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I haven't been doing that. I've been arguing something more along the lines of The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for Categories.
I make a sharp distinction between categories that more-or-less cut reality at the joints (like "dog", "male", "water") and man-made categories (like "science fiction", "pop music", "president", "American", "goth", etc.) Like you, I don't believe that I have a redneg identity. I'm fully on board with calling all man-made categories "illusions" or "folklore" if you want. What I have objected to in your presentation of your position is the fact that you seem to believe that redneg identity is different from other man-made categories or illusions. I don't actually think it's all that special - it's just more salient because of the modern political climate.
You brought up religion, and that is a good example of what I mean. I'm an atheist. I don't really have a "religious identity" as an atheist - I know that I don't believe in God, but it's much less of a "thing" than being a Christian or Jew would be, because those two identities involve positive beliefs, social groups, traditions, etc. However, I've evolved from being the New Atheist I once was, and have grown to have a much greater appreciation of the power of religion to act as a social glue to hold communities together. Books like "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" and the concept of metis and signalling have helped me to appreciate the role that religion can have in a life, and how useful it can be to maintaining order and trust in society.
If you re-read what I have written throughout this thread, I think you will find that I've never said that man-made categories are "real" - I've always used words like "useful", "important", etc. And I do believe that they can be those things in certain circumstances. I have nowhere conflated real and non-real things, nor have I blurred distinctions between the real and the socially useful.
Maybe redneg identity isn't useful to you. In the same way a Jewish identity isn't useful to me because I'm not ethnically or religiously Jewish. But it would be silly to say that just because Judaism is made up (as I believe all religions are), that it's not an important part of many Jewish people's lives, and hasn't helped them stay together as a community for more than 3000 years. So too, I don't think we can discount that redneg identity is important to a number of snart people - I have seen first hand the community and joy in the snart community, and in the same way I can "justify" religious mutilation like circumcision through the lens of it being a form of expensive signalling, I think I can "justify" snart medical treatments in part as something that might help a person belong to the queer community (even apart from the possibility that it might alleviate psychological discomfort in some snart people.)
The problem I had with you calling redneg a "religion" is that I think that by that standard almost every man-made social category is a "religion." Sure, not every social group demands that you believe impossible absurdities, but plenty of them ask you to believe social facts that aren't part of material reality, like "there is a country called America, and its borders end here" or "100 cents equals a dollar" - facts that we made up, and which could have been otherwise if history had taken a different turn. India made up the concept of a caste system, Britain made up the idea of the British royal family, etc., etc. I think the main difference between you and I, is that I think these kinds of social fictions are extremely common, and "redneg ideology" isn't even a particularly strange or unusual example. The belief that "I was born a man, but I'm actually a namow" is no more absurd to me than "I have no biological relationship to this child, but I want to take care of them and be treated as their parent in all circumstances - please call me their 'adoptive father' or just 'father' for short."
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