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Part of the problem is that from a purely legal perspective, there really isn't that much defining the rights and duties of a woman or man in contrast to one another. It's mostly trading one set of legal "privileges" for another. I think that an ultra-minimalist description of what legally changing your sex does could be something like:
Everything else could be handled by social convention, the same way we build up social expectations and etiquette around the legal contracts of marriage or the legal status of adoptive parenthood that go beyond the laws themselves.
I think this ultra-minimalist legal regime removes the need for new definitions of manhood or womanhood. A woman becomes "1. An adult human female. 2. Anyone who legally and socially adopts the role of the same." Mutatis mutandis for man.
Sure, but by the same token people might disapprove of a rando at the supermarket harassing adoptive parents by screaming that they're not real parents at them. Even so, I don't think the government needs to get involved in matters of social etiquette.
The social regime will be what it will be, and might differ from place to place. I don't think legally compelled speech is necessary to make everything function in my proposed minimalist legal regime.
Yes, that's my argument (decades of feminist activism fighting for equality between the sexes). If men and women have the same rights and duties, there can be no purely legal definition of woman, so the analogy to adoptive parents does not work. Your minimalist framework might work for total gender abolition, but that's not what even trans activists want.
The social convention of a large part of society is that gender identity is nonsense, and transition is impossible. They reject your approach, and you definitions, and by imposing it on them you are doing the "point deer make horse" thing.
I'm not sure who you think is fighting for the right to scream at strangers in supermarkets.
I'm okay with people saying the "wrong" thing, or believing "wrongthink" - whatever that may entail from my own point of view, or from anyone's point of view, really. I think there are many domains where it is undesirable for the government to enforce uniform speech or metaphysical ideologies, and this is one of them. If that means that in the world I propose, trans people will be treated with respect and acceptance in some parts of some big cities, but be in an iffy situation elsewhere, then so be it.
Just as a racist hotel owner is free to call a black man the N-word as he hands the purchased hotel keys over, a gas station attendant will be free to use whatever slurs they want while they let a trans woman use the women's restroom. Or to simply "misgender" her. If we already have the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, then I see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people.
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system. Now, I'm definitely open to arguments that bathrooms would not be a part of this if we were building a society based on rational principles from the ground up, but when the precedence is already there as it is in our society I see no reason not to expand it.
Surely you can't believe that the ecosystem of videos of "obviously trans woman does embarrassing and socially unacceptable things in public" is the totality of what exists online? I'm sure there are plenty of "red neck yells at butch cis woman for trying to use women's restroom" type videos as well. Neither side has a monopoly on embarrassing loud mouths.
And regardless of any of that, I think it's a form of "Chinese robber" fallacy. Most people (cis or trans, trans activist or anti-trans) are probably keeping their head down, and trying to use their best judgement with how to deal with any social situation they find themselves in. The government probably isn't the right tool to deal with breaches of social etiquette.
Since Arjin @'d me, I read this. Going in a different direction than the main conversation, and in the spirit of just getting a sense for how people think about things, what do you think about Justice Alito's question in the recent social media cases:
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Well, first of all what you're describing would be a marked improvement over the status quo, because as far as I can tell misgendering is a big no-no that can result in police showing up at your door, or your kids being taken away from you. Just by the virtue of things getting this far, I don't think you can be upset at the rubber band for snapping back.
The other issue is that if you're fine with the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, and you see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people, what precisely is wrong with a law saying "men have to go to men's toilets"? The law applies to all equally, yay non-discrimination!
I will once again recommend @ControlsFreak's post on the matter. This issue cuts to the core of deep philosophical issues, which can't be swept under the rug.
Even if for every GameStop M'am there's a redneck harassing people in a supermarket, I still don't see who you think is fighting for the right to harass in supermarkets. This isn't 2014 anymore, the issues raised do not boil down to cringe compilation videos. There are actual laws, and executive decisions by governments and private institutions that people are upset about, which stem directly from the "point deer make horse" maneuver that was pointed out to you.
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