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This kinda supports exactly the point I am trying to make. Adoption is explicitly a legal fiction: it exists because you want do do something that you know is physically and/or logically impossible (that is, retroactively change someone's parentage), and adoption is just a way of telling lawyers "pretend you don't see the impossibility". Which is possibly fine for lawyers, but as someone who's trying to cleave reality at the joints (and/or arrange a blood transfusion), the scientifically correct answer is once again "No, I will not play your kayfabe, he's not your dad and no piece of paper can make it so, no matter how much state power you array behind it".
The government of Oceania can pass as many laws as it wants that 2+2=5, but paper ain't worth much.
I agree with your assessment if we're carving reality at the joints, but legal fictions are important in people's lives. If legal fictions are descriptively in favor of translegalism, then it matters a lot to how trans people can live their lives. You don't have to believe adoptive parents are biological parents to believe that the legal regime around adoption has a lot of effect on the lives of all the people involved in adoption.
Essentially, I think there are two separate questions here:
What legal barriers, or legal support is there for changing one's documented sex?
What do trans people believe that makes them want to change their documented sex?
Obviously, the main disanalogy between adoptive sex and adoptive parenthood is in the participants' explanation of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. Adoptive parents understand that they were not "parents" in any sense before adoption, and that the act of the court is the thing granting legitimacy to their claim of "parenthood." Adoptive men/women on the other hand, often claim that they have always been their adoptive sex in some sense, and are merely seeking medical, social and legal recourse to reflect this personal belief.
But I'm not sure if that difference matters in practice. The law can be relatively agnostic to the why of people transitioning - I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents' desire to adopt comes from a religious background, but the state shouldn't have to decide that metaphysical question before allowing them to adopt. Similarly, I think the metaphysical claims of many trans people (that they either have a soul/mind of their adoptive sex, or that they have a brain more in line with their adoptive sex) is kind of a side issue to the first question. I'm okay with considering this almost a religious question (I don't believe in souls, and a lot of the brain evidence is pretty mixed) and moving on with my life. I feel like my translegalism+hospitality approach lets me see reality at its joints just fine, while still allowing people some freedom to live their lives the way they want to.
When I read the italicized bit, I immediately thought of foster parents, who form a sort of intermediate case--they clearly have some of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, but not to the same permanent extent as adoptive or natural parents. If someone were to ask me, "are foster parents a subset of parents?" I'd say...kind of? For some purposes yes, other purposes no?
Do you think this fits into the adoptive sex metaphor?
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