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Gender-as-distinct-from-sex is either of nonsense or actively reifying stereotypes, take your pick. Souls are more coherent than strict self-ID gender. That sounds harsh, but for those following along at home, play this out for a minute. If your gender has no connection to the outside world, it's just your internal experience and label for yourself that you definitionally can't be wrong about, then there's absolutely zero reason for anybody to ever treat anybody else differently based upon their gender. There's no reason for gendered spaces or activities or anything at all, and so since the outside world has no reason to care, poof! Bye, gender. Trying to hold onto it is going to just wrap around into it not mattering or build up inconsistencies and nonsense. So for gender to be A Thing about which We Should Care, it has to have some ties to the outside world. Being distinct from sex, we're already ruling out biology. So that leaves social/cultural factors, which are not innate, not inherent, and indeed we see them vary by culture. So we should care about a bundle of traits and properties a particular culture has decided go together - that is a stereotype!
If women are people who X and only X, then let's just deal with X directly rather than lay an extra category on top. If women are people who X and Y, then baby you've got a
stewstereotype going! If women are people who call themselves women and nothing else, then we've no reason at all to care. Once you take the biology out of the gender, you have nothing left that anybody can or should care about but social and cultural baggage, and so by clinging to it and impressing how important it all is to you, you're just strengthening your cultural stereotypes and calling 'em sacred. Quit it.The '90s had the right idea. Boys can wear dresses and have tea parties, girls can play with monster trucks and hit one another with sticks, etc and so on, and none of those things make them not boys or not girls. Let the words refer to the biological reality underneath that is true and correct in 99+% of cases, invent special terms for the outliers if you must, drop the social/cultural barriers, and just let people do their thing. There's no reason for all the hassle, and it can't and won't get anybody any more freedom anyway.
You want to take hormones and are otherwise okay with opening the gates on letting people put stuff in their bodies if they feel like it, go for it. You want to wear 'gender inappropriate clothing' and are otherwise okay with a general lack of expected dressing standards, go for it. You want elective/cosmetic surgery so that your body is more pleasant for you and are otherwise okay with people having other such surgeries, go for it. Do What You Want, up to the limit of what you think society should allow in general, because you are not a special case. You cannot be a special case, because there is nothing special underneath. You're just a boy or a girl who wants to do an activity which is not gated by gender.
IMO trying to completely separate gender from its biological aspect is partly cope for the fact that transition is an imperfect technology and not everybody ends up passing, and no surgery can make you have the reproductive functionality of the opposite sex yet.
Most trans people desperately want to be the opposite sex on a biological level and a trans woman being allowed to wear dresses because boys can dress however they want won’t help with the fact that her hips are too narrow and she hates having stubble and that having a penis means most men will be uninterested in dating her, and that she won’t be able to have a normal sex life regardless, or have children the normal way, etc.
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