I tend to think of human qualities as, well, just that - human qualities... and they've been divided up, culture by culture, into what are considered male-norm and female-norm ranges, and then people mix them up in their heads with male and female. But to me, every human quality (whether creative or destructive) has potential to be expressed by every human, and it's just a norm-convenient convention to say this is how men are, this is how women are.
So I think masculine and feminine are fundamentally flawed/misused models even within their intended scope. They change from decade to decade, and from culture to culture, so they're just a convention. So it's up to you whether you feel that convention makes any sense of your own identity/qualities, and even if it does, there's no reason to assume the next person along thinks of them in same way you do, so it's a bit of a dead end. The only time I get annoyed about it is when one gender or other (speaking in binary terms for a moment
) decides they "own" a particular human quality. Nonsense.
I write this as someone who identifies as female, but not feminine in the conventionally accepted sense of that term.
