Human nature contains two overlapping and asymmetric natures: those of manhood and womanhood.  Failure to develop a comprehensive philosophy incorporating those two have led to tragic confusion.

It seems widely accepted, at least by the elites, that the old question about the differences between men and women has been definitively answered: there are none.

That answer is not only wrong, but foolish and destructive to men and women alike.  There are differences and, just as obviously, similarities between the sexes.  It is important to get this right.  Too much is at stake to simply chant slogans.

Let's start with a misguided idea, excerpted from an essay:

[C]onsider the old-school argument that women are 'naturally' suited for caregiving roles.  This is both a wrong and a harmful way to think about our nature.  It's wrong because, as de Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex (1949), gestating babies is a biological female function, but rearing children is a social commitment.  And it's harmful because the assumption that biology sets our destiny is oppressive.

This is a dangerous mix of truth and falsehood, of science and politics.  The key falsehood, the poison pill, is the statement that "gestating babies is a biological female function, but rearing children is a social commitment." 

The first part is obviously true, but the second part is a fade toward the idea that everything else about sex is just a social construct.  It's not.  Nurturing babies is a commitment, and one shared by men, but only women (absent bottle feeding) can nurse the infant.

Furthermore, women are indeed designed by nature to extend their mothering commitment for years after the child has been birthed and weaned.  The details of this are intricate, including the sound-wave frequencies at which men and women hear and even speak.

Feminists with whom I have discussed this tend to be "triggered" by any suggestion that they are in any way different from men, partly because of the realistic fear that some men will use any acknowledgment of those differences against them.  They will, at least in some cases.  That is unjust.

But there are also clear situations in which the law should reflect the natural and useful differences between the sexes.  To do otherwise is to create avoidable disasters.  My years in the military occurred during an era (1968-90) in which the armed forces transitioned from a "man's army" toward what is now called a "more inclusive" structure, one in which women took on roles previously denied to them.

To be sure, women could perform well in many of those roles, but measuring which roles was made unnecessarily difficult by ideologues who cared nothing about the truth – only that their vision of a sexless society be realized. 

Consequently, a disproportionate number of women, compared to men, failed to complete their deployments, thereby shifting the burden of their duties to the men.  The complaints came not only from the men, but from their wives, who had to wait extra weeks or months for their husbands to return home from assignments – due to "manning" shortages caused by women, some of whom became pregnant while deployed or suffered emotionally from being isolated from their very young children.

Instead of finding a remedy to this sort of problem, military leaders succumbed to political pressure to pretend that the problem did not exist, that everything was going along just fine.  It was not.

The problem is not restricted to the military. 

What happens when society denies the duality of human nature?  You get the absurd and deadly result of young boys being drugged to make them less boyish and more girlish.  This trend knows no limits.  Just as it is now legal to send young girls to an abortionist without parental knowledge or consent, so also is there a movement to have young children transitioned from one sex phenotype to another, regardless of the parents' wishes.

The subject matter includes a long list of absurd situations.  For the purpose here, society needs to clarify its philosophical underpinnings.  Put more succinctly, America needs to get its head on straight.