Seems like a fine community to post in, if you consider your self woman-identified. (See sidebar.)

Obviously, it’s wrong to gatekeep ways people talk. That idiot should shut up – you can talk however you like. But I’ll answer the question you asked – “what the fuck does that even mean?”

From a linguistic perspective, there is a notion of masculine and feminine speech patterns – that is, phrases or words that are most frequently used by women and phrases that are most frequently used by men. In languages other than English, this is often easy to spot – for instance, in japanese, there are pseudo-gendered first-person pronouns. Similarly, “umai” (tasty) is often considered more masculine than “oishii” (tasty). In English though, it’s much less common. I could think of “honey” or “dear” – e.g. “ohh, honey, no!” or “hello my dear” are rather feminine phrases – in my life, I have mostly heard women use those words in that way, and when men use them they tend to be considered “effeminate.” It’s also apparently more common for men to say “uh” and for women to say “um.”

There are probably subtle differences in how often various phrases are used by men vs women if you were to carefully make a tally – but honestly why bother. That’s just descriptivism. To say that men and women should speak in different ways is prescriptivist, and just plain wrong. So I wouldn’t worry about the way you speak – if somebody is upset with that, it is that person who is wrong, not you. As someone whose partner is a tomboy/butch woman, I must say I wouldn’t expect her to switch to using more feminine speech patterns.

If it’s concerning to you anyway, something you can keep in mind is the well-known linguistic phenomenon that new ways of speaking tend to flow from women to men more than vice versa. This is true in every culture studied so far as I know. For instance, it used to be considered an exceptionally feminine thing to say “like” all the time “he was like, …” “that’s so, like, …” but now it’s pretty ubiquitous. So if your speech doesn’t sound feminine today, it might have sounded overtly feminine just 25 years ago.

My motivation is seeping back in. Looking forward to being productive on the things I want to do :)

What are some succesful 3rd world communist movements? Asking for a friend

Well, your response is identical to, for instance, the response given in terf communities I used to peruse. (Relax – I’m a better person now.) The reason I am asking is that I think exclusivity is a bad thing, rather than the absence of a good thing – i.e., the world would be better with fewer exclusive places.

I’d counter with this – why don’t you want men in the community? And does the answer you give to that apply to every man, or just a subset? I understand, of course, that the easiest way to exclude that subset is to exclude all men, and I wouldn’t want to ask the mod team to do more work for free.