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Their view is that if you say you're trans, you are trans, because denying that would be incredibly mean to a trans person and being trans is cute and valid. There aren't any essences involved. Like, what identity-essences does a genderfluid person have, or someone who wants to be a boy sometimes and a girl at other times? It's just 'you are trans if you say you are and you get to do whatever you feel like', which doesn't seem particularly dualist, just dumb.
I understand what you're saying, but I really don't think it's as simple as that. If it was just "mean" or rude to claim that a trans person isn't really trans, would we really see all this hysterical rending of hair about "denying our right to exist", "invalidating our identities" and "committing literal genocide"? I don't think this is just hyperbole for rhetorical effect: I think a lot of trans activists take this really seriously and think that their gender identity is something special and ineffable. I mean, the trope of a trans person's gender identity being validated by how they present as a ghost or in the afterlife is common enough that it has its own TV Tropes entry: we're not just pulling dualist interpretations of the worldview out of our ass here.
Their "essence" is that of a genderfluid person, whose gender identity fluctuates over time. It's tautological but self-consistent.
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