Do better Hexbear smdh 
Edit: I am currently balding folks, it’s happening right now. It’s still not misandry if someone makes fun of me, even if it’s not very nice and hurts my feelings
The other day I went to some family celebration, and my one aunt, who had cancer way back when, she was there with her kids. And she noticed that I was very conspicuously wearing a beanie indoors, and she asked me, “Is it a beanie day today?” — and I said, “Yup.”
And she asked me, “Is every day a beanie day?” — and I said, “Yup.”
And she said, “Yeah, I know what that’s like.” — and thus ended that brief exchange.
It was on the on the one hand “nice” to get a remark on my hair loss that came from a place of empathy, and didn’t emphasize the hair loss as anything “masculine”; on the other hand dealing with hair loss feels like a bit of a catch-22 as long as I’m closeted, like no matter what I do, even the most empathetic acknowledgement of my hair loss is going to sting a little and make me feel silly and pathetic regardless.
Other people can much better explain the exact deal with baldness and how it interacts with gender in multifaceted ways, or explain how “the fruiting body is not the whole mushroom” wrt the things that people might point to and call “misandry” — I guess I just wanted to chime in and say that shit sucks, and making fun of literally anyone for experiencing (or how they choose to deal with) hair loss, shouldn’t fly.
But being against body shaming shouldn’t be a controversial stance, anyways.
I mean i guess? Male pattern baldness is highly gendered and baldness is to some extent treated as shameful in society. If you’re bullying some guy over hairloss then yeah, that’s gendered harassment.
Trans women are also affected by baldness and as somebody who’s close friends with several who suffer massively from that particular fact, it’s kinda gross to have to read this. Cis women who suffer from alopecia will also be treated very differently than a bald man.
What we’re talking about here is body shaming. It’s not ok, it’s particularly not appropriate “workplace banter”, but we already have a term for it and it’s definitely not gender-based harassment. Gender-based harassment relies on a gendered power hierarchy. Gendered power hierarchies in our society place men above women, cis people above trans people, binary people over nonbinary people, endo people over inter people and gender conforming people over gender nonconforming people. A trans woman being bullied for wearing a wig counts as gender-based harassment when we use that term to encompass transphobia, because people are actively using the characteristic of baldness to invalidate her gender identity and enforce a hierarchy that places trans people below cis people. A cis man being made fun of for being bald is not that. It’s still cruel and not ok, it is way too accepted socially and if it happens in a workplace environment, it’s perfectly appropriate when his coworkers get sanctioned for it because it’s just shitty behavior. But it’s not the same thing as the experiences of women in the workplace in a patriarchal society.
