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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?
Who are them which you mean? Are they in the room with us right now?
If you mean the LGBT* movement, I think you will find that they have plenty of cis-female members and allies. Surely these would know what it means to be a woman?
If you mean m2f trans people, you might be right that their idea of what a woman is might be different from the median idea of womanhood expressed by ciswomen in systematic ways. For example, it might be that for your warhammer nerd, rather than being driven to pursue some high platonic ideal of womanhood centered around social connections and care work has autogynophilia -- the thought of having boobs turns her on. Not that I find anything wrong with that. By contrast, I would expect there to be an anti-correlation between being trans and being unconditionally asexual, because if you are a man driven to do care work, that is a totally valid occupation for men today, and if you are a woman wanting to fix car engines, that is likewise fine. (Giant caveat here is that as a cis-by-default, I might not get people for whom gender is a big deal. Presumably, there are trans people for whom their transness is completely divorced from anything sexual, who knew that people were using the wrong pronouns for them based on the role models of men and women they observed at age eight, long before they even learned what the naughty bits were and how they worked.) Still, the autogynophile conception of woman has some significant intersection with the cis conception, I think. People being attracted to you and engaging in costly signaling to persuade you to have sex with them is not a universal experience of womanhood, but still a rather defining one, I imagine.
If we propose that any definition of womanhood should at least encompass all the adult female humans who have not explicitly rejected that label, then that definition of womanhood will by necessity be very broad. Sure, it will encompass the kind stay-at-home mum as a central example, but it will also include Margret Thatcher, car mechanics, butch lesbians, your odd XX warhammer nerd, nymphomaniacs, dominas, ruthless businesswomen, and so on. It would be really bad style to tell that car mechanic that she is not feminine enough to deserve the label woman. And once that is accepted, I think it would also be bad style to police the conduct of trans-women more restrictively. "Yes, Tina is a woman despite being a warhammer nerd, but you see, she was born with a uterus. You were not, so you will need to try to find a more suitable hobby before calling yourself a woman."
This seems irrelevant?
Men are, of course, welcome to have whatever (legal) hobbies their hearts desire.
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