BTW, here's the thing about the stupid-as-all-hell Rachel Dolezal racial analogies:
Race and gender DO NOT WORK THE SAME WAY. They are not remotely the same thing.
Race was an ENGINEERED SOCIAL ENTERPRISE, designed to enable the colonial and slavery projects by classifying different "categories" of humans based on entirely arbitrary collections of phenotypes / ethnicities. And then saying some of those categories are inferior to others.
Today, race primarily has meaning and substance for people because of SHARED CULTURAL EXPERIENCE. There's no neurological or genetic or underlying "subtance" to it, no "real" difference between a black person and a white person and an Asian person and a Latin@ person. The differences are purely cultural and experiential, a shared experience of specific oppression or specific privilege and that's where the term has meaning and weight for people's identities and political discussion. Dolezal DID NOT SHARE that cultural background, but laid claim to it. Hence offense.
Gender, on the other hand, is an EMERGENT CULTURAL SEMIOTIC SYSTEM. It is a non-fixed, mutable, constantly-shifting "language" we apply to understand, express, communicate and read human sexual difference. SOME of that difference has to do with anatomy and bodies, but it also has to do with our desires (sexual, romantic, etc), how our desires relate to and manifest through out bodies, how we relate to our bodies, who we desire, how we would like to be desired, neurology, etc. And, making things more complicated, how we relate back to Gender itself.
THAT'S why changing or adapting your identification relative to gender is not comparable to doing so with race.
Even the physical/anatomical part isn't purely "do you have a dick or a vulva". It's also size of clitoris/penis, presence or absence or severity of hypospadia, descent of testicles/ova, breast development, hormone levels, body hair, skin, XX/XY/XXY/XXYYY/XYY/XO, activation or deactivation or the SRY gene... a THOUSAND different variables.
And don't come at me pretending XY/XX is the most important. We had gender for TENS OF THOUSANDS of years before we even knew about chromosomes. People don't invalidate trans people's genders because they believe gender is chromosomes, they define gender by chromosomes SO THEY CAN INVALIDATE TRANS PEOPLE'S GENDERS.
And this "they think they're a different gender" / "they're CONFUSED" stuff is complete and total BS. Every trans person is PERFECTLY aware of what anatomy they have, how society defines gender, how their identification runs contrary to that, etc. Just because someone DEFINES gender differently than you doesn't mean they're IGNORANT, CONFUSED OR MENTALLY ILL.
And I can absolutely promise that every single trans person has given a thousand times more thought and research into the subject and nature of gender than you have in the five minutes it took to cook up the angry, condescending, bigoted opinion you wanted to post on the internet. It takes more than reading one little poorly-researched newspaper editorial and watching an episode of South Park to understand the issue. And given that you're talking about ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, who face a considerable amount of persecution already, I THINK it's kind of IMPORTANT that you do your damn research before deciding to spew your completely uninformed hatred all over every public forum you find just cos it happens to be topical right now.
And as for bathroom bills: Men pretending to be women to go into bathrooms for ulterior motives was never a problem until AFTER y'all tried banning trans people from using them, and transphobic dudes decided to start entering them to "prove a point" or "protect the women".
It's not exactly clear what you are saying since you didn't quote anyone, but I think this thread is full of a lot of good discussion. Also, while suffering from a certain issue might give you a unique perspective on it, that doesn't make your opinions more valid than someone else lacking your experience. Let's also not forget that everyone can experience things differently. It's human nature to group together with similar people, especially when threatened, but it's very unlikely that everyone in the group feels exactly the same about everything.
Yes, firsthand experience of an issue almost always makes someone's perspective more informed and valid. There's sometimes exceptions, but they're incredibly rare, and certainly missing from the last few pages of this thread.
I don't know their motives or understand their identities. But wouldn't you think something was wrong if a person was physically a male but thought they were something else?
Your question is a non-starter. You're coming at this from the (incorrect) assumption that trans people are LITERALLY unaware of the nature of their own sex. They are perfectly aware, they just approach it with a different understanding than you do.
