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Notes -
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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