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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?
I think the issue is that most trans people don't feel that the outside view is operating in good faith. If there was a society wide consensus that transness was value neutral and all we were after was diagnostic accuracy then it would be easier to trust the outside view, but outside of particular social microclimates transness is stigmatized and so if you really are trans the outside view is going to be wrong. It's true that this oppositional relationship can polarize people into false certainty, but that seems like an inevitable consequence of the stigma, the more costly a decision is the bigger the sunk cost, the more people are going to dig in and defend their decision. Make the decision less costly, build trust that the outside view is a neutral diagnosis, and people may be more willing to reconsider it.
I'd also say that the opposite error, excessive trust of the outside view or not transitioning because of the cost, is very common. I felt that I was trans as a teenager and didn't transition for over a decade because I felt that if there was any uncertainty I should avoid the social/material costs of transitioning. This is not an uncommon story and I feel I would have been better off transitioning younger. Whatever the metaphysics of identity transition itself is a decision and subject to social incentives, and outside of certain social microclimates those incentives are overwhelmingly against transition.
Well, that's one of the issues. And to be sure, a lot of trans opposition is religion-based, or just gut level "Ewww!" reactions, which I agree just use any "diagnosis" of transness as not real as post hoc justification.
However, any attempts at actual diagnostic accuracy have been summarily rejected by the trans movement. Jesse Singhal is a tragic case study: he is despised by the trans community almost as much as JK Rowling, because his whole thing is deep dives into studies and data analysis, in which he consistently shows that trans studies tend to suffer from all kinds of shoddy methodology. And despite the fact that he's about as liberal as they come and repeatedly asserts his support for trans rights, he is accused of being, like JK Rowling, a fascist who wants to see trans children dead in the streets.
So while I understand the mistrust you might have for a generally hostile "outside view," the fact that you take it for granted that any negative conclusion must be bad faith and born of hostility rather than clinical assessment means that there isn't really any way to find some common rational basis for settling trans issues.
And as I've said before, I think the actual issue is trans right supporters being unwilling to confront the bad faith actors in their own camp. People like (presumably) you who just want to live your lives and would trouble no one would be mostly accepted even by the majority of the population who doesn't really believe your gender self-identification is real. But you have a small but vocal group that does things like dress like Cormac McCarthy's hellish parade of Commanches and behaves in the most aggressive, male manner possible while screaming that they "don't owe anyone femininity" and you will call them she/her/they. You have trans women who make a point of inserting themselves into every female space they can, from lesbian dating apps to Girl Guides, just to make a crusade out of crushing the expected resistance. And you have the grifters and the "pornsick men" who are obviously, obviously autogynephiles and getting off on making other people (pretend to) see them as women, and in many cases making people pretend to see the emperor's new clothes is part of their delight in the experience.
It should not be surprising that these highly visible faces of the trans movement make a greater impression on trans opponents than the folks who "just want to pee."
Personally I have a temperamental attraction to conciliation and respectability politics, but I transitioned recently and generally defer to my elders. When I talk to the trans women who transitioned over a decade ago about politics the general response I get is that the animus against us is so great there's no return on respectability politics, trans people cannot make themselves respectable so why bother trying. I think this is kind of outdated and the animus has lessened to the point where it might be worthwhile but it's hard to change that perception.
As to confronting the bad faith actors in our camp, let me try to make an analogy. If the American right stood up and said "the liberals are right, there really are a bunch of racist fascists among us, let's work really hard to kick them all out, then the liberals will definitely stop calling us racist fascists" how do you think that would work out for the right? Perhaps it would improve the general popularity of the conservative movement if it could iterate exactly once and excommunicate the most racist 1% of RW media figures as adjudicated by the New York Times. But if you accept their premise that there's a bunch of fascists in your midst and accept their authority to name who is a fascist you lock in a dynamic that will iterate towards an outcome you'd likely find unacceptable.
I think that's basically the intuition behind trans people not wanting to give cis people any say in who is really trans even if this sometimes has pretty ridiculous results. Personally I think this stand is misguided and won't hold up, a group that's 1% of the population has to make more concessions to outside opinions than a group that's 40% of the population. In the long run some sort of compromise will have to be made.
We're also in an era of decentralized viral communication, movement's have much less power to pick their spokespeople than before. The liberal media will boost right wing guys who says provocative things that most right wingers don't believe, because that's an attention getting story. Similarly I think there's always going to be a demand for stories about non passing trans women behaving outrageously and the community doesn't really have the ability to decide who becomes highly visible and who doesn't.
I do think there are the beginning of some changes that might lead to something different in the long run. There's a growing hostility between "everybody's valid" queer people and "I desperately want to change my body and will pay immense costs to do so" trans people. The political right forcing all AMAB people into men's spaces has different consequences for queer AMAB people who want to wear women's clothes sometimes and trans women who have taken hormones and developed breasts and a feminine body fat distribution. I think in time there may be a defensive move towards a framework that's based more around the ways in which people have changed their body than an internal psychological identity but who knows, intracoalitional queer politics are weird and I don't fully understand them.
The difference, as you touch on, is that there is no majority which thinks GOP voters are all perverts who deserve whatever consequences. Sure, there's people that believe that. But a substantial percentage of people would react to 'transwomen using the mens locker room is a safety issue' with some variant of 'they deserve it for being perverts'. You kinda can't afford to not police your own.
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