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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?
If people were able to be real and honest with themselves and their self-intuitions were reliable, we would not have such a booming therapeutic/self-help industry. No, in my opinion most people are actually pretty bad at knowing themselves. Of course they think they do. Who wants to admit that their self-image bears no resemblance to reality, or that how other people see them might be more accurate than how they see themselves?
Intelligent, assured, and emotionally stable people don't have to worry about this much, and may not understand just how many people are not all of those things.
This doesn't mean there are no trans people who really and truly experience gender dysphoria and an internal sense that their gender is different than their biological sex. Whether or not that is "real" in the sense of being a thing that exists outside their mind, it's real enough to cause genuine distress and I'm sympathetic. But no, I don't think every one of them is really and truly what they perceive themselves to be and the best judge of what their "real" sex is just because they feel it.
There was a time, many years ago, where one of my weird fascinations was the fat acceptance movement (this was early days, when they were still pretty fringe). I was into health and fitness at the time, after having lost a considerable amount of weight myself. I started reading the forums of people who initially fell into this subculture because, well, they were fat, they were unhappy about it, but losing weight is hard. As you might imagine, the levels of cope and rationalization would give trans people some serious competition. Every pseudo-scientific and psychological theory under the sun to explain why losing weight and keeping it off is absolutely and totally impossible and never works, which leads to elaborate theories of socialization to explain that actually, being fat is sexy and normal and it's just our modern society that's stigmatized fat.
Anyway, as you might imagine, many, many people would cruise by and ("helpfully" or otherwise) tell them they were delusional and/or there are actually ways to lose weight. A common refrain from the FA people was essentially what trans people say: "How dare you presume that you know more about our bodies than we do?"
Thing is, yeah, a lot of people actually did know more about their bodies than they did, because the things they thought about their bodies were mostly unscientific cope that flew in the face of reality. Plus the mundane things, like I can't count how many times I've read about someone who weighs 300 or 400 pounds insisting that they literally ate 800 calories and did 2 hours of exercise daily for weeks and physically could not lose weight. No, I am not exaggerating, I have seen those literal numbers quoted. And sometimes much less extreme, but still clearly unrealistic, figures. The degree to which all of these people really believed this, I cannot say, but I'm sure some of them did somehow manage to convince themselves that the bags of chips and bottles of soda and extra whip mocha frappucinos didn't "count."
I think in many ways they are very similar to trans people: they feel something is wrong about their bodies, they would like to change it, but change is hard and difficult, especially when it's your own thinking that needs to change, so instead, they decide it's other people's perceptions that should change.
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