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Well, there was, of course, an implicit "all else being equal" in the sentence you quoted. In your thought experiments as stated, all else is not equal; but that doesn't impinge upon my point, which was that insisting on calling Tex "William" isn't necessarily the right thing just because it is, in a technical sense, "the truth". There can be other, context-specific reasons why it might be good to identify a person currently calling himself Tex as his legal name of "William" against his will - if he's a wanted murderer hiding under an alias, for example. Your Michael Jordan impersonator largely falls into that category. (And mind you, it could be the case that a tall black guy's legal name happens to be Michael Jordan (e.g.), and suddenly the ethical thing would be to only refer to him by a nickname where it might cause undue confusion! The underlying "truth" is besides the point!)
I don't think trans people are in this category in the vast majority of cases. The most crucial difference is that it is legitimate for a hotel to treat the real Michael Jordan differently than they would a random lookalike, whereas if people treat a random person differently depending on whether they believe that person to be a man or a woman, that's their problem for being sexist. Moreover, most trans people are not trying to pass themselves off as the real Michael Jordan. The typical trans woman puts a trans flag in her Bluesky bio and will start talking about her transition journey as light conversation - she will certainly mention it before a date gets to second base. The "trap" who passes perfectly and uses that to lead on a potential sex partner all the way to the bedroom is largely a creature of fantasy, and not behavior mainstream modern-day trans people would endorse (if only because it doesn't tend to go well for the trans woman herself).
Similarly, in your King Charles example, there is more at stake than politeness and self-identification. If Charles Johnson is suffering from a delusion that he is the King Charles then perhaps I shouldn't go along with that (unless medical professionals recommend going along with the delusion for the patient's wellbeing, which does happen with e.g. dementia patients, but that's another question). Nor would I go along with it if a trans woman started telling me about her uterus or a childhood memory of her first period. But normal trans people are not like this. They know they are biologically of the opposite sex; in fact they often advertise it. If my friend is an eccentric who knows perfectly well that he's not really a Windsor, but would like me to call him "your majesty" as a kind of 24/7 LARP (perhaps he's into micronations?), I'd happily roll with it - and if for some reason I refused, it would be absolutely fair of Charles to not want to be my friend anymore.
(This doesn't change if my friend has maverick philosophical opinions that lead him to defend the position that at the end of the day, the "king" of a micronation and the "king" of a real recognized countries are more alike than they are different, in the way that a trans woman might know perfectly well that she's not the kind of woman who has a uterus and a vagina, and simply defend the esoteric metaphysical point that she's still as entitled to the word "woman" as anybody else.)
No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.
I don't even know what you mean by "all else being equal" here. The phrase "all else being equal" normally comes into play when one is comparing two or more alternatives. I think the qualifier you are trying to insert retroactively is "absent extenuating circumstances"
So my next question is this: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding. If I said "If a man knocks at your door, explains he's starving, and asks for a crust of bread, it's clearly the correct thing to do to feed him", and I later clarified that obviously this statement takes all kinds of common-sense assumptions for granted (eg: "you" have some food to spare; "the man" is a stranger to you rather than a wealthy personal enemy of yours trying to discredit you with a hidden camera; etc.), only a pedantic logician would call that disingenuous.
I think they would come up with the impression that you hadn't really thought things through carefully. That's the most charitable interpretation. A less charitable interpretation would be that you were aware your generalization was limited, but you knew that inserting a qualifier would make your argument a good deal weaker. Because to do so would be to implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc. So instead you just hoped nobody would notice.
In any event, my question stands: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
I don't believe there are any such circumstances, unless you contrive a situation where their "desire in terms of name, pronouns, etc." is unrelated to their actual transness (e.g. a trans man happens to currently be impersonating a specific biological man for nefarious purposes).
A variety of unrelated ones, much as there's a variety of unrelated reasons why you wouldn't feed the apparent starving beggar.
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