[pogimabus]

You are struggling with this because believing there is no difference between the mental characteristics of men and women on average is to be in denial of reality.

I think maybe this is a hard pill to swallow for many people because we have proven over and over that we can't trust each other to both know this AND still treat everyone, regardless of how we may be able to classify them, as an individual and to judge each individual by their own actions, desires, and capabilities rather than by the average characteristics of whatever bucket we happen to be considering them to be in at the time.

[artichokes]

That's not the difficult part for me, it would easily just be another Bayesian prior like occupation, style of dress, language, etc. It's just that the odds of me being right and everyone else in the world being wrong about such a simple, universally understood thing are so unlikely that it's almost certain that my reasoning is wrong.

[tkmo]

It is almost universally accepted (outside of a few small echo chambers), men ("male bodied people") and women ("female bodied people") do have, on average, differing interests and propensities. Are you under the impression this isn't the case?

[artichokes]

I’ve seen a few people on the internet who believe there are differences, but I’ve never met one in real life. And not for small sample size- the fact that there aren’t differences has always been a common topic of conversation in every social setting I’ve been in- my classrooms, workplaces, hanging out with friends, etc. It’s amounted to hundreds (thousands?) of people who know that there are not mental differences between sexes, and none who believe there are. Every family member, every girlfriend, every professor, every coworker, etc.

But none of been willing to explain to me why we know this; when I ask they think I’m trying to make a rhetorical argument that here are differences, and react poorly. I’ve stopped asking them.