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These are good examples of the 'we define social categories' argument so let's explore them.
Parent and national are multifaceted social categories, additionally with legal requisites based on observable characteristics. There is an element where people might disagree and a negotiation on the boundary decided politically, but there is a substantive requirement for belonging to the category, beyond just the desire to belong to it. You can't self-ID your desired nationality or declare yourself a parent because in both these cases the legal definition takes precedence. Both do have a social and self-ID component (I feel like a US citizen etc) but this does not guarantee membership as far as others are concerned.
The boundary of a legal category is a political negotiation but what we have in the current mileu is an attempt at top down enforcement without negotiation. While widening the definition of nationality does create potential conflicts, over resource allocation and who gets a say, it doesn't create a fundamental rights conflict. Existing nationals maintain all their rights. Widening the category of women does create a fundamental rights conflict because some rights are based on sex, and gender identity seeks to take primacy legally over sex.
There are philosophical distinctions as well, gender is actually parasitic definitionally on sex, whereas nationality is definitionally based on other characteristics.
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
I personally would accommodate trans people in their desire to live as the opposite sex if it were a thorough process - the self-ID laws, which my country already has, make accommodation much more difficult.
I would take issue with the lies implication. It's well understood what kind of categories those examples are and there's no issue with understanding, for example, that there are real and meaningful differences between different citizens.
A trans woman in my view is a kind of woman in the social category sense where we can accommodate them in the category- I am free to form my opinion as to what they can know of womanhood in comparison to a biological woman, just as an eighth generation American can contrast themselves to a recent immigrant.
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