Respectfully: I'm sorry to hear that homophobia, sexist pressure to conform to feminine standards, and sexist harassment from men seems to have driven you to opt out of femaleness as best you can, by cloaking yourself in a male disguise. At least, that's how I read your description of why being seen as female became intolerable to you. Feminism has tried to fix those problems, and is trying still. In 2026, women really can dress as we please. I'm sorry you didn't realize that. And makeup? Millions of us, surely, never give it a thought. Vulnerability to male assault is another matter altogether.
But BIG props to you for listening to both sides, uplifting detransitioners, paying attention to the medical harms of so-called gender-affirming care, and speaking respectfully about people who passionately disagree with gender ideology altogether. Yours is a rare, brave voice in this polarized world, and I just recommended your column, and subscribed.
Thanks for writing this. I’m neither trans nor particularly good at conforming to my gender. But I never had any animosity toward trans people until activists depicted it as a choice to be offered to prepubescent children and started proclaiming that trans women are women. They are trans women whose experiences are unique and obviously different as you point out. I believe trans people exist-as in their bodies don’t make sense to their brains for whatever reasons. Bipolar extremism is currently rampant in every facet of our society. Probably due to the platforms that now unite small but passionate people who seek power they previously had little chance of gaining. Keep writing. The questioning center who can still be rational and reasonable must speak their imperfect truths. Or we are doomed.
But the “lies” you’re comparing this to aren’t remotely equivalent. Social niceties are chosen by the speaker. They aren’t enforced through institutional policy, backed by threats of ostracism, reputational damage, or job loss. They don’t carry consequences for an entire family — ie- a mom is gender critical and therefore her entire family is socially banished, play dates disappear for her kids- this has happened in my community because of a parent’s choice not to force her children to call a man in the community a woman.
When preferred pronouns are mandated top-down by HR departments, schools, and public institutions, there is no real choice. You are required to affirm something you know isn’t true, under threat of professional or social penalty. That’s not a harmless white lie used as social lubricant.
Children, especially, are being required to override their basic safeguarding instincts — to refer to male teachers, coaches, or friends’ fathers as women, and in some cases to call their own fathers “moms” their only mother, the woman who birthed them— their “father,” This often does great psychic damage to children and hasn’t been researched.
That isn’t trivial language adjustment. It’s a demand to publicly deny observable reality.
This isn’t comparable to polite fictions. It’s compelled speech, reinforced socially and institutionally. And when dissent is treated as moral deviance — on par with racism — that has serious implications for freedom of conscience and expression.
When you said “we lie all the time,” like not calling a friend fat — that’s optional. You’re choosing not to say something mean. You’re not being required to affirm anything. You could also just… not comment.
Pronouns aren’t like that. They’re how you’re expected to address someone.
If someone goes by wrong sex pronouns they’re putting you in a position to actively say something that isn’t materially true. And if you even gently say “I’m not sure we should be doing this” there are instantaneous social consequences.
I might have gone too far in my example above where these micro situations become institutionalized, but it’s far more subtle too—In the way that just using wrong-sex pronouns to describe yourself is a form of compelling speech….
So when you say you oppose compelled speech, I’m genuinely curious how you’re defining it.
It sounds like you’re defending a form of it? Maybe on a personal level but not institutional? Your opinion of pronouns use wasn’t clear in your essay to me, so that’s why I’m probing. I’m genuinely curious.
A request is not compelled speech? I don’t typically tell people what pronouns to use for me. I am not asking for affirmation. That said, I don’t think using ‘wrong sex’ pronouns has to mean that you must literally believe the person is that sex. It is similar, in my mind, to interacting with someone who comes from a different culture, who may have different customs. You may not follow the same customs, but you may still respect their customs when you interact with them, as a sign of good will and relationship-building.
I don’t think the pronouns you choose to use should be dictated by law or that people should be let go or fired for their choice of pronouns. I will also say that some people who insist on using sex-based pronouns when speaking with or about someone who clearly has made an effort to live their life as the opposite sex, can come across as pretty obnoxious. It’s often done to be intentionally provocative and ‘edgy’. Not because they are actually seeking dialogue or understanding.
Hmm, okay — that actually helps me understand what you meant in your essay. I appreciate you clarifying.
I think we just see pronouns differently.
You seem to see them as affirming how someone feels about themselves.
For me — especially in how I’m helping my kids make sense of the world — pronouns have a basic descriptive job. Humans evolved to point and name. We’ve had sex recognition wired into us for a very long time. So pronouns name material categories. A doe is female, a buck is male. That’s the level I’m operating on.
“He” and “she” developed to refer to sex, not someone’s internal sense of self. And that’s neutral. A woman can look any way — short hair, facial hair, no makeup. A man can wear dresses. They can feel however they feel about being their sex. I teach my kids that. The category isn’t about stereotypes or presentation. It’s just about sex.
Pronouns aren’t identity words to me. They’re how other people refer to us. I don’t call myself “she” in my own head. They’re public descriptors. Like, “go catch that guy in the red shirt.”
When someone medically transitions, I understand that social recognition is part of the goal. Hormones, surgery sometimes, name changes, pronouns — it all works together toward being seen as the opposite sex.
But in reality, most people don’t actually pass consistently. So what ends up happening isn’t that perception naturally shifts — it’s that language is being asked to override perception. And that’s where this gets hard for me.
I don’t believe sex changes. So I can’t pretend it has. That’s the tension. It feels like I’m being asked to say something I don’t think is true.
And I don’t want to train my kids to override what they can clearly see and instead rely on haircuts and clothes as cues. When someone they recognize as female says “actually I’m a he,” it teaches them to doubt their own recognition and look for superficial signals instead. That doesn’t sit right with me.
I also agree that deliberately using sex-based pronouns to provoke someone and be jerky, I don’t support that.
But here’s the thing: if simply not going along automatically makes you “obnoxious,” then it doesn’t really feel like a choice. Who wants to be seen that way? That’s social pressure… compelled speech.
So when I’m asked to use certain pronouns, it doesn’t feel like simple respect. It feels like I’m being asked to publicly affirm a category change I don’t believe has happened.
That puts me in a lose-lose position. If I decline, I’m disrespectful. If I comply, I’m lying to you about what I really think— I don’t like being fake and I don’t like people faking out with me either.
And where I live, saying no isn’t really optional. It’s a small left-leaning community — amazing in many ways — but this issue carries consequences. My kids and I have quietly lost friendships over it. Some never even got started.
And just to be clear — this isn’t about hating trans people or denying their struggles. It’s about language, truth, and how we coexist when words like “man” and “woman” are expected to mean something different than what we actually see and understand in front of us.
Anyway I didn’t mean to highjack your comments section and it’s totally okay if you completely disagree with what I wrote. I clicked on your essay and even shared it because of the title and it’s well written…and this is a topic I’m really passionate about and it brought up a lot for me.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you using sex-based pronouns for the reasons you highlight makes you a jerk. And I think you’re right - the meaning we are ascribing to pronouns is different.
Something happened along the way to social niceties and compassion. Suddenly it flipped from accommodating difference and respecting individual choice to a power based hierarchy which elevated social-sexual identifies above all others.
Soon enough, the trans identity reigned supreme and demanded compliance. It then commanded sacrifice. It wanted your child sacrificed on the alter of this extreme overvalued belief.
It was not long before a request of school administrators to allow a Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club shifted from a request to a command. For Canada this is a demand grounded in human rights victories.
Where I am lost is government funding a man who wants a "front hole to go with his pole". Penile Preserving Vaginoplasty has now confirmed in my mind that we have crossed a line into the ridiculous. I have very little compassion left for this type of dysphoria. This guy can go f#Ek himself, and ironically he actually can.
I have been meaning to add to, "Something happened along the way to social niceties and compassion." What happened was the emergence of individuals prone to callous, manipulative, and harmful behavior. These are the Dark Tetrad personality types and it is reflective of different social movements and a product of "teaching activism" in schools. Now what we have are personality traits that reflect: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. A nice combination. Look close the next trans-activist rally. Its on full display.
I like your point. I would add, I wish we lived in a world where you didn’t have to have surgery to feel comfortable in your own skin OR be made to feel that surgery is what you need to feel comfortable." The second part reflects the toxic part of todays world, at some point we need to become comfortable in life, and just be.
First I want to say how much I appreciate this thoughtful, well crafted essay. I too have thought about the Babel metaphor (my grandparents were fundamentalist Christians) and how it speaks to our current societal disruption.
I also have a lot of time for the linguistic theory that there is a two-way relationship between language and society. I.e. Language creates society and society creates language. That is why I find pronoun politics very challenging. On the one hand, I don’t want to deliberately hurt any other human being’s sense of self by using sex-based pronouns for someone who apparently identifies as the opposite sex from their natal sex. On the other hand I also refuse to use ‘preferred pronouns’. This is because I believe that there is a pipeline that goes from: “linguistic substitution” to “psychological conversion” to “political incursion”. The political incursion bit is the one that worries me - that is the incursion on women’s and children’s rights (not necessarily in that order) - women’s rights to protected spaces and children’s rights to grow into adulthood without suffering extreme modification of their healthy bodies.
That is why I will sometimes tie myself in linguistic knots in order to avoid using “preferred pronouns” but also to avoid deliberate “misgendering”. I realise this is unlikely to be a popular strategy but it’s the best I can come up with at the moment.
Common ground can be found if trans identifying people are willing to recognize they will never be the opposite sex, and that if people call a trans identifying woman 'he', or a trans identifying man 'she', those people are either mistaken or being polite in a way which should not be expected. Reality is not rude. This is not the same as calling someone 'fat'. It is like saying, "The 8 year old soccer league is only for 8 year olds". And actually in some situations, it is necessary to say someone is fat. A doctor, for example, must tell people the truth.
Women have birthed every human on the planet, and we have been oppressed, raped, died in childbirth, for millennia, as a result of men's actions on women's bodies. That reality is so significant that 'gender identity' pales as completely insignificant in the light of it. Yes, it might be personally meaningful for some, but the expectation that others adopt such beliefs should never be held.
I wrote a longer comment that disappeared into the ether. The short version is I knew we were fellow travelers on the same road, in opposite directions. I have found joy and peace on my journey, and hope you do the same. 🩷
You're operating on the level of "after-the-fact", where, actually, most people are more likely to notice that you are trans than peopls are to pay any attention to the fact you're not wearing makeup. Why on earth can't "woman" refer ONLY to your sex (because there are some things that are crucial, which requires women to handle together to fight: male violence (in whatever context) equal rights, women's needs (such as childcare, so she can work) sexual harassment, and, how about this: the tyranny of a society that runs on stupid stereotypes and has lately regressed because so many has come to believe that being a woman means having a certain "feminine" essence or "being a man" has to do with having a "masculine" character, and preferences.it sounds to me, though, that your motivation had to with escaping the way many men treat women. I don't like that either. But I prefer to stay and fight. If too many masculine women decide they're "really men", it's going to suck even more for the rest of us.
There are averags differences in some measures of things like empathy and nurturance, confidence and competitiveness, qualities labeled "masculine" and "feminine", but all people possess the potential for all of those qualities and the ratio is not something you can predict in any given person.
We are all have both "feminine" and "masculine" qualities and that is the way it was meant to be. Ideally, we should all have a balance. And it's not a "spectrum" of "gender" unless you're talking about a particular quality. In any case the weirdos are the ones who are very unbalanced, and match the masculina and feminine stereotypes.
We are all born with the rudiments of a personality, and we may naturally, overall, skew one direction or the other. But it is not completely predictable that a child's overall basic character will "match" the stereotype society has constructed to "go with" their sex. But for the most part, we are raised; we all exist in a context.
Some children are not raised in a particularly masculine or feminine way. Others are raised in a family where the perceived "differences between boys and girls" are emphasized. Certain qualities are reinforced, while others are subtly (or not so subtly) discouraged. I was raised by a father who was feminine (and this is a different usage of the words "feminine" and "masculine -- it is not a description of particular characteristics, but how close you fit one stereotype or the other) and a mother who was "masculine", according to the comparison to the stereotype. But my mother was also a strong feminist, as was her mother. She was raised to believe that the masculine and feminine caricatures should be done away with. Consequently I am neither masculine nor feminine in comparison to stereotype. I do not dress in a feminine way, except on special occasions, but as far as I'm concerned, that's cosplay, or dressups. In terms of particular qualities, I'm a balance of both. If I felt obliged to label myself in comparison to stereotypes, I might say that I'm "nonbinary" or "agender".
But I don't. I'm a woman because I'm female. I don't consider that my relationship to stereotypes to be the substance of who I am. Sex is unimportant to most things (except those few which are very important ) but "gender" is actual bullshit, whether it "feels" that way or not.
Women are different from men in a few important structural and hormonally-driven ways. And those few, not too surprisingly, cannot really be "felt", or "experienced", "approximated" or genuinely "identified with".
I have no problem with the very small number of people who are actually better off living as the opposite sex, for whatever reason. What I do have a problem with is my explicit "obligation" to not only pretend I believe that they are ACTUALLY the other sex, but also not to say anything at all that is contrary to the idea that they might NOT actually be the other sex, such as understanding, and mentioning, the reproductive binary of male and female, which is defined by to the production of sperm or eggs. I also have a problem with Trans Women demanding access to places where females are vulnerable to abuse by some subset of males. I'm not obliged to accommodate a polite fiction if you're messing with my safety, or fairness in competition, given there's a great deal more involved than just medals, and it should not have to be pointed out that telling women to be a good sport and let the man win (because his ego demands it), is beyond regressive.
Sex is real and binary, and has consequences. "Gender" -- the comparison of oneself to the stereotypical -- is not really anything, and yet it's being allowed to run the show.
"The more ardent trans activists argue that they are literally, biologically the other sex regardless of their gametes, chromosomes or genitalia. They do not merely want to be treated like the other sex but instead insist that they are the other sex. At a certain level, I admire their clarity of vision even if I do not share it."
Clarity of vision?! They are bullies. demanding demanding demanding the rest of the society plays along. And truth matters.
I really like your stack, but sometimes you pussyfoot too much.
Full citizenship and actual integration absolutely does happen. Biologically as well. The fact you remained in a limbo state doesn’t mean every persons transition either direction matches this concept? You see to believe that if you don’t think you have actually transitioned or naturalized that this must also be true for everyone. How? Why?
I continue not to find a single one of these that concedes that some people do actually fully transition beyond any point of legitimate objection, even if many do not. Just baffling.
Really appreciate the nuance here. The Tower of Babel analogy nails it tbh. What strikes me is how the 'gender immigrant' framing highlights something often missed: the literal impossibility of full integration. Ive noticed in bioethics discussions this paradox gets ignored because neither side wants to admit the gap betwen metaphor and reality. Middle ground requires accepting some discomfort on both sides.
Respectfully: I'm sorry to hear that homophobia, sexist pressure to conform to feminine standards, and sexist harassment from men seems to have driven you to opt out of femaleness as best you can, by cloaking yourself in a male disguise. At least, that's how I read your description of why being seen as female became intolerable to you. Feminism has tried to fix those problems, and is trying still. In 2026, women really can dress as we please. I'm sorry you didn't realize that. And makeup? Millions of us, surely, never give it a thought. Vulnerability to male assault is another matter altogether.
But BIG props to you for listening to both sides, uplifting detransitioners, paying attention to the medical harms of so-called gender-affirming care, and speaking respectfully about people who passionately disagree with gender ideology altogether. Yours is a rare, brave voice in this polarized world, and I just recommended your column, and subscribed.
Thank you
Thanks for writing this. I’m neither trans nor particularly good at conforming to my gender. But I never had any animosity toward trans people until activists depicted it as a choice to be offered to prepubescent children and started proclaiming that trans women are women. They are trans women whose experiences are unique and obviously different as you point out. I believe trans people exist-as in their bodies don’t make sense to their brains for whatever reasons. Bipolar extremism is currently rampant in every facet of our society. Probably due to the platforms that now unite small but passionate people who seek power they previously had little chance of gaining. Keep writing. The questioning center who can still be rational and reasonable must speak their imperfect truths. Or we are doomed.
Thank you for reading this.
Interesting perspective — I appreciate it.
But the “lies” you’re comparing this to aren’t remotely equivalent. Social niceties are chosen by the speaker. They aren’t enforced through institutional policy, backed by threats of ostracism, reputational damage, or job loss. They don’t carry consequences for an entire family — ie- a mom is gender critical and therefore her entire family is socially banished, play dates disappear for her kids- this has happened in my community because of a parent’s choice not to force her children to call a man in the community a woman.
When preferred pronouns are mandated top-down by HR departments, schools, and public institutions, there is no real choice. You are required to affirm something you know isn’t true, under threat of professional or social penalty. That’s not a harmless white lie used as social lubricant.
Children, especially, are being required to override their basic safeguarding instincts — to refer to male teachers, coaches, or friends’ fathers as women, and in some cases to call their own fathers “moms” their only mother, the woman who birthed them— their “father,” This often does great psychic damage to children and hasn’t been researched.
That isn’t trivial language adjustment. It’s a demand to publicly deny observable reality.
This isn’t comparable to polite fictions. It’s compelled speech, reinforced socially and institutionally. And when dissent is treated as moral deviance — on par with racism — that has serious implications for freedom of conscience and expression.
I, too, am opposed to compelled speech.
I guess I’m confused then, is all.
When you said “we lie all the time,” like not calling a friend fat — that’s optional. You’re choosing not to say something mean. You’re not being required to affirm anything. You could also just… not comment.
Pronouns aren’t like that. They’re how you’re expected to address someone.
If someone goes by wrong sex pronouns they’re putting you in a position to actively say something that isn’t materially true. And if you even gently say “I’m not sure we should be doing this” there are instantaneous social consequences.
I might have gone too far in my example above where these micro situations become institutionalized, but it’s far more subtle too—In the way that just using wrong-sex pronouns to describe yourself is a form of compelling speech….
So when you say you oppose compelled speech, I’m genuinely curious how you’re defining it.
It sounds like you’re defending a form of it? Maybe on a personal level but not institutional? Your opinion of pronouns use wasn’t clear in your essay to me, so that’s why I’m probing. I’m genuinely curious.
Appreciate the thoughts you’ve provoked.
A request is not compelled speech? I don’t typically tell people what pronouns to use for me. I am not asking for affirmation. That said, I don’t think using ‘wrong sex’ pronouns has to mean that you must literally believe the person is that sex. It is similar, in my mind, to interacting with someone who comes from a different culture, who may have different customs. You may not follow the same customs, but you may still respect their customs when you interact with them, as a sign of good will and relationship-building.
I don’t think the pronouns you choose to use should be dictated by law or that people should be let go or fired for their choice of pronouns. I will also say that some people who insist on using sex-based pronouns when speaking with or about someone who clearly has made an effort to live their life as the opposite sex, can come across as pretty obnoxious. It’s often done to be intentionally provocative and ‘edgy’. Not because they are actually seeking dialogue or understanding.
Hmm, okay — that actually helps me understand what you meant in your essay. I appreciate you clarifying.
I think we just see pronouns differently.
You seem to see them as affirming how someone feels about themselves.
For me — especially in how I’m helping my kids make sense of the world — pronouns have a basic descriptive job. Humans evolved to point and name. We’ve had sex recognition wired into us for a very long time. So pronouns name material categories. A doe is female, a buck is male. That’s the level I’m operating on.
“He” and “she” developed to refer to sex, not someone’s internal sense of self. And that’s neutral. A woman can look any way — short hair, facial hair, no makeup. A man can wear dresses. They can feel however they feel about being their sex. I teach my kids that. The category isn’t about stereotypes or presentation. It’s just about sex.
Pronouns aren’t identity words to me. They’re how other people refer to us. I don’t call myself “she” in my own head. They’re public descriptors. Like, “go catch that guy in the red shirt.”
When someone medically transitions, I understand that social recognition is part of the goal. Hormones, surgery sometimes, name changes, pronouns — it all works together toward being seen as the opposite sex.
But in reality, most people don’t actually pass consistently. So what ends up happening isn’t that perception naturally shifts — it’s that language is being asked to override perception. And that’s where this gets hard for me.
I don’t believe sex changes. So I can’t pretend it has. That’s the tension. It feels like I’m being asked to say something I don’t think is true.
And I don’t want to train my kids to override what they can clearly see and instead rely on haircuts and clothes as cues. When someone they recognize as female says “actually I’m a he,” it teaches them to doubt their own recognition and look for superficial signals instead. That doesn’t sit right with me.
I also agree that deliberately using sex-based pronouns to provoke someone and be jerky, I don’t support that.
But here’s the thing: if simply not going along automatically makes you “obnoxious,” then it doesn’t really feel like a choice. Who wants to be seen that way? That’s social pressure… compelled speech.
So when I’m asked to use certain pronouns, it doesn’t feel like simple respect. It feels like I’m being asked to publicly affirm a category change I don’t believe has happened.
That puts me in a lose-lose position. If I decline, I’m disrespectful. If I comply, I’m lying to you about what I really think— I don’t like being fake and I don’t like people faking out with me either.
And where I live, saying no isn’t really optional. It’s a small left-leaning community — amazing in many ways — but this issue carries consequences. My kids and I have quietly lost friendships over it. Some never even got started.
And just to be clear — this isn’t about hating trans people or denying their struggles. It’s about language, truth, and how we coexist when words like “man” and “woman” are expected to mean something different than what we actually see and understand in front of us.
Anyway I didn’t mean to highjack your comments section and it’s totally okay if you completely disagree with what I wrote. I clicked on your essay and even shared it because of the title and it’s well written…and this is a topic I’m really passionate about and it brought up a lot for me.
Take what resonates and leave the rest. 🖤
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you using sex-based pronouns for the reasons you highlight makes you a jerk. And I think you’re right - the meaning we are ascribing to pronouns is different.
Something happened along the way to social niceties and compassion. Suddenly it flipped from accommodating difference and respecting individual choice to a power based hierarchy which elevated social-sexual identifies above all others.
Soon enough, the trans identity reigned supreme and demanded compliance. It then commanded sacrifice. It wanted your child sacrificed on the alter of this extreme overvalued belief.
It was not long before a request of school administrators to allow a Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club shifted from a request to a command. For Canada this is a demand grounded in human rights victories.
Where I am lost is government funding a man who wants a "front hole to go with his pole". Penile Preserving Vaginoplasty has now confirmed in my mind that we have crossed a line into the ridiculous. I have very little compassion left for this type of dysphoria. This guy can go f#Ek himself, and ironically he actually can.
I have been meaning to add to, "Something happened along the way to social niceties and compassion." What happened was the emergence of individuals prone to callous, manipulative, and harmful behavior. These are the Dark Tetrad personality types and it is reflective of different social movements and a product of "teaching activism" in schools. Now what we have are personality traits that reflect: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. A nice combination. Look close the next trans-activist rally. Its on full display.
Thank you for a very interesting post. I wish we lived in a world where you didn’t have to have surgery to feel comfortable in your own skin
I like your point. I would add, I wish we lived in a world where you didn’t have to have surgery to feel comfortable in your own skin OR be made to feel that surgery is what you need to feel comfortable." The second part reflects the toxic part of todays world, at some point we need to become comfortable in life, and just be.
Yes. I like that. A lot.
First I want to say how much I appreciate this thoughtful, well crafted essay. I too have thought about the Babel metaphor (my grandparents were fundamentalist Christians) and how it speaks to our current societal disruption.
I also have a lot of time for the linguistic theory that there is a two-way relationship between language and society. I.e. Language creates society and society creates language. That is why I find pronoun politics very challenging. On the one hand, I don’t want to deliberately hurt any other human being’s sense of self by using sex-based pronouns for someone who apparently identifies as the opposite sex from their natal sex. On the other hand I also refuse to use ‘preferred pronouns’. This is because I believe that there is a pipeline that goes from: “linguistic substitution” to “psychological conversion” to “political incursion”. The political incursion bit is the one that worries me - that is the incursion on women’s and children’s rights (not necessarily in that order) - women’s rights to protected spaces and children’s rights to grow into adulthood without suffering extreme modification of their healthy bodies.
That is why I will sometimes tie myself in linguistic knots in order to avoid using “preferred pronouns” but also to avoid deliberate “misgendering”. I realise this is unlikely to be a popular strategy but it’s the best I can come up with at the moment.
Common ground can be found if trans identifying people are willing to recognize they will never be the opposite sex, and that if people call a trans identifying woman 'he', or a trans identifying man 'she', those people are either mistaken or being polite in a way which should not be expected. Reality is not rude. This is not the same as calling someone 'fat'. It is like saying, "The 8 year old soccer league is only for 8 year olds". And actually in some situations, it is necessary to say someone is fat. A doctor, for example, must tell people the truth.
Women have birthed every human on the planet, and we have been oppressed, raped, died in childbirth, for millennia, as a result of men's actions on women's bodies. That reality is so significant that 'gender identity' pales as completely insignificant in the light of it. Yes, it might be personally meaningful for some, but the expectation that others adopt such beliefs should never be held.
I wrote a longer comment that disappeared into the ether. The short version is I knew we were fellow travelers on the same road, in opposite directions. I have found joy and peace on my journey, and hope you do the same. 🩷
You're operating on the level of "after-the-fact", where, actually, most people are more likely to notice that you are trans than peopls are to pay any attention to the fact you're not wearing makeup. Why on earth can't "woman" refer ONLY to your sex (because there are some things that are crucial, which requires women to handle together to fight: male violence (in whatever context) equal rights, women's needs (such as childcare, so she can work) sexual harassment, and, how about this: the tyranny of a society that runs on stupid stereotypes and has lately regressed because so many has come to believe that being a woman means having a certain "feminine" essence or "being a man" has to do with having a "masculine" character, and preferences.it sounds to me, though, that your motivation had to with escaping the way many men treat women. I don't like that either. But I prefer to stay and fight. If too many masculine women decide they're "really men", it's going to suck even more for the rest of us.
There are averags differences in some measures of things like empathy and nurturance, confidence and competitiveness, qualities labeled "masculine" and "feminine", but all people possess the potential for all of those qualities and the ratio is not something you can predict in any given person.
We are all have both "feminine" and "masculine" qualities and that is the way it was meant to be. Ideally, we should all have a balance. And it's not a "spectrum" of "gender" unless you're talking about a particular quality. In any case the weirdos are the ones who are very unbalanced, and match the masculina and feminine stereotypes.
We are all born with the rudiments of a personality, and we may naturally, overall, skew one direction or the other. But it is not completely predictable that a child's overall basic character will "match" the stereotype society has constructed to "go with" their sex. But for the most part, we are raised; we all exist in a context.
Some children are not raised in a particularly masculine or feminine way. Others are raised in a family where the perceived "differences between boys and girls" are emphasized. Certain qualities are reinforced, while others are subtly (or not so subtly) discouraged. I was raised by a father who was feminine (and this is a different usage of the words "feminine" and "masculine -- it is not a description of particular characteristics, but how close you fit one stereotype or the other) and a mother who was "masculine", according to the comparison to the stereotype. But my mother was also a strong feminist, as was her mother. She was raised to believe that the masculine and feminine caricatures should be done away with. Consequently I am neither masculine nor feminine in comparison to stereotype. I do not dress in a feminine way, except on special occasions, but as far as I'm concerned, that's cosplay, or dressups. In terms of particular qualities, I'm a balance of both. If I felt obliged to label myself in comparison to stereotypes, I might say that I'm "nonbinary" or "agender".
But I don't. I'm a woman because I'm female. I don't consider that my relationship to stereotypes to be the substance of who I am. Sex is unimportant to most things (except those few which are very important ) but "gender" is actual bullshit, whether it "feels" that way or not.
Women are different from men in a few important structural and hormonally-driven ways. And those few, not too surprisingly, cannot really be "felt", or "experienced", "approximated" or genuinely "identified with".
I have no problem with the very small number of people who are actually better off living as the opposite sex, for whatever reason. What I do have a problem with is my explicit "obligation" to not only pretend I believe that they are ACTUALLY the other sex, but also not to say anything at all that is contrary to the idea that they might NOT actually be the other sex, such as understanding, and mentioning, the reproductive binary of male and female, which is defined by to the production of sperm or eggs. I also have a problem with Trans Women demanding access to places where females are vulnerable to abuse by some subset of males. I'm not obliged to accommodate a polite fiction if you're messing with my safety, or fairness in competition, given there's a great deal more involved than just medals, and it should not have to be pointed out that telling women to be a good sport and let the man win (because his ego demands it), is beyond regressive.
Sex is real and binary, and has consequences. "Gender" -- the comparison of oneself to the stereotypical -- is not really anything, and yet it's being allowed to run the show.
"The more ardent trans activists argue that they are literally, biologically the other sex regardless of their gametes, chromosomes or genitalia. They do not merely want to be treated like the other sex but instead insist that they are the other sex. At a certain level, I admire their clarity of vision even if I do not share it."
Clarity of vision?! They are bullies. demanding demanding demanding the rest of the society plays along. And truth matters.
I really like your stack, but sometimes you pussyfoot too much.
Full citizenship and actual integration absolutely does happen. Biologically as well. The fact you remained in a limbo state doesn’t mean every persons transition either direction matches this concept? You see to believe that if you don’t think you have actually transitioned or naturalized that this must also be true for everyone. How? Why?
I continue not to find a single one of these that concedes that some people do actually fully transition beyond any point of legitimate objection, even if many do not. Just baffling.
Really appreciate the nuance here. The Tower of Babel analogy nails it tbh. What strikes me is how the 'gender immigrant' framing highlights something often missed: the literal impossibility of full integration. Ive noticed in bioethics discussions this paradox gets ignored because neither side wants to admit the gap betwen metaphor and reality. Middle ground requires accepting some discomfort on both sides.