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Does anyone who is pro-trans want to steelman gender ideology for me and try to field questions? It's always seemed rather ridiculous to me (for example, the idea that someone with XY chromosomes, a penis, and the physical size of a man might actually be a woman) but I realized the other day that I haven't looked carefully at the details of pro-trans arguments.
I realize that this is something I could probably look up elsewhere online, but I would like to follow up with critical questions so that the whole argument is laid bare without any motte/bailey pivots.
To start things off, I understand that those who adhere to gender ideology draw a distinction between "sex" and "gender." "sex" refers to the markers such as male versus female genitalia; XX versus XY chromosome; etc. which have traditionally been used to distinguish between human males and human females. "Gender" (according to gender ideology) refers to a person's internal feelings in regards to their sex. So that a person who is of the male sex, might possibly be of female gender and vice versa. The purpose of sex reassignment procedures (hormones, surgery, etc.) is to align the disconnect between the person's sex and their gender. But even in the absence of such procedures, a person who is of the male sex and the female gender should be treated by society as a female (and vice versa). Even to the point where a another person's sexual preferences should go to the gender, not the sex, of a potential romantic partner. So that a straight man or a lesbian woman should be okay dating an individual who is of male sex but female gender, and if not they are a "transphobe."
Is that a fair summary of gender ideology? If not, what did I leave out? Or what did I include that's incorrect?
I am broadly pro-trans, but don't really come at it from a progressive/woke angle.
The basic foundation I'm coming from is a combination of libertarianism (people with different belief systems should be allowed to do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else), trans-humanism (people should be allowed to do what they want to their bodies), and a little bit of pronoun hospitality (when you are speaking with someone, it is nice to meet them halfway and use their preferred terminology, even if you don't agree with their metaphysics or ontology.)
I also think there's a strange way in which a lot of the trans debate is primarily a linguistic debate. I've said this before, but I think well-informed pro- and anti-trans people are generally in agreement on empirical questions like, "Can trans women get pregnant?", or "What chromosomes do an overwhelming majority of trans men have?"
I think in a lot of ways, it is less mystifying to model trans people as people with "strange" desires. The same way some people want tattoos and piercings or breast enlargement surgeries, they want to change their bodies to look more like the opposite sex. And the same way some people ask for nicknames and hate their birth names, they want nicknames and "nickpronouns."
My feeling is if they have the money, and that is what they want to do with their life, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that?
I'm okay with private sports organizations making whatever choice they want about which sex trans people compete with, let the free market sort such things out. For government-controlled domains, we'll have to work out what we want to do through a combination of voting, and application of constitutional principles. I'm personally okay if trans women get housed with male prisoners as a stop gap solution, though my preference is for all prisoners to be treated humanely and to be safe from other prisoners, and I am open to other possible solutions that still accomplish those goals.
I don't think much of the trans debate is a linguistics debate, actually, though some of it certainly is; it's primarily a coercion debate. That is, e.g. whether trans women are women is somewhat a linguistic debate, but it's more about coercion, of whether people who don't think that trans women are women ought to be coerced away from being able to refer to them as men or with male pronouns or to deadname them or etc. Of course, a strong argument is that private organizations ought to be able to coerce their members in this matter, but an equally strong argument is that people ought to be free from such coercion from private organizations, such as existing rules and norms against discriminating on the basis of race in certain circumstances. But that's where I see the real debate taking place, and the specific meanings of words are merely tools by which to put forward arguments around that.
I just don't think the linguistic debate can do what people want it to do.
The statement "trans women are women" can be true in some sense, and you can still have policies to prevent transition in minors, and make trans women use men's bathrooms, play on men's sports teams, and be imprisoned in men's prisons.
The words cannot compel the desired action, regardless of anything else.
Like, even if you accepted a "maximalist" supernatural trans position, and said that souls are real, and trans people are acts of the Abrahamic God putting souls in bodies of the opposite sex, nothing about that would imply anything about how we should treat such individuals as a matter of law or custom.
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The canonical defense in these parts would be what Scott Alexander wrote almost twelve years ago. He is always worth reading in full in my opinion, but the trans defense starts in section IV.
I am not doubting that there is some penis-haver who is asking women in a Lesbian bar if they would want to suck their cock and cries trans-phobia once they get kicked out. From my personal experience, this is rare. As a straight guy, I do not have to fend off trans-women cancelling me for refusing to fuck them basically ever. Love is the last bastion of libertarianism. You can be into one gender, one sex, one type of genitals, hair or skin color, a certain BMI or age range and people will usually accept this and not try to cancel gays for having some anti-women bias in their dating partner selection or whatever.
Amazingly upside down. Love has been heavily regulated since forever. Heard of monogamy? It still is today, just in a way that aggressively favors feminists.
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Are you adopting his position? Because I would like to ask some critical questions.
Ok, so I take it that you are disputing that according to gender ideology (and by that I mean the general progressive/leftist/woke position on transgenderism) if a person claims to be "superstraight," they are considered to be transphobic? And that other than that, you agree with my summary?
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What do you mean by “gender ideology”? The mainstream progressive leftist/woke perspective on gender? Any pro-trans viewpoint? There’s tons of different variations and subcultures, including very unhealthy, sometimes fetishistic terminally online ones, to more academic gender studies type ideas. I don’t agree with many of those, so my pro-trans arguments will be very different and don’t rely on the gender/sex distinction.
As far as I know the term “gender ideology” is a term used only by some conservative/gender critical people to refer to a bunch of different LGBT and leftist/“woke” concepts - there’s no central ideology or agreed upon theory. Most academic “gender studies” doesn’t have anything to do with trans gender people and concerns itself more with feminism.
Again there’s different viewpoints on this. Some will say that yes, the internal gender is all that matters, and some online trans spaces are pretty strident about it, but I believe it’s mostly cope/sour grapes rather than any coherent belief. Maybe it’s about the other person subconsciously feeling the internal aura?
The way I would steelman it is that human sexuality is more flexible than people assume, and a lesbian could be attracted to the feminine energy and vibe of a small, cute femboy, or a gay man to a buff butch, and feel conflicted about calling themselves bi because it feels more like an exception to the rule.
And when you add HRT/surgeries on top of that, someone of the female sex can look male enough that you don’t see them as a woman anymore.
But that’s not the same as an otherwise masculine male self-IDing as a woman and expecting sex with straight men/lesbians without changing anything. Being charitable, that sounds to me like someone taking advantage of progressives/pro-LGBT people having trouble not affirming or including absolutely everybody, even bad actors, and not wanting to be the gatekeepers who’s “actually” transgender or not.
I don't think this is remotely universal. On the contrary being flex is pretty rare, as any gay man will tell you. I want to stress that straights, gays and lesbians actually exist and they're not lying when they say they're only aroused by one sex.
But also, yeah theres a reason everyone jokes about the "straight" guy into femboys.
I actually suspect it is more common than you think. Look at prison sexuality, Afghanistan's bacha bazi, and ancient Greek homosexuality.
What I think they all have in common, is that if you sex segregate a population, some men who aren't really "bi", and who would self identify as straight in most circumstances in a modern context, will have sex with smaller weaker men (often of the more effeminate variety, where they can be had.)
But I think this would be less common in less sex segregated places like the United States as a whole.
I don't think that sexuality can be partially a product of one's culture or coercive environment has much to do with the initial notion of how, e.g. a lesbian who doesn't find sex with a male who self-identifies as a woman is being transphobic, where we're using "transphobic" to mean something to be judged as irrational or morally negative or. If you ran an experiment of sticking one lesbian in prison with a bunch of trans women, I'm sure on at least a few of the trials, the lesbian would find sex with the trans women to be fine or even desirable, but the situation in real life that we're dealing with is where lesbians aren't so limited in their choice of partners.
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Better yet, look at how much prison sexuality differs just between the different Anglo cultures. I’ve watched the occasional Ladbible / Insider interviews of British career criminals and several remarked that the ”watch out when picking up the soap” (while of course an obvious exaggeration) is an American thing and does not work the same in British prisons. Clearly the amount of flex is heavily affected by cultural factors.
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I think pure orientations are more common than zoomer self-reports would indicate, but rarer than naive 5% statistics would indicate. And like most things there seems to be a spectrum.
That said, genital preference seems to be the strongest binary, with exceptions, which is important because hormones and self-care can change your secondary sex characteristics to a degree but not your junk. I’m familiar with the GAMPs, roughly ‘straight’ men with low genital preference and quite adjacent to your referenced femboy enjoyers, but I’m not familiar with women having a similar phenomenon (though given how situational women’s attraction is, who knows, and there are obvious… anatomical considerations that are relevant in that case).
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How would you describe them?
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More or less, yes. The mainstream progressive leftist/woke perspective on transgenderism. If you are not versed in this perspective but consider yourself to be pro-trans, then we can go with that.
So the first question: Is my summary more or less fair? Is anything missing or wrong?
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"Trans" is a word used by woke LGBTWhatever people to capture a large number of wildly different phenomena.
Some of these you may believe in or not believe in, some of these you may have sympathy for:
-Old school cross-dressers.
-Drag.
-People using their appearance for social and financial opportunity (ex: some of the Thai Ladyboys).
-Blanchard Typology Types.
-True "Trans."
-BPD or serious mental illness with identity disturbance.
-Autistic and socially adrift people who latch onto trans identification.
Some of these are social contagion, some of these are "traditionally treatable" (ex: pure mental illness types), some of these are reasonably healthy or unburdensome (fetish types and people looking to make money).
But modern culture homogenizes them and thinks they all need to be treated the same. That's tremendously unhelpful. A true trans person who does great and is very happy after top/bottom surgery does not need the same type of support and engagement from society as someone who just needs some Haldol or protection from being trafficked. Distraught young men need counseling but a different type of counseling, not to be piped straight into LGBT.
So the steel man is something like: "fuck these idiots, real trans people exist but are rare and other conversations obscure what these people are like and what they need."
In your view, what's a "real trans person" and is there any objective way to distinguish such a person from non-real trans people?
A real trans person is pretty much what you expect, they do exist and are rare. The clearest examples I can find are people who have absolutely zero social deficits or mental health issues they just seem to have identification with the opposite sex. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a weird misfiring of biology could create this (rarely) and that in a permissive social environment these people would be allowed to exist.
Slicing these people off from "fake" trans people should be reasonably easy but in the modern environment where you aren't allowed to asks questions it is impossible. A fact of life in medicine is that we treat people who are almost certain not trans (especially a category I didn't mention above - malingering types) as trans because it's not acceptable to ask questions.
Hopefully things will settle down and we'll be allowed to get more focused care each segment.
Is there any objective way to distinguish?
I think the science would have to advance beyond the politics for the answer here to be yes.
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I mean, here's a simple model that's probably not true. (But maybe...?) Say there's a generic factor of "brain mutation rate". The higher it is, the more unusual things are going on with your brain. In such a world, one would expect most trans people to have other mental disorders, but one would not necessarily expect the trans part of a trans person brain with mental disorders to look different from the trans person brain without mental disorders, because the common cause is high mutation load causing both ("real") trans and mental disorders.
I think you're operating on a mental model where mental disorders cause people to present as trans, but I just don't see why this would necessarily or even plausibly be the case.
In my clinical experience (which is admittedly anecdote, research on anything related to this topic is poor) I've encountered people who seem to be trans because of mental illness, people who have predisposition to mental illness and are trans and mentally ill, and people with no mental illness whatsoever but are trans.
Just like depression is a word for a variety of phenomena that include "I live in a war zone" and "my brain is clearly malfunctioning in an obvious way that generates depressive thought content" and a million things in between, "trans" refers to a variety of complex social, psychological, and biological phenomena.
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I’ve met a few with pretty good mental health but the vast majority of transgender people I’ve met complain of mental health issues of some kind, even if “just” anxiety and/or mood issues, I have a friend who’s transgender, bipolar (but seems to be doing better with treatment), and extremely online and shy.
I guess the difficulty is, how do you differentiate between people who both have an identification with the opposite sex and have mental health issues, and people who have mental health issues alongside identity instability with which the gender identity issues are fellow travelers? I’m sure you have a clinical perspective, but this is also a philosophical question as to what constitutes “pure trans identification” with regards to gender ID, especially since gender dysphoria can come with acute mental suffering.
From a clinical perspective - my licensing bodies and professional and social milieu have very strongly embraced the idea that trans identification needs to be accepted without clarification or question, even when it is deeply questionable (for example patients in the forensic setting clearly seeking special privileges).
I don't have any interest in harming my license are ability to teach by deviating from this in the slightest so I will not.
That said.
You can investigate the various "trans" phenomena, explicate on the types, do research on outcomes and care needs, test questionnaires and scales that help you identify what's going on for an individual person...all the usual things.
We know what to look into but nobody really does it because countries are either "burn the trans" or "transition children immediately" with no effort at moderation.
This has improved a tiny bit in the US in recent years, however.
Psychiatry in particular has a pretty good history of breaking apart various phenomena into healthy, range of normal human experience, and mental illness (this side of the conversation is missed by normies for the most part).
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I'm pretty sure you're not entitled to anyone else's sexual desire. I remember being told this by Social Justice during the NiceguyTM era of dating discourse.
This is also the crux of why I find gender ideology so dementedly self-centered; your gender is ultimately only truly relevant when it comes to who you want to fuck and who wants to fuck you, which is a basic drive of being human. If you're ugly enough that a very narrow band of people will fuck you, that sucks. If you groom yourself weird, act/dress weird, and mutilate your body into something weird that an even narrower band of people want to fuck, that's a self-own. You don't get to shame and berate people for their sexual preferences because you made yourself less attractive to 99% of human beings, who's sexual preferences are tuned towards finding a fertile mate that they can produce offspring with.
Well yeah, every -supremacy movement is kind of by definition self-centered (it's in the name), and gynosupremacy is not any different.
In the 99.9% case, it's a woman being angry at men for this. Transgender ideology is simply a projection of that (i.e. to solidify their right to do it) and the equalization of "women can be men too".
Why would it be? You don't even have to pair off, the State will take care of you in your old age.
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This was already mentioned, but it’s the usual who/whom.
If a man isn’t able to attract a woman he finds attractive, it’s because he’s the problem.
If a woman isn’t able to secure commitment from a man she finds attractive, it’s because men are the problem.
If a transwoman isn’t able to attract a man he finds attractive, it’s because cishet men are the problem.
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Oppression olympics, it's all who/whom. Transgender lesbians are entitled to the sexual attraction of real lesbians(and being women, they don't cure this with Antina The Butch and her strap on, but rather with freakouts), because being trans they are more oppressed than lesbians.
One of the dumbest things I've encountered IRL was a petite, plain-at-worst FtM complaining that gay guys didn't want to fuck him.
So, you want to fuck people with dicks. And you have a vagina. But, instead of dating one of the numerously eager people who like vaginas and have dicks, the dick that fucks you HAS to like dicks, which despite your grooming and manner of dress, you do not have. And instead of compromising on your rather esoteric preference, you choose to waste everyone's time with this woe-is-me bit. Also, I suspect you only have this preference for dicks-that-like-dicks because, despite being heterosexual, you've been conditioned by external influences to think dicks-that-like-vaginas are bad. And no one is allowed to tell you that your desires and how you go about seeking to satisfy them are back-asswards.
This is someone who’s oblivious and/or masochistic enough to choose living life on a higher difficulty setting, so I suppose wittingly or unwittingly nuking their pool of eligible sexual/romantic partners is part of the experience.
Them complaining about it is pretty funny though. It’s like the Bike Fall meme/comic of a man jamming a stick through his wheel. Damn, if only there was a way one could have been attractive to a larger population of penis-havers…
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I agree that this is potentially a valid criticism of gender ideology, but I'd be interested to know if adherents of gender ideology agree that it's transphobic for a straight man (or a lesbian woman) to categorically rule out dating an individual who would traditionally be thought of as a man but is of the female gender.
I do remember that a few years back, there was an online commentator who declared that he was "super-straight," a sexual orientation which meant that he was sexually attracted to women as the term is defined more traditionally. As I recall, trans activists did not find this acceptable or amusing.
I'm pretty sure they do think that. Or at least that's what I've seen ostensibly-straight gender-ideology-adherent women posting angrily about on social media.
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Gender ideology is a big-tent movement, and many of its members can be pretty slippery about assigning concrete meanings and labels to things, so it's going to be difficult to make a specific set of claims that "those who adhere to gender ideology" believe.
With that being said, I think the main way your explanation differs from the usual story is that "sex" is not considered a category that exists. Each person has a "gender", which is an innate property that's not externally observable. Then they have several externally observable traits, things like what kinds of clothes they wear or what kind of genitals they have. Society generally has associations with which traits correspond to which genders (e.g. sundresses are typically worn by women), but it's not necessary for a person's traits to align with their gender (e.g. putting on pants does not cause you to cease to be a woman).
Taken to the extreme, it's not necessary for any of a person's externally observable traits to align with their gender. While many people feel an innate, personal sense of despair when their externally observable traits do not match their gender identity (according to their/society's general associations between traits and genders) and they should be given the resources and medical care to bring their traits into alignment with their gender identity if they wish, that's a purely personal decision on their part. It's important for everyone's gender identity to be respected regardless of the traits they have.
"Externally observable traits" here is a term I made up. The term used most often is "gender expression", which refers to the traits that other people can actually observe in practice, which is what matters most of the time. But things like "the feelings caused by the hormones in your body" are also usually considered to be something external to your gender identity, such that you might want to bring them into alignment but are not required to. (Things like the Y chromosome are not considered relevant here because they aren't easily observable. It's nice if you happen to get a bunch of traits that all align with your gender identity, but the "how" of that doesn't matter much.)
Thank you for responding.
Ok, and is it fair to say that (according to gender ideology)
(1) each person is the sole and ultimate arbiter of his own gender;
(2) there is no objective way to test for gender, it's just a matter of what the person says; and
(3) society should treat people based on their gender, so for example any adult of the female gender should be able to referred to as a "woman"; should be permitted to use women's changing facilities and play women's sports; and straight men or lesbian women who refuse to date this person would be considered "transphobic."
(1) Yes.
(2) Yes.
(3) Yes, with the caveat:
This works similarly to anti-discrimination law. You're allowed to refuse to date any individual, but you aren't allowed to refuse to date people because they're transgender (or, more broadly, because you do not accept their gender identity). You can express preferences based on gender identity, and you can sometimes get away with expressing preferences based on physical traits, but you can't express preferences based on transgender status or things that obviously correlate with it (like "gender assigned at birth").
(You can't even express preferences in favor of them, that's called being a "chaser".)
Ok, thanks for responding again.
My next question is this:
What's the evidence that "gender" exists in the way you have defined it? Is there any evidence other than self-reporting?
Speaking as a very pro-trans person: I don't especially believe that "gender" "exists" in some objective sense separate from subjective preferences - nor that it needs to.
I think it might help you understand my perspective if we look at another marker of identity with huge emotional significance to individuals, but very little biological basis if any: names. If an individual whose legal name is William would prefer to be known as Bill or Tex or Archimedes, it's clearly the correct thing to do to call him by his chosen name. In some technical contexts it might be necessary to bear in mind that the name on his ID papers is "William", but it would be dickish and bizarre to chime in whenever he says "Hi, my name's Tex" and go "ackshually, your name is William; either you're lying or you're delusional". If one of Tex's coworkers keeps passive-aggressively calling Tex "William" no matter how many times he explains that he doesn't like hearing that stuffy-sounding name that doesn't feel like it reflects him as a person, that coworker would clearly be engaged in a kind of low-grade psychological harassment.
Social transition, to my way of thinking, works very much like this, except in addition to a "William" who would rather be an "Alice", it's a "Mr" who would prefer to be called a "Miss", a "he" who would prefer to be called a "she". It is clearly, I feel, the nice, the civil, the moral thing to do to respect that person's wishes; and it doesn't require anyone to be confused about what William/Alice has got in his/her pants. She can be a conversational "she" and a medical "he" in the same way that the first guy was a conversational "Bill" but a legal "William". It's just that, unless you're a doctor/an IRS employee, the underlying technicalities of Tex or Alice's identities are none of your business. If a guy tells you "I'm Tex" it's none of your fucking business whether it says "Tex" or "William" on his driving license, outside a few specific technical circumstances; likewise if someone tells you "I'm a woman" then it shouldn't be any concern of yours what she looks like naked, unless you happen to be a doctor, or a prospective date. To put it another way, under normal circumstances, the only relevance that the sex of a random person has to you, whatsoever, is by what titles and pronouns it would be polite to address that person; how you should refer to them if you don't want them to feel insulted or misrepresented. So if that person dislikes the pronouns and titles that their biological sex would normally entail, sex loses relevance altogether, trumped by self-identification.
And a similar analogy can be devised for medical transition. Let's say you like to shave your chin but keep a mustache. Is there some specific factor in your brain that makes you a Person Whose Inner Identity Is A Mustache Guy? Probably not. It's besides the point. It would still be dickish of someone to say "biology says the male Homo sapiens is meant to have hair all over his face, you're not allowed to shave your chin", or indeed "it's better for society if grooming norms are cohesive, shave that mustache as well or you're a hippie freak". How you want to style your facial hair-growths is your business; if it's emotionally important to you to present the face of a Mustache Guy to society, and you don't feel like yourself with a lumberjack beard or a full shave, then it would be dictatorial of society to force you to do otherwise; it would be rude and invasive of any private third party to tell you how they think you ought to be styling your body.
"Gender identity" is just a kludgy concept lumping together a lot of disparate preferences, positive and negative; and even when two trans people share a preference, they might have come to it for completely different reasons (much as you may like to shave your beard because you think a full beard makes you look like some kind of caveman, while I like to shave my beard because I don't like how sweaty and itchy it makes my neck). But all those preferences, individually, should be valid in any free, humane society.
A name doesn't claim to be a statement of fact about anything except an arbitrary designation. A term about sex does.
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There have been relatively low-quality MRI studies that attempt to draw physical evidence of the concept of gender identity, but mostly it is by definition a self-reported trait, so the fact that people are self-reporting it is the evidence.
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
If you would feel negatively about this change, this demonstrates that you have an innate gender identity, and it's at least possible to imagine your body not being aligned with that identity. It just so happens that your body happens to be aligned with your gender identity. Lucky you!
If you would genuinely feel ambivalent (are you sure you're not repressing anything?), then... okay, that probably exists and is a valid category of gender identity. But lots of other people do have strong feelings about that, and gender ideology is the most inclusive way to support those people.
Ok, thank you. So it seems there is nothing to distinguish trans people from those who self-report as being Jesus; or who self-report as having been abducted by aliens; or who self-report as having been spoken to directly by some deity; etc. Agreed?
I think this argument proves too much. If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that I had been transformed into a man who looked pretty much like Henry Cavil and was 25 years old, I would be pretty happy about the change. That doesn't say anything about my innate identity as a short mediocre-looking man in his 50s with graying hair, though.
I think the assumption here would be that there are people who would basically go crazy and try to tear their skin off every time they looked in a mirror and saw Henry Cavil. Like, the fact that you would be personally fine with it is not necessarily a generally true fact about how identity works.
(Sadly, we'll have to wait until the singularity to properly test this.)
There may be people like this, but I'm not. (But I'll make it even easier. If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was transformed into a 25 year old version of myself, I'd be delighted. ) This single counter example disproves the entire generalization.
Unless of course, what transgender really means is that the person desires to be the other gender. Which I strongly suspect is pretty close to the truth.
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These other claims all, to varying degrees, depend on external facts to be true. For example by asserting you've been abducted by aliens, you're asserting that aliens exist.
Gender ideology views gender claims as being more similar to someone saying "I had a dream about aliens last night." If you're talking to some weirdo who's never had a dream before, you may need to convince them that it's possible, but to most people it's obvious that the claim is both plausible and not really possible to disprove.
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be Jesus?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be black?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be a cat?
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That thought experiment seems to prove to much - would you accept transracialism if people would be happier transformed into a different race? Let alone other identity features such as age, nationality, weight, sexuality, etc.
Maybe I’m reaching a bit, but if you think about it, progressives do support an equivalent of trans “ethnicicity”, in the form of immigration!
In this case “biological sex” would map to race, which is unchangeable, but gender would map to nationality. For a conservative, a German is someone that’s born German, but leftists say that a Middle Eastern immigrant that gets German citizenship should count too.
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Sexuality is definitely another one of those unobservable things that you have to take people's word on.
On the other hand, weight is straightforwardly an observable physical trait, and age is a straightforward historical claim (the date on which you were born). Race and nationality are social constructs that are hard to pin down, but generally people agree that they involve some combination of physical and historical traits.
"Racial identity" does exist, but it is not considered very useful most of the time; it's mainly used as a tiebreaker when the physical/historical facts don't fit nearly into the categories. A lot of gender ideology boils down to a values claim that "gender identity" is a much more important concept that everyone should care about.
There are many people who wish they could change their sexuality magically - but does that mean they "really" are of the desired sexuality rather than the one that corresponds to how they are attracted?
You say that race and nationality incorporate physical traits. Are you claiming that gender does not?
I will say that one of the main things that broke me off of accepting transgender perspectives was how credulously accepting advocates are of transgender self reporting while being completely unaccepting of the idea of transracialism (e.g. Dolezal). Race is, to me reckoning, far more socially determined than gender is, but the political left sees it as immutable and sacred.
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Yeah, I made a similar point before I saw this comment. But now that I think about it, the argument is rather telling. Because I strongly suspect that most, perhaps all, trans identifying men are simply men who really enjoy the fantasy of being a woman.
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