I can only presume this unwillingness to accept someone else's identity comes from a strong religious conviction: that your god "doesn't make mistakes" or somesuch, and thus if someone feels there's something wrong or mismatched between their gender identity and their sex, they must be the one who's wrong to think that.
Am I on the right lines? Not trying to describe it in an insulting way. Genuinely trying to get my head around your position.
To be fair, we've been pretty far from even establishing my position.
"Gender identity" is a combination of two imagined things. Both gender and identity come from the human mind exclusively. Which is not to say that they aren't real just because they are imagined: sports are imagined, recipes are imagined, nations are imagined. Lots of important, real things come out of the human imagination. Human sexual dichotomy is not one of them. There are categories, male and female, which may not contain every single human between them, but are physically required categories for humans to exist and reproduce. We cannot reimagine sex, reality will assert itself.
Gender and identity are things society has invented, and can choose to reimagine. Gender is the collection of things we societally associate with masculinity and femininity (or anything in between), but most of those are semi-arbitrary and highly relative to time and place. Identity is those characteristics by which we associate people into groups and/or distinguish between them, and those things are also semi-arbitrary and highly relative to time and place. The very concept of gender identity is the avoidable societal decision to distinguish between groups based on arbitrary markers of masculinity and femininity.
I'm going to group people out here for a second so that I can speak specifically. There are people with severe body dysmorphia related to their sex organs. That is incredibly rare, and I'm not talking about them. There is also the Tumblr crowd with fake identities, which is depressingly common, but I also don't want to talk about them. I want to talk about just the people whose gender identities don't match their biological sex. I am not unsympathetic to them, their suffering is real, the causes are real. But the suffering does not stem from a medical problem, it stems from a societal problem, a society that has latched gender markers onto things needlessly and tied them conceptually to sex such that people who do not often match up with those markers are constantly being signaled to that their existence is wrong. That's where the inability to accept oneself comes from. That's where the suicidality comes from.
I don't think a transgender individual is wrong about who they are and ought to conform to societal standards. I think the problem with transitioning is the societal standards. I have no problem with masculine women or feminine men, that does not make them less of a man or woman. I think it's a horrible thing that people are conditioned to not be able to live as they are, based on arbitrary standards, and so often choose suicide to escape it. But transitions are themselves a parallel to suicide. Obviously preferable out of the two, but it's still killing the person they are in a certain sense. Hence concepts like "deadnaming", the individual may be alive, but that pretransition identity is dead now.
On an individual level, I can't fault an individual's personal decisions. Societal problems are not within the power of any one person to fix, a trans person cannot rewrite society alone, but they can present themselves as they choose for themselves. What I do fault, however, is rhetoric that reinforces rather than challenges the modern notion of gender identities. I am still quite fond of the phrase "gender is a social construct", and I wish we could get back to that point of understanding, because treating transgenderism as a medical issue broadly is choosing to lock in the current gender paradigm that causes so much pain in the first place. A medical professional telling a troubled youth being hurt by society that the problem is entirely within their body and we just need to block their hormones for a while seems to me both insane and heinous.
aeon.co
