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Notes -
I love the part of this essay where he goes through the various definitions of gender identity. That is fascinating, and to me illustrates that they are indeed kind of incoherent (or minimally useful outside their specific context, like political/social activism, clinical care, etc). I'd be curious what those definitions are now (it's been a few years)-- perhaps they have evolved as the cultural battle lines shift.
Instead of using these shaky definitions as a basis for a half-assed mathematical (philosophical?) proof he should have gone on to look at formal definitions of male, female, man, and woman with the same rigor. I'd imagine that they are also riddled with inconsistency or context-specific bias. Humans are complicated and muddy (especially at the margins), and any comprehensive "truth" needs to reflect that reality.
Personally I think that some are threatened by the idea of trans people because their existence suggests that our closely-held ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman might be too simple. In the future, when the gender identity people have won (because reality is in fact complicated), we'll probably have more creative (or straightforward?) ways to signal "I can provide semen" or "I can bear a child" or "I can provide you your desired sexual experience."
In that future it wouldn't surprise me if we came to accept that people's "switches," as Byrne puts it, are often innate but also at times flexible and subject to change on a biological basis, whim, trauma, or desire. It's just that the current political/social climate can't accommodate that reality, and current medical technology can't support wearing a different gender to work every day of the week.
If we're predicting the future then no, I don't think we're going to create complicated markers and instill everyone with an intricate and complex understanding of anything like gender. We'll do what we always do with complicated topics, allow them to collapse back down to the sex binary(because sex cleaves reality at the joints and gender, as you've said, is unsuitably complicated to be condensed into the primary division) and acknowledge that there is great individual variation on how those sexes can present, including mimicking the opposite sex. I predict trans-X eventually giving way to femme-boy for natal men mimicking natal women and Butch for natal women mimicking natal men and it be normalized for these practices to be more extreme.
No, we'll continue the trend of matching being done more and more online and the filters will handle this for us. People with extreme minority appeal and extreme minority appetites will find each other online.
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Humans are complicated and muddy, like biology in general. The sex binary, however, is incredibly clear in biological terms. There are massive differences in genetic material between men and women. There are gross morphological differences. And they all come as a set in nearly every case. Only nearly, because it's still biology. But human individuals being of one sex or another is as clear as humans being born with 5 fingers, and a lot more pervasive. Trying to disguise that with "reality is complicated" is about as effective as trying to hide a 1,000,000,000 candela spotlight (or, rather, two) with a smoke machine.
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