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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'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.
You can't, that's the main draw of it. The topic of what you're being a nerd about at the time, or the thing that you're trying to do at that moment, is the 'woman' in this context. Women who do this have either explicitly chosen, or have an innate affinity for, not being the 'girl' in this social context; that's what separates tomboys from your standard representative of Women, Inc. (and is part of why tomboyism is more common in childhood).
The thing about these topics, or goals, is that the mystery is... external, not personal. You either measure up to be rewarded for examining something or you don't- this can be from hunting to computers or music or anything in between [you either have the right answer], but it's not going to shut itself off, turn its nose up at you, or try to murder you for examining it like Women, Inc. will. This is an existential threat for us in a way the average man can't understand (they're missing a piece).
And from the male side, the really feminine thing to do is to just be one of the girls.
This manifests as the "gay best friend" phenomenon from Women, Inc. reps that don't fully understand this (they've identified the 'not a sexual threat' part correctly though, and something that tends to get in the way of nerd relationships; just because you spend most of your time as masc-presenting doesn't mean your attraction patterns aren't fundamentally female). If you watch [or were] the little boy who hangs out with the girls a lot (something more common for nerds than for the average man), this is what he is doing.
Guys have the attraction-dampening effects on for tomboys in a similar way, but the specifics are a bit different.
The people who do most of that complaining are not nerds. While I agree that "unnatural degeneracy" is the best way that the average man, or Women, Inc. representative, should describe someone not obeying their instincts, I also think that those are the people for whom (as you put it) dimorphism exists in the first place. From that viewpoint, that is why it is possible to "be turned [LGBTQP][1]", and I also agree that in some cases this is an accurate statement to make (especially since these people can be manufactured from stuff like "being a victim of sexual assault", and the meme that one can be "traumatized" by seeing porn or sex at a young age comes directly from this place)... but if you're not starting from that viewpoint then these claims become an incoherent mess.
Yes, I think that forms some anxiety, especially for autoandrophiles. Real women-men know they don't need to have a penis to be a man, but not all women are capable of getting to that state (and Women, Inc. has done its best to distract them for the reason I noted earlier- women-men are not a threat in the same way). So, if the ideals of your culture and the rewards given are disproportionately masculine... then it makes sense that more women will perceive they don't measure up. Combine that with the tactical and strategic implications of being a woman (where your only value at that point is childbirth, and the odd social crusade once you're too old for that) and it's not exactly a surprise why one would want to opt out.
[1] Which is part of why these "conditions" are grouped like this in the first place, and is also why these people claim P is an inextricable part of that grouping and are very invested in that "most gays were raped as children" statistic.
My point is that, as nice as it may be to have something like that, it cant be all of society. You need? women, not just biological ones but social ones too, and you need to have some space for that. Even if they are then not nerds, then nerddom would need to have some kind of interface for an intended complement, and it doesnt. Nerds just want to marry nerdettes, and want them to not do the women things except when the need for it is really in your face, and then they copy something from mainstream society or wing it.
Is it? Concern about your appearance really is feminine behaviour, so IMO its congruent that trans women pursue a female body.
Yes, but a lot of people from the overlap are here, thats why I brought it up. I didnt really understand the rest of your paragraph there.
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