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A common argument in trans discourse is "who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
I've spent years operating on the opposite assumption about myself, that I'm a bad judge of myself. Furthermore, everyone has dissatisfaction with themselves and the world. Personally, I flip-flop, get dissatisfied about my life and direction, but most people tell me "that's life, get over it". But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard. Not because it's necessarily true, though. It converts vague restlessness into a clear enemy and a fixed identity, and that provides false stability and obsession for a feeling of listlessness.
So I don't buy that conviction is evidence of accuracy. If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it. I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
Gender identity immediately breaks down outside the context of the narcissistic modern west. Everyone else who's ever lived has lived in direct relationship to those around them. Placing the onus of deciding the gender for ourselves leads to strange or ridiculous outcomes some percentage of the time. Traditionally you are just whatever gender the people around you assign to you which would correspond to genitalia nearly all the time.
If someone asks for my pronouns I am irritated that I have to decide for myself because I think it should be designated by someone outside of myself in relation to the averages and experiences of society. If they assign an exogonous gender to my imagined self then it will tell me something about me, or them, but at least it relieves me of the pressure of having to assert something about myself.
Picking your own gender and asserting its correctness is dumb and ridiculous but completely consistent with the dumbness and ridiculousness of the modern west.
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