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Should people be treated as what they'd like to be seen as rather than what they are? Setting aside whether trans women are women, someone that has recently transitioned and isn't even in the ballpark of passing as a woman, much less an attractive one, should not have a reasonable expectation that people will immediately begin pretending that they're attractive as women. Someone that looks like Chris will only be attractive to a specific sort of fetishist, not to a straight male with normal tastes in women.
I can't imagine applying this level of reality distortion field to any other expressed preference. It's trite to bring up examples like, "well, what if someone wanted to be treated as Napoleon?", but that really is the level of dissonance that I experience when a pretty obvious guy in a wig wants to be treated as an attractive woman. Regardless of what their internal experience is, that simply isn't what my eyes see and I don't buy that it's what anyone else is seeing either.
I think it’s good to make some accommodation for others’ worldviews. To gently prod at another preference, consider others’ religion/lack thereof. All but your own will seem laughably absurd. Yet if I was invited to dinner by devout Zoroastrians, I wouldn’t laugh in their faces when they suggested we say a prayer before dinner, nor would I immediately start attacking the holes in their holy book. When a belief seems delusional to you, but is important to someone else, then provided it isn’t causing any real harm, I think you can make accommodations. It’s pretty well impossible to have relationships with people otherwise.
On the other hand, maybe this kind of thinking has landed us in our current predicament? If we were all completely open about calling out what we see as insane, then maybe silly belief structures would find it harder to take root. It’d probably be a society with far more hatred and conflict, though, so I don’t know if the tradeoff is worth it.
There are gradations too, with acting around trans women. It’s one thing to accommodate saying ‘she’ and ‘her’, another to point-blank lie when asked “do you think I’m attractive,” and another entirely to agree to join them in the bedroom so as to maintain the fiction.
All up, provided a transwoman isn’t obnoxious about the whole thing, I feel it’s needlessly demeaning and rude not to do the bare minimum along with it. At the same time, there are limits to what I’ll do.
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I think the core conflict here is at what level does self-perception trump others' observed reality?
If someone fancies themselves a genius but struggles with simple maths and spelling, we do not humour them. Their identity as a genius is not to be respected. Other people's labels trump your own. So too with attractiveness. Some professions even have titles that are legally protected in some places -- calling yourself an engineer or a doctor when you aren't one can actually get you in trouble.
It seems to me that the trans issue is almost the only one where self-perception is expected to trump others' observations of you. You can't declare yourself cool, or force a nickname for yourself, or anything like that. But you can declare yourself a woman? I don't buy it. And I don't think trans do either, given their constant insistence on everyone else "validating" them. They know that identities are not really determined by the individual, hence the attempt to force others to perceive them they way they wish to be perceived.
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