created for white society roughly between the 17th and 19th centuries as a way to organize white bodies into boxes that promote white reproduction and dominance in service of European colonial expansion, while many black, brown and indigenous cultures already understood gender as expansive, fluid, multiple spiritual white supremacy needed its own rigid system To look civilized, so it labeled those expansive identities as primitive, less evolved or deviant. This idea that gender is fixed, binary and rooted in reproduction, it wasn’t discovered. It was invented to keep people in roles that serve the system.
The dissonance between our personal truths and the identities placed upon us is so loud and uncomfortable that we have to follow something deeper to survive our lives, prove something profound, that who we are is not limited to labels or roles or even biology. So when they say trans people are destroying society, what they really mean is that we are challenging the rules that keep us all in our place, and that scares the people who rely on those structures, people who identify with them, because when gender expands, the system begins to fall apart, and they don’t know the difference between who they are and the systems they serve.
The truth can be delayed, but it cannot be denied. We are not the threat. We are the evolution. And deep down, they know that when one group breaks out of a cage, the entire structure shakes and everyone gets a little more room to breathe. This is your fight too. It’s for all of us.
-Elle Michel Deran (Instagram)
Come Together Right Now
I don’t want woo to push us apart and war to keep us at odds.
I’m sad that the options seem to be to either beat each other over the head with ideas for bragging rights, or get lost in the weeds with comforting but unrealistic identity systems.
I’m not drawn to mysticism and I’m not drawn to intellectual combat.
I want and need to understand the world in a way that is rooted in evidence along the banks of the river of empathy.
Stargazing can be inspiring, but not influential for me.
In other words, I need meaning without mysticism. I need a balance of logic and intuition, because over-optimizing for either is going to leave things unbalanced and hinder connection.
I was afraid to publish this because I knew it would piss some people off. I sat on it for several weeks.
The truth is I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I also need to be honest and authentic. I want to find my people, and if this article didn’t piss you off, then you’re probably one of the people I’m looking for.
This is the filter. If you also crave evidence-based empathy, if you’re exhausted by both woo and war - you’re what I affectionately refer to as a Feeling Thinker. And I’m hoping to build something by us, for us.
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and media producer. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting which provides sensory comfort and accessibility consulting. She also writes the Beyond Quiet Rooms blog, also on Substack.
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