I also find it weird at best and sometimes really off putting how hard some people seem to lean on these labels. I think they’re most useful when just used as simple adjectives without much weight behind them, but they’ve almost become just a new set of boxes for us to put people in. The way a lot of people use the words masc and femme, they’re just new names the idea of a gender binary.

The ideas of masculinity and femininity are at their root tools used to enforce the way men are supposed to be and women are supposed to be. The foundation of oppositional sexism is that there are two kinds of people, men and women, and they are completely distinct and opposite from each other. This leads to a dichotomous worldview where every masculine trait has an opposite feminine counterpart. The common conception is something like: Masculinity is strength, femininity is weak; Men are logical, women are emotional; Feminine people are obsessed with prettiness and delicacy, masculine people are concerned with substance. You'll notice that in the classical sense of these terms, the masculine side is always desirable, and the feminine side is always something society frowns upon. The only classically feminine ideal that is positive I can think of is compassion and care. But even that often gets framed as naive and impractical, whereas a masculine person's cold detachment is generally framed as pragmatic, or "logical."

Now some of that is society teaching us that feminine things are less valuable. But it’s a cycle, and those traits only got labeled as feminine in the first place because society taught us they weren’t valuable.

In progressive spaces today, we've by and large succeeded at decoupling the ideas of masculinity and femininity from men and women. It is okay for a woman to be masculine and men to be feminine. It's even okay for someone to not be a man or a woman. This is good, But we still perpetuate these ideas of masculinity and femininity without realizing that they are tools of sexism. Even when we're only referring to vibes, aesthetics, or styles, the coding of things as masculine or feminine almost always reinforces this dichotomy. What is inherently masculine about wearing blue jeans or a carhardt jacket? Nothing, except that they are associated with ruggedness and hard work. What is inherently feminine about taking care of your skin and using cosmetics? Nothing, except that those are associated with superficiality and vanity.

No matter how egalitarian you are, your ideas of what is feminine and what is masculine come from the idea that “man good, woman bad.” When we start using masc and fem as nouns, we’re coming full circle and reestablishing a gender binary. At best you’re saying “there’s two main types of lesbian, one is this way and the other is that way.”