And the outlets he’s going on aren’t challenging him. They’re just giving him a platform. It seems like for the most part (except when he goes on Fox, but that’s not “mainstream”) the media outlets are totally accepting Pete Buttigieg is a form of manly. I think we’re actually having a national dialog right now about what it means to be manly. Even this years big pop culture moment of Kendrick v Drake has centered around what it means to be a man (at least in part) with the winning side saying what it means to be a man is to live authentically and not to perform masculinity. I get where the thread starter is coming from that we shouldn’t need this national dialog, because we should be treating people as people and not as totems, but American politics and media culture are intrinsically totemic in nature and so we have to have these national dialogs every so often even if the majority is already advanced beyond that. The fact is that people awaken to truths slower than others because of the cultural context they exist in, and right now the feminist and men’s liberation movement have a major opportunity to take center stage and show what preferred pronouns, gender identity, and acceptance are about.