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Now granted, I do not know the father and you do, so you probably have a better idea of how to reach him than I would. But to be completely frank my reaction when reading your excerpts is largely negative.
Your text is very long and it reads like a Motte post rather than an address to a friend.
You go too far in conceiving of innate differences between men and women. For example, the idea that women on average find it so hard to imagine people not caring about them that for them it is like a Lovecraftian horror is such an exaggeration of whatever grain of truth might be in it that it comes off as very silly. You make it sound as if compared to the life of the average man, the life of the average woman is like floating on a cloud of peaches. Which again, there might be a grain of truth to it but the way you put it is so exaggerated that it makes it hard for me to take your text seriously.
Even if you do not intend it this way, a fairly large number of men would find your text to be somewhat misogynistic.
Even if you do not intend it this way, your references to your friend's daughter's future sexual life might come off as creepy. Granted, one could also say that there is something that could be viewed as creepy about helping one's own child to transition. But even if that's true, it probably doesn't help you to be persuasive to your friend.
You are kind of saying that it takes you significant will and self-control to prevent yourself from cheating on your wife. Which, even if maybe that's true for the majority of men (I don't know if it is or isn't but I wouldn't be surprised), is not necessarily something that adds as opposed to detracts from your arguments.
To me at least, the most persuasive parts of your text are where you point out the difficulties that the boy is likely to face if he does actually attempt to live as a woman. I mean the way I see it, if we had some kind of amazing technology that would allow people to switch genders whenever they felt like it (putting aside for now the question of what that would even mean...) and then switch back then there would probably be no good argument against letting the boy use it.
The core problem for would-be transitioners is that we do not have such technology. At best, this guy's son could go from seeming like 95-100% male to seeming maybe like 75% male. No matter how hard people tried, no matter how much effort people put into it, the son would not be able to even come close to becoming a woman. The son's ability to be all of the man that he could be would be perhaps irreversibly damaged and what would he gain from it? The ability to be relatively slightly more of a woman than he was before.
The argument "there is nothing wrong with transitioning but we do not have the technology to do more than an extremely crude, ineffective, and (especially at the boy's age) likely permanently damaging job of it" does not rely on easily questioned exaggerations of the nature of men or women or on culture war arguments like "are trans people valid or not?". So that is the argument that I would probably try to push.
But again, you know the father and I do not. Please take this as constructive criticism.
"Average" might be doing a lot of work here, but this, unironically. In any given setting, adjusted for class, country, era etc., the lives of women in general will be vastly easier physically and psychologically than men's. This does not mean that "vastly easier" isn't still often terrible and tragic. But in the "average" case, it will be even more terrible and tragic for the males.
My wife's a tough indian from the backcountry (i.e. had a harder life than 99% of female Americans). She was abandoned as an infant by a crackhead mother and raised in poverty by her father: a drug dealer, poacher, and local wild man (shout out to my FIL). So, not exactly silver spoon territory, and yet she wouldn't last a day in my life.
This makes me extremely interested in what a day in your life looks like. Would you be willing to share?
It's simple logic. Any human community that is invested in its own future is compelled to provide a certain level of comfort to its female members, otherwise they won't bear and raise children, and the community disappears in one generation. With regard to its men, that calculus does not appear.
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Obviously I'm exaggerating somewhat, not literally no days ever. That said:
A dozen miles a week, a thousand swings, a hundred pull-ups, three classes of BJJ, two range sessions. This is relatively lazy, but I'm old and just trying to maintain a bit of capability. Still, not a chance.
Your previous comment made it sound like she couldn't last a day because your life was psychologically tougher, or maybe that you need to go through intense physical trials to maintain an income. If your wife had to go through a day in your life, she would just choose not to do an exercise routine targeted at a physically fit male.
Ok mate, I'm trying to be a little coy here and not overdo it. Here's the outline from stuff I've already posted. Born in a faith-healing cult, three years in Russia as a MK, infantry NCO, purple heart, CIB etc. etc. I've worked manual labor jobs planting/picking crops, baling hay, detasseling corn, roofing crew, washing semi trucks, digging spot holes for excavation. Now in arthritic middle age, and officially "disabled", I work indoors and my job isn't nearly as strenuous. Mostly paperwork and shitty customers. So I keep my hand in with a bit of light exercise, which my wife still couldn't do.
From your previous comment. Your life is not like the average western male's at all. I think most western men would collapse under the stress of being an infantry NCO in a position to get a purple heart too.
My wife hasn't had an average difficulty life either. I would say she's equally far from average for a woman, it's just that the male variation is much, much larger.
I also said:
I think being in a relationship is a good "adjuster" for age, geography, culture etc. It is my argument and thesis that in general, on average, with many exceptions, across cultures, countries and history, men have had the harder go of it and always will. It's just math really. Men are the higher variance sex, and there's more room at the bottom for failures than there is at the top for success. Also, males are disposable in a way that females are not in our species. We need far fewer males to continue than we do females.
https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
Men are disproportionately rich for the same reason they are disproportionately poor. Women are inherently valuable, men can be an asset or a liability.
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I'm curious too. As a pretty average male in a Western country, I personally feel like I do get a decent amount of advantages from being male. Mostly in the areas of not being terrified of walking through a city at night, and not needing to worry about if friends are just faking friendliness to try to get into my pants.
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