[natecavanaugh]

I think the “buy into” aspect is possibly buying into the importance of it all. In the current climate, it’s a charged issue, because for one side it’s a matter of respect, dignity, and honoring a persons agency, and for the other it’s about coercive speech and toeing closer to coercive thought.

And then there’s the the third side that can perhaps see that both sides have valid points, except that none of it matters in the long run. If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman, blue as red, 50 as 1,000, depending on a person’s internal emotional state, then whatever we choose to say is as valid as anything else.

And if one person refuses to comply with social niceties, it doesn’t necessarily indicate anything other than, at worst, said person is a dick.

So I think right now, it’s a social crusade for both parties, and not everyone wants to get sucked into feeling passionate about everyone else's fights. And that doesn’t mean you’re choosing sides.

But somehow, less than 100% virtue signaling in either direction means you’re implicitly supporting “them”.

But, my approach is, when dealing with people, I’m not going to be a dick, and I’ll happily call them a preferred pronoun, within reason, even though it’s really not that important to me. But I’m also not going to go out of my way to try to fix everyone who is a dick either, even when it is something important to me.

[CydeWeys]

>If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman

Based on this statement, I don't quite think you understand what being transgender actually is. It's not people asking to be called the opposite gender, it's people asking to be called the gender that they actually are, and have been their entire lives, but who had the vast misfortune of being born into the wrong body. There is not a 1:1 correlation between the body's sex and the mind's sex; usually they match up, but sometimes they don't. Gender dysphoria has severely negative outcomes for mental health and well-being, and no one chooses it willingly.

[natecavanaugh]

Oh, I’m also not claiming anyone is choosing gender dysphoria, but they are choosing their responses to it. I’m sure there are ways to superficially suppress the mental side just as we can superficially suppress the physical side. One is, in this day and age seen as preferable, and the other is a seen as caving into social norms, and denying your true self. But why is perception, one that is not shared or independently validated to be true or measurable in any way the one to follow?

I’m not saying these are easy questions or that I even understand the experience. But simply that there are many people who view themselves or others in a way that contradicts quantitative facts, but there isn’t a large social movement to have the world at large support that perception.

But as I said originally, inasmuch as it doesn’t require anyone to do anything and doesn’t have a cost to anyone else, what do I care?

[natecavanaugh]

Is mental gender something that can be as quantitatively determined as physical gender? And what is a male or female brain apart from the accompanying biology? What makes it uniquely male vs female?