There's a push today to see and treat women and men as the same, that is to refuse to differentiate in most respects, and to take any evidence of past or present different treatment as malicious. In general this is noble. The arrow of progress is always essential, and basically any push is unbalanced and necessarily so: how would one accelerate to move without an imbalance of forces? But it's become worse than unfashionable to recognize that past societies genuinely understood women and men as being somewhat different, fulfilling somewhat different purposes.

That is, there was no malice - not necessarily, anyway - in the basic belief in a distinction. Typically they believed that God created two kinds of human, and two kinds of every animal, and these categories are discernible visually and in other ways, and function somewhat differently to somewhat different ends, with somewhat different strengths and weaknesses. There was a faith that God's work had intent, that every noticeable difference meant something, was part of the grand design, a design humans had better heed.

And even today, whether you believe in God or not, it would be difficult to deny that male and female match the description of slightly different formats from nature, the separation between those formats going back millions of years, sensitively tuned to the environment, to energy flows and efficiencies, to social cohesion, to life and death struggle, to survival. We can't deny that there's likely to be some sort of reason that men are usually taller than women, that women usually have breasts that are larger and capable of lactation, that women are less likely to become mass shooters or start armed conflicts as politicians, and so on. These patterns did not appear in a vacuum. They evolved according to untold millions of lives and deaths, births, relationships, hunts, stories, gifts, and so on.

The old societies understood something - took it for granted and ran with it, embellishing it, emboldening it, decorating it, canonizing it in mythology, reifying it in social networks - that remains partly true: men and women are not exactly the same. Sexual dimorphism indicates that nature "intended" (to the extent it intends) or "manifests" (to the extent that's the closest evolution gets to intention) a certain degree of functional distinction. There's a great deal of overlap between male and female. Some individuals hug the boundary or even cross it. And nature is infinitely inventive, so as soon as you think you've got it all worked out, you'll find out there's a new twist in the wool.

But I find myself unable to shake these thoughts, because they are so readily shaken off by many who would like to - or who desperately need to - see change. It's perhaps a common criticism of feminists that we end up denying biology, that we throw out science in favor of a social or moral agenda. I doubt that's true at large, but in many particular instances, it begins to seem true. Perhaps it's because science is still coded male, and science has a lot of institutional sexism left, and so girls and women might see themselves as not (naturally or personally) scientific, and perhaps by extension not expected to or not needing to argue along scientifically evidentiary lines. But act a certain way, and you'd better be ready to get described as acting that way yourself. Or perhaps there is no such pattern of less concern with scientific evidence among feminists driving home a point, and it appears only in the eye of a beholder.

Often words don't convey understanding fully, but rather deltas. You perceive how a person grapples with a topic or situation, and you home in on a particular shift you'd like to suggest in their approach or attitude or belief, so you say that. You cannot at the same time say everything that is also true. You speak to adjust. You give a tidbit. It cannot be complete. And so many of these pushes to advance society, to move away from restrictiveness, oppressiveness, ignorance, even hatefulness, are specific, targeted thoughts. They cannot address in a balanced way the larger picture. You do not steer a car by choosing a compass bearing in minutes and seconds of arc, or radians, but rather in tiny shifts to the current direction. "A tiny bit left" is a radically different statement from "31 degrees, 55 minutes, and 52 seconds east of south." In debates we often make statements close to the first kind, and very unlike the second. But if we aren't aware of this, sometimes we ourselves don't know that we're doing it, and we start to believe that "a tiny bit left" is an objective and complete description of the direction from here to Mt St Helens.