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I missed @FtttG post about Dave, and while I’ll agree that Dave is likely porn sick, I don’t think that’s what happens all the time. My impression of most trans people of either gender is that they rarely understand anything other than what media or social media tells them their desired sex is actually like. They tend to, for want of a better term, “LARP”. Trans women tend to suddenly wear makeup and frilly dresses and take up interests in things that media holds as traditionally feminine interests. It comes of as the gendered equivalent of a white man deciding that his soul is that of a black man and proceeding to go out wearing dreadlocks, fake gold teeth, flashing gang signs and tattoos, and eating fried chicken and watermelon. No one would think of such a thing as a serious attempt to live out the life of a black man because that’s not remotely the way most black men live. It’s a stereotype, tropes, and are generally things that whites or at least racist whites think black men are like.
Most women, unless they’re feeling fancy, are not wearing dresses in ordinary life. Unless working in a field that requires it, most women aren’t wearing skirts. If they’re just hangout wyother women, it’s jeans and a cute top or something. And most women are not just doing things TV decided was feminine. Lots of women like sports and play them regularly. They go hiking and fishing, they play video games, they read science fiction and fantasy (and not all of us like romantasy).
So whatever is actually happening in the brain, I think it has less to do with a feeling of being a woman and more of a desire to be treated like a woman. They know what the media tells them women like, but they have no other source of information.
I've said it before that a lot of the gender culture wars seem to be caused by the apex fallacy. People draw conclusions about the typical or median of the other gender based on noticing the chunk that's high status enough to notice. I think a lot of transwomen suffer from a pathological level of it.
I don’t see apex in this, simply because so much of what trans women seem to think the interior life experiences of women are the things that the media tells people that women are like. It would be like me taking men’s media portrayals as what men are like. If I say I’m a man and I act like the media portrayals of male action heroes maybe like John Wick or something, you’d find the effect rather weird because this isn’t what any men are like. I don’t think John Wick in the wild is super high status, but he’s the character people think of when they think about maleness.
I'd absolutely say that John Wick is super high status, even before you account for the fact that he's, in-universe, famous as the assassin that makes other world-class assassins shit their pants. Ie even if he were some "everyday" assassin with just enough assassination skills not to be killed on the job, he'd be super high status. Men and women who are protagonists in fictional works are almost never very low status and often very high status, and even the very low status ones, like, say, Forrest Gump, are exceptional in a way that makes them relatively high status compared to similar people - it's exactly their exceptionality that makes the fictional story worth telling, because a loser being mopey and suffering and then dying without ever making anyone's life any better, including their own, is a really boring story.
But more to the point, perhaps you can argue that "apex" is the wrong term, and I would probably agree with that argument. It's a very broad "apex" being used to describe the slice of people in that genre who are high status enough to be noticeable. Which is probably like 40-70% among men and 60-90% among women, by my completely unevidenced speculation. In that bottom 10-40% of women are the women who aren't noticed by men, and I'd wager that women who are less traditionally feminine are more highly represented within that bottom slice. So if you build your vision of what a typical feminine woman's life is like while ignoring that slice, you end up with a vision that's, among other things, more feminine than the reality. I think a lot of transwomen combine that with some other pathologies to end up believing what they do about what being a woman is like.
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