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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 the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.
I think that a gender identity (as used by pro-trans people) is not something falsifiable. Other unfalsifiable beliefs might be the belief that you are a good person or that you are among the elect. Or more mundanely, that you prefer strawberry to vanilla ice cream -- which is technically not something unfalsifiable, but very few people would care to quantify that objectively and correct people who claim the wrong flavor preference. ("Actually, we have analyzed your ice cream buying behavior and EEG responses and you are definitely a vanilla-lover.")
Oh contraire- to the extent that it exists, it's pretty easy to falsify- they do it every time they use the toilet. It's like insisting that they're six meters tall, no they're not, every time they go through the door they disprove their assertion.
The median trans woman does not make the claim that she was not born a biological male. Instead, she has a concept of "woman" which allows her to claim membership of that set.
Attaching a certain label to a given set of items is not something which can be wrong. You can certainly argue that (1) it does not carve reality at its joints and (2) that it goes against pre-existing usage. Neither is unprecedented. In fact, if you look at the etymology of pretty much any word you will find that its membership set has drifted over centuries.
And I'm six meters tall in some deep and profound way that doesn't correspond to physical reality. I just feel bigger than my house.
You are using "tall" in a non-standard way in that sentence, meaning it evaluates to "not even wrong" rather than "true" or "false".
Transactivists are using the word "woman" in a way which is non-standard to the rest of us, but standard in their filter bubble. The word string "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman" has different meanings in English and Wokespeak, in the same way that the word string "I'm going to bum a fag" has different meanings in British English and American English*. Both meanings are clear, and the English meaning evaluates as "false" while the Wokespeak meaning evaluates as "true". Caitlyn Jenner being a woman in the Wokespeak meaning of the word is a true fact about the world (regardless of whether you like the use of the word "woman" to refer to it) in the same way that whales being feesh is.
I happen to think that the English meaning is more useful than the Wokespeak meaning, because (among other things) it allows you to talk about reproductive medicine using words that 100IQ patients can understand.
* One of my university friends was kicked out of a biker bar in rural Michigan for this. Both possible meanings turned out to be false, although the fool had intended for the British one to be true. Apparently outlaw bikers don't commit more crimes than necessary, so if you leave politely when asked, you don't actually get beaten up.
But the essential problem with the ‘it’s true in wokespeak’ is that the wokespeak term doesn’t have a definition. There’s a (hilarious)movie about it. The sentence ‘can I bum a fag’ has different meanings in American and British English- thé key word being meaning, one of those meanings being rather unfortunate to express to outlaw bikers. But the alternate meaning is also well defined, and while outlaw bikers might not let you borrow a cig they would understand the concept. In contrast thé wokespeak sentence ‘Caitlin Jenner is a woman’ doesn’t express a concept, as far as anyone can tell- it means as much as my 14 month old saying… no one’s quite sure.
The wokespeak term doesn't have a definition in the sense of a necessary and sufficient condition for being a "woman", expressed in terms of simpler concepts to avoid circularity. But it has an established usage which allows you to understand the core cases of "woman" and "not-woman", and Caitlin Jenner is within the core meaning of "woman" in wokespeak. This is completely normal for language - even the English meaning of "woman" doesn't have a scientific definition that matches the duck types in all the (vanishingly rare) corner cases. "Is Caster Semenya a woman?" would still be a confusing question if the whole trans silliness had never happened. [Of course, the wokespeak meaning is poorly specified, so there are orders of magnitude more corner cases].
The goal of transactivists is thought reform via changing the meaning of common words.
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