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Well, happy that we can at least agree on that :p
But I’ve seen enough examples of non passing, pre-T trans guys insisting that their boyfriend is gay for being with them and I think they’re being genuine. Likewise in reverse with gender-criticals.
Not according to your definition sure, but I think it’s quite useful to separate “male” from “man” (or “dude” or “guy”). A trans man is female, but can be a man, a boyfriend, a husband, referred to as “that dude over there”, because those aren’t scientific terms or claims about their chromosomes. Otherwise it’s kinda like insisting you’ll never see your friends’ adoptive parents as their mum and dad no matter the circumstances, because mother and father should be used purely for the biological parents. It just turns into a semantic debate, and debating whether a trans guy is a man becomes as stupid as arguing whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around. What are we actually debating here?
You have seen gender-criticals claiming a non-passing trans guy in a relationship with a man is in... a straight relationship? That would be consistent! (I think the trans guy claiming her boyfriend is totally gay is coping, because she'd be mad to realize he still thinks of her as a woman.) Or do you mean something else? I'm honestly confused here.
This is the whole "sex versus gender" debate. Provisionally, I am willing to accept that gender roles are more fluid than gametes, but I also think gender roles are social/psychological constructs (i.e., basically I agree with the gender-criticals here). If you are a man but you "feel" like a woman and act like a woman and want to be seen as a woman, fine, whatever, but it doesn't make you female. In an ideal world, this wouldn't matter and we wouldn't have to debate it. Doctors could factor in your natal sex when it matters and otherwise it would be mostly irrelevant. Just as being an adopted child does not make you less of a real child, but if you start being concerned with genetic diseases you kind of need to know someone's biological parentage.
At its heart, we're debating whether gender "exists" in some real fashion, outside your head or mine, as something separate from sex.
The reason we care about the debate are all the effects it has that makes people mad. You have your religious conservatives who think living as a different sex is violating God's law. They can pound sand as far as I'm concerned, but they exist. You have the fragile trans-identified people who think it's a violation of their personhood not to really, truly see them and internalize your conception of them as whatever sex they say they are. They can also pound sand. Both those camps would be fine if they just MYOB and let people think what they wish as long as their rights aren't being infringed upon.
But then you have the men who want to enter women's space (almost never the reverse) and that's where all the heat is, even if it's a relative small frequency compared to the total trans population. But if you think women's sports matter, it's important! If you think women being raped in prison is important, it matters! If you think bad faith actors using trans ideology to act out their fetishes and subject other people to them under the cover of identity politics is an issue, it matters!
You seem pretty reasonable: you are not bothered by my thinking of you as a man as long as I'm not rude to you. But that hasn't been my experience with most trans people. They don't want you to just mouth the words. They want you to really believe, or at least pretend to believe so convincingly that you'd suck girldick and call yourself straight if it came to that. We're debating whether it's possible to accommodate such people while also letting you live your life as a woman.
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