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If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.
The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.
Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.
They never didn't have rights. These tactics have done nothing to advance them.
???
Regional court cases about people wanting to change their sex (or just change their name to one common for the other gender) didn't start to get won until the mid-70s, and most federal agencies didn't update their policies to officially allow these changes until the 2010s.
Unless your point is the trite 'gay men and straight men had the same rights in the 1980s, they were both free to marry women' thing.
These were not the tactics used in the mid 70s, this is an extremely new phenomenon.
Ok, sounds like we agree your previous 'they never didn't have rights' claim was incorrect?
They didn't have rights under the crown either. You were describing rights gained by tactics.
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That's entirely orthogonal to my point, I'm saying that the standard you're using invalidates far more than just claims of gender dysphoria. I don't deny that what you describe wouldn't be palatable to most trans activists.
One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.
I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."
Attempting to use one's right hand isn't the same as being right-handed! A person who is left handed can very well claim that they're so, without anyone asking how they're quite so confident in that fact, since they've never experienced the internal qualia of being right handed so they can claim that they somehow know that's not what they're feeling in the first place.
It's not news to me that this isn't the stance or primary concern of trans ideologues, I oppose them myself after all, it's my specific objection to your use of the fundamental inability for us to inhabit many counterfactual mental states as the primary criterion for denying the existence of innate senses of gender, regardless of whether that's a real thing. It has far too much collateral damage at the very least, as I've attempted to show.
Yes, a left handed person and right handed person cannot possible experience the other's qualia directly. But yes after trying both methods of writing they can without much consequence choose a preference. If we're bringing this back to gender than I've already conceded the ground that people can decide that they prefer to be flush with estrogen or testosterone as they see fit, I have no qualms with this so long as it brooks no costs or at least trivial costs on broader society. What I object to are the claims that this is anything but a recreation.
There is a version of liberal freedom of form that you espouse that seems something I could coexist with but it feels like two liberals in mao's China discussing whether a public option is communist just before the liberation army breaks down the door and puts a bullet in both our heads. We're barely even discussing the same subject as the trans advocates.
Trust me, if they're coming for us (they haven't come for me yet, India hasn't succumbed to wokism), I'm more than happy to close ranks. Consider this more of a dispute about epistemic standards than anything else.
After all, while I am OK with the nominal goal of trans people of changing sexes, and even endorse it from the perspective of transhumanism as just as valid as any desire to change the limitations of one's flesh, I demand they pass biologically before I will accept them as actually now the opposite sex, mere self-identification works for football clubs, not sex.
In other words, I think there is a non-negligible subset of trans people who feel genuine distress at being their natal sex, and would likely have that distress relieved by physical transition, but I have no issues with AGPs either, I simply resent being dictated that they're now women without possessing the relevant attributes of femininity.
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