This-Whining-Mongoose

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Mis niños. 😭💞

We (humans) made all this up. For the sake of simplifying our understanding of the world we live in, we came up with categories that apply broadly to most instances. So when something new comes up, it's easiest to put things in one of those boxes.

This is not always applicable. That's why we have a word for 'fish,' and most people agree on what is and is not a 'fish,' but all fish do not share a common ancestor.

Another example: 'vegetable' is not a useful term in biology, but it is a useful culinary term. So we can put things like tomatoes (fruits), carrots (tuber), and broccoli (flower) in the vegetable category for cooking and dietary classification, even if individually they're different things.

Those kinds of classifications are useful in the disciplines where they are useful, but generally not outside of it. In an ideal situation you look at every instance with individual nuance, but sometimes that can be a bit much.

Arguing taxonomy is a favorite pastime of a certain kind of guy that I work with. It's a way to feel googleably smart, but its not always applicable in real-world situations. (Example: I once said I was cold. He told me that 'cold does not exist, it's the absence of heat.' Which might be true, but hypothermia is real. Warping of metal under extreme conditions is real. Contracting of molecules, shattering of glass, and presence of ice are all very real. So while possibly technically correct, functionally useless as a talking point. Believing that 'cold' does not exist does not make me less cold.)

When trolls are like 'what is a woman,' I'm like... several levels of education above answering that question in a way that they're willing to understand, because they are trolling. They dont actually want an answer and they wont listen to the answer i give them. "You'll still have to go to a procologist instead of a gynecologist." Etcetera.

Those are areas where the words 'man' and 'woman' might be useful distinctions, but it's also really rude to talk about a person's genitals, so I really don't need to know what kinds of doctors they see.

If your protagonist is a fighter or magic user, do you show other women in those roles? If your society is more relaxed about sex discrimination, have you built a world that looks like it?

Have you built a world where your female characters don’t all have to be The Best At Everything, or is almost every female character placed where she can be extraordinary next to a bunch of male counterparts? Are you comfortable letting a female wizard or warrior be average or unimportant, or does she have to be one of the most skilled and powerful of them all, able to match or best all the men around her? On the other hand, are you comfortable having a female wizard or warrior be indisputably the most skilled or powerful out of the wizards or warriors, without drawing attention to her gender, placing her in competition with men, or having her be an exception to the rule because she’s female?

Are you letting your female characters be mediocre and un-extraordinary? Your world is full of powerful sorceresses, fierce battle maidens and calculating noblewomen, but do women do things in this world other than be Exemplary and Great and Awesome? If you’ve established that women do business and fight, do you have female soldiers carousing at bars and vaguely dull female Evil Minions Of The Dark Lord bumbling around doing evil bidding and female apprentices slacking on work or is every background woman we see competent and controlled and intelligent and doing whatever it is she’s doing without error, whereas only men are allowed to be foolish, impulsive, mess things up, or just be shown unflatteringly during the couple sentences we know them? In other words, does the world show women being unapologetically human beings or are all your female characters basically making up for being women by not doing anything that would badly represent their gender?