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If you put a transgender person alone on a space station and give them HRT they're still going to have experiences aligned with their gender identity. How they experience emotions, sexual arousal, and some of their personality characteristics are going to become more closely aligned with the gender they identify with. On the obvious stereotypical stuff, trans women will find it much easier to cry, trans men experience more arousal in response to visual stimulus.
If you put a white person on a space station and let them increase their melanin levels are they going to have any experiences that constitute 'the black experience' or are part of black culture in the U.S? I would think not, because those experiences are inherently social. Perhaps they might have to change their skin care routine, but that doesn't seem a comparably large change in internal subjective experience.
That is to say that melanin is constitutive of race almost entirely because it's a flag that indicates how others should treat you socially. Gender is both a social cultural experience and an internal psychological one.
It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender". It doesn't make sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to a different race" because I don't think races have unique internal psychological experiences outside of social treatment.
As you point out with the case of pregnancy there are going to be all sorts of things where trans people have experiences that are wildly atypical for someone of the gender they identify with. Obviously criminalization of speech is bad and I oppose that. But if someone says to me: "I think my internal psychological experience is closest to a man's and I would like to occupy the male social position and take testosterone, but the only way for me to have biological children is to become pregnant and so I have chosen to do that please refer to me as a man" I would do so.
But this ultimately does not make sense. It's a claim to knowledge that the person cannot possibly posses. There is not way to differentiate between in the internal experience of "I am a male who correctly identifies that I internal psychological experience closer to what women have" and "I am a male who incorrectly believes I have internal psychological experience closer to what women have and actually the experience itself is inherently a male experience". We all only have one first person experience.
You could say the same for all internal mental states because language is an imperfect medium for communicating lived experience. How can I ever know if I'm really "angry", or if I am incorrectly describing some other emotion as anger? I can never directly access everyone else's experiences to know what anger truly is, I just have to construct an idea of anger based on other people's descriptions.
Very little usually hangs on the accuracy of such comparison. Yes - you can't actually know if the anger you feel is the same as the anger I feel although you do at least have a lot more evidence it does(especially if we're the same sex), because anger serves a common biological purpose. Your gender's body has very little reason to be able to accurately model such a thing and probably a few reasons to not perfectly do so.
And hell, I'm open minded, I'm not bothered by Men who want to dress as women, act like women, even get cosmetic surgery/take hormones to look like women for whatever reason. They just enjoy looking cute, they feel sexy, whatever. But don't expect me to agree that there is some cosmic way that they're actually fundamentally women. I gave up religion a long while ago and this is precisely the thing I will no longer accept on faith.
We're social animals so there's lots of evolutionary utility from being able to predict other people's actions and accurately modeling other people's internal states would be helpful for that.
Sure I'm not big on metaphysics. I think labels are about communicating useful information not cosmic essences. But I think in most cases the useful information to communicate is the social role a person is presently occupying not their birth sex. I think trans inclusive language in medical contexts is pretty dumb because the anatomical details are relevant there, but in most social contexts expected presentation and mannerism are the relevant content of the gendered label.
I disagree - in my experience, trans people tend to act in ways that confirm and pattern-match to their birth sex, with transbians being some of the most "malebrained" people I have ever interacted with. When I try to model the behaviour of trans people, I ignore their gender identity and operate on the basis of what they were assigned at birth, because that approach generates far more accurate predictions (with the exception of same-sex attracted trans people, who tend to be closer to their target gender). That understanding also makes for good predictions - if I see a trans person talking about computer programming, striped socks, slice of life anime, Final Fantasy XIV and making threats of physical/sexual violence against feminists, I think I can make a pretty good guess as to their assigned gender at birth.
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One man's modus tollens or however that's phrased.
The trans activists would have us believe that a trans woman's inner experiences are similar to those of the modal female, but that it's ridiculous to suggest that a white person could have inner experiences similar to those of a black person.
A trans woman can approximate the social experience of being a female adult by dressing as one, and doing so could give her a meaningful insight into how being a woman "feels" socially. The thing is, there are real differences in bodily functions such that there are experiences a trans person will never be able to have: a trans woman will never experience menstruation or pregnancy, a trans man will never experience ejaculation. As you correctly note, the meaningful differences between a black person's subjective inner experiences and a white person's are almost entirely social: people treat you differently because of how you look. As in the case of transgender people, transracial people can approximate this social experience using tanning beds, makeup and the like.
So a trans person claims to be able to bridge the experiential gap and understand what it feels like to be someone of the opposite sex, overcoming the social differences (people treat you differently because you are female/male) AND the actual biological differences, which cannot even be approximated and which are hence entirely inscrutable. Transracial people have a much easier job: they only need to contend with the social differences. The imaginative empathetic gap is far narrower for transracial people than for transgender people.
I don't think you're getting it. The idea isn't that black and white people have no inner experiences in common, the idea is that they have no difference in inner experience except for in response to social treatment. To say "I desire to change my melanin to match my inner experience of blackness" is incoherent because there is no inner experience of blackness distinct from social treatment. To say "I desire to increase my testosterone to match my inner experience of masculinity" is coherent because femininity and masculinity are aspects of inner experiences.
I think a big part of our disagreement is that I think living with a testosterone or estrogen dominated body is a much bigger part of gendered experience than having the appropriate genitals. I ejaculate every few days, a cis woman menstruates a few days a month. We're both constantly having our emotional processing, cognition, personality and preferences shaped by our hormones. A trans man might never have 100% of the experiences of a cis man but getting on testosterone can give them a lot of them pretty quickly.
A white person who tans their skin isn't going to immediately start having racialized experiences, and because race is so linked to class and culture they may never. Progressives don't like to talk about this but black people police blackness all the time and discuss people not really being black enough. I don't think a well educated middle class woman who tans her skin so she's plausibly biracial is really going to experience much racial discrimination and may or may not participate in black culture.
It also seems a little telling that trans-racial people as re usually not white people from 'the ghetto' who live in the black community and want their skin to better reflect their internal experiences. It seems to be a bunch of white women who want favoritism for non-profit positions.
I don't know if every transgender person claims to have inner experiences similar to those of the opposite sex, but "I feel happier and more fulfilled when I'm presenting as a woman because I like the way people treat me" strikes me as the kind of sentiment many trans women would say accurately describes their inner lives. If a big motivation for transitioning (or even just "passing") is the social component, why is this desire legitimate in the case of transgender people but illegitimate in the case of transracial people? Why is "I like the way people treat me when I present as a woman, even though I'm male" a perfectly legitimate desire to hold, but "I like the way people treat me when I present as black, even though I'm white" offensive and wrongheaded?
All of this is further complicated by the fact that, while taking hormones and undergoing surgery will change a trans person's inner experiences to be more similar to those of a member of the opposite sex, many trans people never take hormones or undergo surgery, and the suggestion that trans people who don't medically transition aren't really trans is widely seen as an offensive form of gatekeeping in trans activist circles ("truscum" is the preferred term). For many trans people, the extent of their transition is social: they have no interest in changing their bodies in order to change their inner qualia, changing the way people treat them is good though for them. Once again, I ask why this preference is legitimate in the case of gender, but illegitimate in the case of race.
You could say the exact same thing about male sex offenders who suddenly "discover" an internally felt female gender identity upon conviction. If the existence of a few transracial grifters cynically claiming to be a different race for personal gain invalidates transracial as an identity, precisely the same argument applies to transgender. For what it's worth, Freddie himself doesn't go this far, acknowledging that he thinks there's something "tragic and wounded" about Rachel Dolezal.
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If people have to take hormones, or mutilate themselves to achieve their “gender identity” then those are biological changes that prove that the whole thing is biological.
But do keep up. The ideology of gender identity supports self identification and demands no medical intervention, which means that -for instance - any male rapist can be get into the female prison estate by merely calling himself a woman. No GRC even needed.
This is the inevitable result of gender identity - you have to believe anybody and everybody.
You don't though. It's possible to admit the existence of a mental health condition without believing everyone who self diagnoses with that condition actually has it. That's how gender dysphoria has been treated for most of history and the shift to mere identification being adequate is recent. Imo it isn't a logical conclusion of ideology, but an obviously incoherent position invented to deny any grounds for gatekeeping by the medical establishment.
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