[TazeTSchnitzel]

This is the internet, I can call myself a girl if I want to. If other people don't want to, that's their problem.

Also, you clearly don't know anything about trans people if you think it's as simple as "dressing up like a girl".

[camus]

The only question is what are you legally? if you are legally a man then you are a man no matter what you think you are. If you are a woman , then likewise.

[jholman]

Legal gender is is totally not the only question. Why would you hit the comment button, just to say something so obviously wrong?

There's not one legal question, but many. If you live in a jurisdiction with different rights by sex-or-gender, which rights do you get? If you live in a jurisdiction with legal heterosexual marriage but illegal homosexual marriage, who may you marry? If you represent yourself as (fe)male to someone who cares, are you committing fraud? When contracts legally discriminate between genders (e.g. maybe scholarships for one gender only?), do you get to choose which gender you are for those contracts?

There're medical questions: if sex is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness, what should you be telling your doctor? What should E.R. techs do? What if _gender_ is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness? (Consider difficult cases like this: someone who is XY but was gender-reassigned in infancy to female (it has happened!), and raised female, and believes emself female.... which pathologies will follow male distributions, which will follow female, which will be something else?)

There're public-space social questions: which washrooms can you enter, which changerooms? (mutatis mutandis for other gendered public spaces). Can you attend girls-night-out? (Some friends-of-friends do a ladies night that includes transwomen; when I've met them, I'm inclined to think of them as dudes. How limited of me.)

And then, arguably most important, there're private social questions. We've already mostly worked out (at least in the left-leaning parts of the West) that neither sex nor gender determines who you want to have sex with, and that's probably fine (I personally think it's 100% fine!), but baby that's just the tip of the complicated iceberg. What do you do if you have an Adam's apple, and big hands, but you also have breasts, and you want to find people to discuss bra-sizing with?

tl;dr: gender and sex are complicated, and there are 2 defaults that seem to mostly-work for maybe 80%-95% of the population, and then a few more semi-defaults that work for maybe 80%-95% of those left, and then a few more defaults that work for maybe 90% of those left, and so on. And this shit matters to people, seriously. Don't be a dumbass by saying "oh it's as simple as X".

[camus]

you are entitled to your opinion like blah blah ... what's make my opinion wrong and yours right ? yes legal gender is the question. If you tell me you are a woman but in fact your are legally a man , you are lying to me , period.

Are you this website owner ? so in the name of whom are you saying i should not hit the comment button ? who do you think you are ?

[jlgreco]

If Ahmadinejad decrees that there are no gay people in Iran, does that make it so? If Kim Jung Un went craz(ier) and said that all North Koreans are men, would that make it so? If (when) I become galactic emperor and (for my own amusement) declare that henceforth camus's legal status will be "bird", would that make it so?

Laws are what we make them, they do not influence the nature of reality.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I'd rather not discuss my legal gender.

However, that doesn't state your gender definitively. Intersexed folks exist, people who were mistakenly mis-assigned gender by their genitals exist, and you can change your legal gender, at least where I live.

[jlgreco]

> if you are legally a man then you are a man no matter what you think you are.

Do you mean "legally a man", or "medically a man"? It is trivial to conceive of legal systems that fly in the face of what is plainly reality. The law can, and at various times and places has been, written by bigots and/or the uninformed. Who cares how it classifies things?

As for "medically a man", while it is possible to be "medically a man" or "medically a woman", for any reasonable definition of "medically", there are more than those two options.

[camus]

What does "medically a man" means ? I mean one undergoes a re-assignement because one wants to change its legal status right ? now in my home country however (France) , I dont think there is a third option , but you can legally change your sex. And that's fine.

[jlgreco]

I'm not a doctor, nor do I really do any sort of gender studies research as a hobby, so I do not know what "medically" would mean in this context. What I do know is that "legally" is basically worthless.

[darshan]

That's the only question in a legal context; it's not clear why that would be the only question (or one at all) in social contexts.

Your comment seems to suggest that you don't realize that one's legal gender status can and often does follow one's gender identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_transsexualism

[yaddayadda]

There are multiple legal documents that can be used to establish sex or gender. What happens when a person's driver's license is in one sex and their passport in a different sex? Better yet, what happens when the person has an "X" as their passport gender?