There is something to be said for the way we’re educated being at fault for all this.
We’re taught that so many things are completely fixed and set and stone - and that certain things we learn are as set in reality. We’re taught that the fact that “a duck has feathers” is the same kind of fact as “a duck is a bird.” One is an observable truth; the other is a social construct (yes, a social construct) that we’ve created in order to categorize the world and speak more efficiently.
It is significantly faster to say “bird” than it is to say “a warm-blooded organism that lays eggs and has feathers”, in the old way of doing it, or “an animal that is the most recent common ancestor of Struthio and Passer, or a descendant of that ancestor”
But that term, “bird,” is made up, in order to summarize that information. If we had to define every single thing as we say it, then we would never actually be able to have a conversation, and we’d also be talking in circles (we’d have to define a feather, and an egg, and etc. etc. etc.)
So we learn that “bird” is the same kind of set-in-stone of thing as, say, the fact that a duck is covered in feathers. One is a shortcut, the other is an observation about the natural world.
So, people think that “male” and “female” are the same thing as “someone with a penis” and “someone with a vagina” because, in school, those things are treated as the same; when in reality, the first two are ways of grouping up characteristics (whether physical, if we’re talking about the anatomical sex of someone, or societal, if we’re talking about their gender - which have been separate things for years), and the latter two are observations about someone’s anatomy .
We’re allowed to - and have to - redefine our shortcut words as we receive new evidence. We used to think “Dinosaur” meant one thing, but now we know it means another, and so on. The same applies to “gender”, “man” and “woman”. And all of our shortcut words will always be imperfect compared to observation, because one is based on fact that we can see in front of us and is based on our senses (let’s not get into the philosophical debate on whether or not we can trust our senses), and the other is a word that carries meaning that we assign to things, and that meaning can and does change as we learn more about those things. We used to think man came along with certain anatomical characteristics & societal roles. We now know that it means someone who identifies with that concept in society, regardless of anatomy or how much one partakes in societal expectations of that concept.
So, the real way to get people to understand this better - and stop being ignorant transphobes - is to go back to high school (and earlier. Elementary school even, I’d argue) and explain the difference between observation as “fact’ and terms made up to categorize & sum up these observations as “fact”.
(Of course this doesn’t excuse transphobia of people who make statements like this, but it does explain where these misconceptions come from - and how we can work to tear them down at the source).
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