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I'm glad I posted this because the responses revealed a serious flaw in my explanation.
I very specifically do not mean "they don't know what a female is". They get that, for the most part. I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish. Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. It parses the same way you would consider the differences between The Rock and Kevin Hart. They treat their female friends and girlfriends like a guy, and then don't understand why it backfires. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt. So if a person with a penis puts on a skirt and claims to be a woman, what's the difference?
And the solution is to have other men explicitly teach them about the differences in perspective. The full Boomer Wisdom.
Or they can just watch Hoe Math videos.
And from that, witness the fundamental anxiety: there are women who qualify as this (tomboys are not trans men, though they function like the platonic ideal of one, including attitude and general outlook on life- there are women who just act like this more generally without specific tomboy markers, and they're harder to spot, but they'll always show you who they are eventually), and there are women who do not.
Women who qualify tend to get lots of high-quality male attention, for reasons that are blatantly obvious (the self-awareness alone makes a much better partner, to say nothing of the other stuff; hostile unproductive attitude, which is something TERFs don't solve, is corrosive). Pick-me-s. This makes Mean Girls jealous.
So, how best to attack such a woman? By doing the same thing to these men-women that they did to men more generally- take away their spaces, destroy what was good about them through gender politics. That is the sole purpose of having men in women's sports: destroying the spaces where participating in a male-type pursuit is productive, and making them as miserable as every other worthless bitch (and now a disadvantage in the instinctual quest for the highest sexual price that defines womanhood). Mission accomplished.
The spear counterpart to this behavior is, of course, as you described:
"Lived experience" of a thing is not required to know how expressions of it can be destructive.
Ive thought this too. If self-identified trans men really are men, theyre the type of man who worrys that his canthal tilt isnt enough - ie a loser, who we would consider at least as deficient in masculinity mentally as physically. Obviously the really masculine thing to do is to just be one of the boys.
And while youre right that theres some obvious reasons why men would be interested in those women, I also think there is something particular to it for nerds. We are a culture thats mostly male and at least used to believe in gender equality, and so have accumulated a lot of masculinely inspired but genderneutrally applied ideals. Jocks might like the convenice of a more masculine mentality, but they also like acting steretypically all girly. How do you act girly in accordance with nerd culture? Dimorphism exists for a reason, and I feel sometimes that this remains a mote in our eye, who now complain about other unnatural degeneracy.
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We must secure the existence of our tomboys and a future for girl's sports.
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I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of. You can approximate, sure, but my question to anyone claiming to be having the internal experience of being the opposite sex is “what does being that gender feel like exactly?” Like, im a woman and im not sure I could explain the feeling of femaleness to another person. And I’m certain I could never understand the internal experience of maleness. I could approximate, but my thought of what maleness feels like (interest in competition, visual based sexuality, practicality, and disinterest in arts) would likely offend males much like any other stereotype even if true in other areas.
Don't worry about "knowing". Settle for "being able to usefully predict the results of". For example, I have read books from an author with a feminine name that I knew literally nothing about as a person. And halfway through my brain just says "Sorry, but there is no chance a woman wrote something this spectacularly autistic", and then I go look and of course the author is trans. There are tells, in what gets highlighted and how things are approached.
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Perhaps, but the offense comes more because discussing them quickly pattern-matches into angry venting (in the "I don't see the use of you, let us clear you away" Chesterton's Fence sense).
That, and "knowing"[1] someone in public is just fucking obnoxious. "I read in a book that You People do X, so I'm going to do X then get frustrated that it's not working" kind of comes off like stealing in the... sense that you've taken information that wasn't being emitted then drawn conclusions based on that to gain a personal advantage. Compare the "I read that black people like fried chicken, so we'll serve it for Black History Month" thing for a more neutral? example.
But then, how to balance "making the attempt to understand" against "there's a right way and a wrong way to do this", combined with the fact that the people who aren't all that experienced (or competent, in some cases) at the former are less likely to understand the required secondary knowledge of the latter? And then you have people who want to do it for the wrong reasons anyway.
[1] I find the Biblical meaning of "knowing" to be instructive here (and as a consequence, take being trusted with certain other kinds of information more seriously than I do the knowledge gained by 'merely' sleeping with someone; there are plenty of things that can be way more destructive than that).
Sure, but when people say that, a "so you don't have the right to call them out for destructive behaviors that I'm trying to normalize for myself" is being smuggled in. You don't need to internally experience being an X to have the right [when it is within my political power] to impose costs designed to constrain nastiness that the statistically-average member of X exhibits.
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Forget groups, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of anyone else.
We just had a whole discussion about how one man thought no men would be willingly be kicked in the balls to have a child. And was immediately corrected several times over by multiple other men. So clearly even for men, for a fairly universal experience of being kicked in the balls our individual internal experiences vary massively.
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Well that's just explicitly denied by ideology. Everything that you described is what Butler would call a performance of gender, and argued to not be innate.
That's where this whole thing starts, that's what gender as a concept is: social constructivism.
I agree that it's probably not true and renders the endeavour impossible, but let's be fair, they understand what a woman is, they just want to change that or destroy that, because they think the world will be better for it.
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