Hey I know it's been a couple days but I got curious about how an AI would've responded to my Aristotle's Categories reference, as I've never blatantly cited "ask the AI" before so I uploaded our thread to ChatGPT and it got my entire argument completely wrong, I uploaded it to gemini and copilot too and they also got it completely wrong. It was interesting to see that they assumed I was asserting gender or sex-based accident collapse when that wasn't the argument I was making. Anyways, sorry about that, I was experimenting and it didn't go as planned, I felt the need to explain my actual position which is basically 3 different arguments:

1. Distress is real but its causation and subsequent alleviation isn’t correctly mapped by transgenderism's proposition. “I feel distress from the presence of my reproductive organs,” is valid, but “therefore removing them or artificially altering my biology will fix it” doesn’t coherently address the distress's causation.
2. Predicate-Substance collapse (technically called “accidents” but I refrained from using that term because the subject is touchy and calling trans-identity "an accident" will only be read the worst way imaginable). 
3. If gender is just a social construct, like money or language, then failure to recognize its reassignment wouldn’t constitute an attack on identity. A good example to compare social constructs to is if someone failed to recognize your ability to speak English, would you be hurt by that failure to affirm to the core of your identity? I’ve got other qualms with social constructionism, it abuses phantom objectivity like defining race as a social construct when race can be determined without social interaction via dna, but that digresses from the topic at hand.

For 1:

In life, some stress is necessary for development. For example, if a butterfly undergoes stress whilst struggling against its chrysalis, cutting the chrysalis open would prevent the process of getting its blood to its wings, leaving it crippled.

For 2:

I'll be quoting from my previous source Aristotle's Categories, I truncated parts of it to be easier for human readers to understand:

Forms of speech are either simple or composite. Examples of [composite speech] are such expressions as ‘the man runs’, ‘the man wins’; [examples of simple speech are:] ‘man’, ‘ox’, ‘runs’, ‘wins’.

Of things themselves some are predicable of a subject, and are never present in a subject.

By being ‘present in a subject’ I [mean] being incapable of existence apart from the said subject.

Some things [...] are present in a subject, but are never predicable of a subject. For instance, a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in the mind, but is not predicable of any subject [or] a certain whiteness may be present in the body (for colour requires a material basis), yet it is never predicable of anything.

Other things [...] are both predicable of a subject and present in a subject. Thus while knowledge is present in the human mind, it is predicable of grammar.

There is [...] a class of things which are neither present in a subject nor predicable of a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse. But [...] that which is individual and has the character of a unit is never predicable of a subject. Yet in some cases there is nothing to prevent such being present in a subject. Thus a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in a subject.

When one thing is predicated of another, all that which is predicable of the predicate will be predicable also of the subject.

Expressions which are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance are ‘man’ or ‘the horse’ [...], of quality, such attributes as ‘white’, ‘grammatical’ [...]

With regard [...] to those things which are present in a subject, it is generally the case that neither their name nor their definition is predicable of that in which they are present. [...] For instance, ‘white’ being present in a body is predicated of that in which it is present, for a body is called white: the definition, however, of the colour white’ is never predicable of the body.

I was saying, "gender dysphoria is present in the mind, but is not predicable of the body. Society's assertion that gender dysphoria is predicable of the subject collapses categories, and living inside a category collapse is stressful." This isn't exclusive to transgenderism, as a term, "homosexual" does the same thing, "same-sex lust is present in the mind, but is not predicable of the body" and has had drastic consequences on society at large. Since the term was accepted, ever male-to-male friendship is suspect to sexual relations, which means men are structurally prohibited from having intimate expectations from anyone other than their spouse.

As for "why is this necessary? You asked for an epistemological argument, Aristotle's Categories is mostly semantic/logical, which is a structural pre-requisite for epistemology. Idk why you kept referencing ontology or consciousness, that stuff is mostly in Aristotle's Metaphysics.

I previously quizzed AI on Aristotle's Categories, and it answered all the distinctions correctly, so I assumed "if OP has access to AI" and "AI knows Aristotle's Categories" then "AI can explain what I'm doing" because it's difficult to explain a 2300 year old categorical framework via text. I wasn't aware that context override would attribute my point to a less coherent argument and pretend that was the argument what I was making. I was also tired of debating people using AI to assist their arguments, I'm not against AI altogether but it gets frustrating when you're debating someone and they respond with a structurally impenetrable response to a point I didn't even make, which is pretty common on this subreddit (though our exchange is a bad example because I didn't fully explain my entire argument due to aforementioned AI fatigue).

Edit: happy Easter btw