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What is a woman?
I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.
Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".
I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.
First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)
And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
Now what about the guys who aren't that
mercenarycynicalsocially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
Americans understand the one drop rule makes Meghan Markle black, but not the pope. But race-as-a-spectrum is actually literally arbitrary; there are cultures which see mulattos as not-black. There are cultures which see whiteness as a one drop rule. The same is not true for man and woman.
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