Exploring Differences "Differently"

 About a year ago, I took a course in Buddhist sutras, where I came across the passage of Virmilakirti Sutra in which a goddess causes Saraputra to briefly transform into a woman. Saraputra is asked to transform back to his "original state" to which he responds that there is nothing to change back to. Saraputra realizes in that moment that the true essence of his mind cannot be reduced to male or female. The mind's essence is the same regardless of the male or female forms.
   Gender is a controversial topic, and one that still rages on to this day; I don't intend to add much more to it in this context. However, this passage has lead me to wonder, what "difference" "makes a difference", and which "differences" are only creations of the mind? Is there a clear way to distinguish between authentic differences and differences we designate through our conceptualizations? Or are all differences simply products of the mind?
    An example might be that of color.  Many people walk around convinced that there is an objective property in things which can be pointed to as "red", "blue", "green" and so on. But is color a property that we can say belongs to something, or is it something that is generated from the minds' conceptual apparatus? Many cultures have several names for what we call "green" and "blue" whereas other cultures don't have distinct terms for these, thinking of both colors as the same. In this case, what we designate as "green" or "blue" is entirely based on cultural naming and socialization. I am brought up to make distinctions and differences.
   Even so, can one even say that color itself is a property of a thing? Yesterday, I had an amusing conversation with my primary students, in which I asked them the classify in Ramona the Brave the experiences that are sensed by the eyes, ears, touch, nose, etc. One of the students remarked that "blue" can be tasted: after all, she can put something that is blue on her tongue, and thus taste the "blue object", so is she not tasting blue as well? But then I told her, blue itself is not a distinct "taste" or "feeling". I asked her to close her eyes and tell me which of the colored markers she picks is the "blue" one and how can she tell? The blue marker cannot be known simply through feeling. But who knows, maybe there is someone sensitive enough to sense blue things by touching them! In Surangama Sutra, it is said that practitioners who don't rely on the senses can actually "see" through their ears, "hear" through their noses, etc. This is because we are conditioned to sense through specific channels, but the mind is not limited to these narrow channels.
   To go back to my theme: difference is often exaggerated. We assign meaning to things based on a simple minor difference that we designate. We know that a lot of prejudice arises from attachment to difference: seeing more in the difference itself than what is there. Can we say that, between similarity and difference, we tend to err more on the side of difference than sameness? The error I see people making is that of taking difference as being so different that it gets exotified into something "other", and starts to assume qualities that we have rejected in ourselves. "Male" and "female" is a very good example of this, but it's also the case that anytime we are afraid of something, we are probably trying to assign qualities to the other that we cannot own in ourselves. To use the example of snakes, many people are terrified of snakes because of what they perceive as the fearsome, predatory or sneaky qualities of snakes. But I begin to wonder, how many people have died from snakes compared to the number of snakes who were killed by humans? Perhaps the fearsome qualities we see in snakes are really projections of our own ferocity in the eyes of the snakes.