What does Eddie Izzard mean by “girl mode”? The idea that there is a “girl mode” and a “boy mode” is pure, regressive gender essentialism. I am sick of patriarchal constructs being rebranded as revolutionary when they are anything but. https://ew.com/celebrity/eddie-izzard-announces-she-her-pronouns/

Women have been fighting against the idea that males and females each embody fixed and innate gendered qualities since the dawn of the feminist movement. Because that sexist logic has been used to justify centuries of women’s violent subjugation by men as the ‘natural order’.

So for someone who has spent the last 58 years benefiting from the social and economic privileges attached to the male sex through the hierarchy of gender to breathe fresh life into said hierarchy by affirming the concept of “girl mode” is, frankly, salt in the wound.

I absolutely support Eddie Izzard’s right to wear dresses, lipstick, scarves, or any other attire perceived as feminine. But I agreed with Izzard’s previous assertion that clothes etc. are not inherently gendered: “They're not women's clothes. They're my clothes. I bought them.”

Eddie Izzard’s career took off in the 1980s, when The UK had barely a handful of female comics bc the traits embraced in a comedian - loud, confident, vulgar, holding the spotlight, telling uncomfortable truths - carried social penalties for women as deviance from “girl mode.”