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That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.
I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.
I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."
This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.
To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.
You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.
Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?
Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does. Alternatively, if you do want perfect egalitarianism, why do you care how "man" and "woman" are defined? They become just arbitrary streams of phonemes used to categorize different fuzzy phenomena, like arguing over whether a virus is "life" or "nonlife."
I'm a Roman Catholic. I care about the definition of "man" and "woman" because I believe men and women have different divinely-ordained privileges and duties. So as a society, it's important for us to define the meaning of those terms correctly so we can effectively promote said privileges and duties. But it would be ridiculous to expect, say, a Jain, to have the same idea of what those privileges and duties are, even if they concede that they exist in the first place. Their fundamental beliefs about the nature of god are wrong, and what I hope to change. But until I do, their derived beliefs are presumably self-consistent and therefore unassailable ... unless I can convince them that within their own moral framework, they should alter their behavior.
The same logic applies to convincing people who believe in gender self-identification*. You're making some claim that it's futile to meet them where they are because doing so doesn't shift them from supporting a particular political establishment... and you substantiate that claim by pointing to personal experience of debating people who support gender self-identification. But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways. For just the bathroom-debate and sports-debate alone, you can come up with three different pro-transgender combinations that must necessarily derive from completely different worldviews. And since those three worldviews are part of the same political establishment, they're all fighting each other, all the time, on the inside of their filter bubbles. They each have some idea of what the "party line" is, and probably they all think it's wrong and they're right.
* I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.
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That's a bunch of postmodern second-hand lesswrong rhetoric meant to let the camel's nose into the tent. Now the camel is halfway in and kids are being sterilised and/or taken away from parents who "don't affirm their gender". Let's get the camel back out.
You're trying to fix the debate around your particular framing, but if you are actually correct that's wholly unnecessary.
And anyways, convincing people to have a "traditional" views about what a man and women are doesn't even prevent kids being sterilized or being abducted from their parents. So it's doubly useless to argue from a position of privileging your own moral framework. You not only fail to convince people to adopt said framework, you also fail to make progress on the object level issue.
Here's an example: I was arguing with my girlfriend about transgender people in women's sports. She's "pro," I'm a muddled sort of "anti."* I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women. She actually thought women would do fine in men's sports, if they weren't excluded from tryouts, or something. So none of my appeals to fairness, or justice, or even entertainment value were working on her, because they were all made from a framing that she viewed as essentially incoherent. I eventually got her to concede that, were we to have true co-ed competitions at an elite level, and men consistently won, then it would make sense to keep males, including transgender ones, out of women's sports.
That's what it took to get the object-level issue resolved, and in the process I saw that currently-intransversible gap between our frameworks. Before I can even get her to care about the higher male genetic propensity for sexual assault, I'd need to convince her it was genetic in the first place, rather than culturally mediated. And in particular, to someone who believes most observed differences between sexes are due to cultural factors rather than genetic, it would seem trivially obvious that changing their cultural presentation of gender is changing their gender, because gender is all culture in the first place.
Anyways, altering your body is a natural right, in that it has no external victims and requires active government intervention to stop. Natural rights can be exercised poorly, but that doesn't stop us from having them. Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf. By the same token, government doesn't have leave to interfere with a parent's justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their child. So the hypothetical people you're arguing with are wrong, but you are too.
* I don't think "transgender women are women," but also I'm not really in favor of women's sports? So it's like, whatever to me. I don't judge sporting organizations for just doing whatever is going to get them the most viewers and therefore the most money.
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