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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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