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The delusion is in insisting that wanting to be something is exactly the same thing as being that something, which is obviously ridiculous. Honestly you are starting to sound wilfully ignorant which makes me think you are trans-identified yourself, because consistently denying reality and pretending not to understand things that have been explained to you ad nauseam is a key characteristic of trans-identified people and their allies.
But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:
To apply this analogy, it would be like thinking that overweight people become skinny merely by expressing the desire to become skinny. And moreover, not only are they now skinny (even though they are objectively still fat), they have retroactively always been skinny, and if you deny this, you are a bigot and you will get banned for misweighting a stunning and brave transskinny person.
The fact that nobody actually thinks like this when it comes to fat people shows how ridiculous gender ideology is.
And sure, there is a type of trans person who actually tries to transition. They will take cross sex hormones, change out their wardrobe, change their behavior, and so on. Those people have at least some valid claim to be treated as the opposite sex. But importantly, gender ideology doesn't require anyone to do anything like that (claiming someone needs to transitions to be “valid” as a transgender makes you truscum which is practically as bad as being a TERF) and even if you go through all that trouble, obviously it doesn't change who you were before your transition, although gender ideologues will insist that who you were in the past depends entirely on what you identify as today.
@rae is trans, yes.
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My understanding of the matter is more:
The premise that gender is merely a separate thing from sex was used as a foot in the door twenty years ago. No modern gender ideologue operates on the basis that biological sex is real and important today.
If you disagree, I will ask you the same thing as I asked Rae: go ahead edit the fact that Imane Khelif is male and that Elliot Page is female into their respective Wikipedia pages. If you manage to do that, I will concede that gender ideologues in the real world separate sex from gender identity.
Sure, that's what gender ideologues believe, but why shouldn't it be? Especially if they use their false claim to get special privileges, like Imane Khelif falsely claiming to be a woman to compete in the women's boxing tournament.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
The closest case I can think of is someone like Oscar Pistorius who is a sprinter with artifical legs who was eventually banned from competing against natural humans because he had an advantage over regular athletes. If we can ban Pistorius from men's sports, why can't we ban Khelif from women's sports?
Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
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That’s my understanding as well. Maybe @MartianNight and @hydroacetylene don’t believe in the gender/sex distinction but it’s central to the mainstream trans viewpoint and it’s either a straw man or a misinterpretation to interpret “x was always a man” as “x is and always was biologically male”.
Progressives will be very sensitive about language and avoid explicitly calling a trans man a biological female, but they aren’t (completely) denying reality, they’ll just use euphemisms and softer language (like AFAB/AMAB, “presenting as female at the time”). If you don’t have hold the sex/gender distinction it’s easy to think it’s complete nonsensical absurdity and that they’re saying a man can will himself into having a uterus, as opposed to having this nebulously defined conception of the inner self as a woman.
No it's not, and I've already pointed you to enough examples that I now believe you are being completely disingenuous the way all gender ideologues are always completely disingenuous.
If gender ideologues embraced the sex/gender distinction, Wikipedia's Elliot Page article would start with: "Elliot Page is a female actor who identifies as a man"
And Wikipedia's Imane Khelif article would start with "Imane Khelif is an intersex male suffering from 5AR2D who identifies as a woman..."
The Khelif article literally contains the false claim that "Khelif was born female" and for months contained the completely unsubstantiated sentence "false claims that she was a male circulated online": while these claims did circulate online, they were factually true, and this is still not acknowledged, though the sentence has been modified by replacing "male" with "man" which is still a lie since Khelif is a man in the trivial meaning of the word.
There is no "sensitivity" or "soft language" here. There is just a complete denial of objective reality. And it's not an oversight: this was one of the most-viewed articles of 2025. Many people tried to correct the "born female" and "false claims" phrasing; these people were all overruled by the gender activists that watch these articles like hawks and police the language carefully with the intent to maximally deceive the public.
If you disagree and you think the statement "Khelif was born female" was not meant to deceive the reader into thinking Khelif was born female (when in fact Khelif was born male) I would love to read your argument to that effect. But stop your bullshit about me not “believing” in a gender/sex distinction that obviously real world gender ideologues don't believe in either, considering that they're always intentionally conflating gender with sex, and never plainly state the sex of transgender/intersex people.
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How have I denied reality? I guess we can argue over the proportions of people with extreme beliefs about gender. I’m not even saying I agree with the mainstream pro trans position, I don’t, but I feel like you’re painting a straw man here.
Anyone who believes trans people literally become the opposite sex by self declaration is delusional and an idiot. That might be a big proportion of people arguing online about it, I don’t know, but I’ve thankfully never met anyone who believed that IRL.
That is so stupid it has so be a straw man or a minority of hardcore activists that don’t represent most trans people (which I have never encountered). Trans activists are all about separating gender from sex, and saying you being a man or a woman is different from you being male or female. That’s why there’s the whole “what is a woman” debate, otherwise how would that work, would they believe you can spontaneously manifest a uterus by believing you have one?
This is the vast majority of trans people I know, at least for hormones and wardrobe, behaviour is somewhat hit or miss.
Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.
OK but that is literally the standard model of gender ideology in the real world, and if you argue for your interpretation you will get banned from half the internet and fired from every job in academia, hollywood, sillicon valley, and wherever else the woke reign supreme.
Go try and edit Wikipedia to reflect your belief that Elliot Page was a woman when he played a pregnant teenage girl. Heck, go on Wikipedia and edit the Elliot Page article to state that Page might be a man now but he still is biologically female and was born female (rather than merely being “assigned female at birth” by an ignorant doctor) If you manage to do that without getting banned or ganged upon by a rabid troupe of gender ideologues who will swiftly revert your changes, I might consider your hypothesis that gender ideology might possibly mean what you claim it means.
But who are we kidding? We both know that your conception of gender ideology doesn't exist outside The Motte. It's actually a fantastic example of the motte-and-baily fallacy. Only in The Motte, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, where people don't automatically agree that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, does transwoman mean “person who wishes they are a woman but is a male in reality”. Everywhere else it means “woman, and if you deny it you're banned”.
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