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Notes -
Just to make sure my position is clear before we give up, for posterity if nothing else:
It's very unlikely that any two people ever have identical experiences of any complex thing, down to infinite resolution. This is partially why I was being so aggro about the use of the term 'qualia'.
Complex categories like 'man' and 'woman' include a huge variety of similar-but-different experiences (like most complex category boundaries, such as 'bird', contain many similar-but different-things) across the billions of different people in those categories.
I think cultural information (everything from spoken descriptions to artistic depictions to reasoning backwards from observations) is sufficient to be pretty confident about your own experiences being more central to one of those two vast fuzzy blobs than the other one (especially if you have good introspection and spend a lot of time thinking about it).
In normal conversation, we do not typically apply a very high standard of scrutiny to people guessing that they are having similar experiences to other people. Demanding a much much higher level of scrutiny in this case is an isolated demand for rigor.
I agree that we're probably at an impasse, except that I would again ask you to think about reconsidering the level of scrutiny you're placing on this one. How do you 'prove' that you're a 'fan' of a particular artist, or that you're an 'extrovert' or 'mildy autistic' or 'smart' or 'emotionally mature' or any of a million other very normal things to say about someone that are mostly premised on mental features?
99% of the time we just take someone's word for it when they say their mental features match a relevant category or have a particular feature. In a few cases where we're really strict, we have a written questionnaire they fill out or have a psychiatrist take some observations or something. Gender clinics already do stuff like that in these cases, I don't know the full details but I'm pretty confident you could make a written test similar to an IQ test or DSM diagnostic criteria that most trans people would pass.
fear not, eventually this topic will come up again and a new angle can be taken until one of us slowly comes to our senses. I hope it's me, it would be much more convenient in my social circles to confidently be on the TRA side.
I think part of the disconnect is that there is no way for me to convince you I'm not trying to gatekeep out of some arbitrary adherence to categories. I'm not talking about a third person trying to determine if the perspective trans person is 'really trans'. I'm talking about the person themselves honestly evaluating their experience and trying to come to the determination that they're a girl trapped in a man's body or vice versa. That's why I'm talking about their ability to internally differentiate between the true or false belief that they have qualia in line with the opposite sex. I don't think this is the kind of thing someone can actually answer. It's not falsifiable. It's difficult to express how much more comfortable I'd be with this if there was like some kind of brain scan we could do and falsify the belief in some people. The phenomenon of noticing symptoms of whatever medical condition you've most recently read about makes me deeply suspect that many people who would have otherwise lived normal happy and fulfilling lives if they had never heard of transgenderism are able to convince themselves that they were always the opposite sex. Especially children who are prone to adopting fads like goth/emo/whatever and investing far more than an appropriate amount of the identity into it such that it feels like a self betrayal to later admit they were caught up in a trend. It's the kind of thing I could have fallen into as a disaffected kid who, like all kids, didn't exactly conform in every way to the masculine ideal.
And the "correct" answer to these questions is posted online where potential trans people are coached on how to get past these gates.
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