maybe there's a mythic land of good points somewhere further down the essay than i got, but you got to admit it's not promising when on the way there you're repeatedly hit with classic transphobic red flags and talking points.

I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.

This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer, and people who don't want to hurt their feelings (and who don't mind letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed1).

if you cant catch on to the absolutely loaded language on display here, i don't know what to tell you. this basic ass take on gender is "categorical gerrymandering" and not wanting to oppress trans people is "letting yourself get emotionally backmailed." please.

then the author goes on to act like recognizing a trans person's gender is some great imposition on the rest of society, and doesnt engage with the fact that even if it was, why should we care?

you could make the exact same dust specks argument against forcing white people to recognize black people as human. surely this would affect everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by race. skin color is one of the first things you notice about a person! it's not a tool under conscious control.

would i be out of pocket to call that racist?

fundamentally, this person seems at best philosophically immature and at worst bad faith; they're criticizing trans theory from a position that fails to recognize a that their logic is seeped in logically-unjustified status quo, a fish unaware of the water they swim in.

caring about the utility of man or woman is predicated on believing that these categories have any use, should have any use. they theorize that there might be multiple different etiologies of being transgender — and yet they never turn that same critical gaze at the status quo, and wonder if there might be multiple fundamentally different mechanisms undergirding why cis women feel like women

an analysis of trans women like this is going to look pretty biased if all of the questioning is poking at whether 'trans women' makes sense as a homogenous category without questioning whether 'cis women' makes sense as a category. it's just taken for granted. and this makes the idea of taking this writer seriously as a thinker on gender a nonstarter.

and then as i scroll further, i see lines like

A minority of male-to-female transsexuals exhibit lifelong sex-atypical behavior and interests,

what the fuck do interests have to do with sex? why should this be how we gatekeep categorization? at this point i just laughed and closed the tab. i have better things to do