It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

At the beginning of the Chapter 6, Woolf begins to develop an idea that defines, in rather vague and abstract terms, a notion of femininity and masculinity, and the benefits of experiencing both in a conjoined manner. I admit to feeling a twinge of discomfort when she brought this up, but as she developed the notion, I began to feel very differently. For what she developed was not so much a heteronormative gender essentialism - it would have been odd for her to do as much in the context of her own bisexuality. In fact, she establishes a necessity of every creator to have both a male and female part to them, and claims that many male writers of her time suffer from lacking sufficient femininity, from writing as a man, first and foremost. Likewise, she praises Proust as producing works which are, if anything, more feminine than masculine, at least in part because of the rarity of such works.

This leaves me wondering: is this a useful or even accurate conceptualizing of gender? If so, what does this imply about good strategies regarding the way we discuss gender? Furthermore, can this sort of thinking be extrapolated to other forms of identity?

Off the top of my head, I can think of both advantages and disadvantages to this. On the one hand, there is the perhaps more harmful notion of asking, for instance, who is "the man" in a gay or lesbian relationship. Yet Woolf's conception does not inherently require this; a person can, presumably, be both the man and the woman in any relationship. One may even claim this to be necessary to some capacity to achieve a happy relationship.

But, I'm reminded of numerous situations in which, say, a transwoman has come into a conversation on /r/TwoXChromosomes and by virtue of their explicit experience with a sort of gender duality, been able to shed some clarity on a woman's issue that ciswomen seem to be struggling with conveying. Whether this is something innate to an awareness and acceptance of this duality is unclear, but I wonder if there is something to be said for embracing both our masculine and feminine sides whenever we come into any conversation on gender. Note that this does not necessarily mean siding with the "male perspective," but rather something more nuanced which, perhaps, it is worth further developing.