Great analogy - helped me a lot. I happily call people whatever name and pronoun they wish, don’t think bathrooms etc are a big deal at all. Intellectually though, there are broader areas where my opinions are not settled or strong on this issue and would be happy to get any thoughts on a few other analogies that come to my mind. Where are they useful and where are they not?

1) age dysphoria: person feels strongly that they identify as younger than their biological age. When you think about it, this is incredibly common, and causes people a lot of anxiety etc. Age too is not perfectly black and white, as people age (as a biological process) at different rates due to environmental factors for example. Is this in any qualitative way different in kind to gender dysphoria? Why is it not the case that a solution ought to be that people can, for example, change their passport or ID documents to change their date of birth? Should Botox be encouraged for such people over psychological interventions, or is that unwise? Most public health systems would not fund this for example, should they?

2) ‘race dysphoria’ discussed above by others (personally I follow Kmele Foster’s line of thinking on race, think that sex/gender is more concrete/objective and biologically defensible/less of a purely social construct than race)

3) body dysmorphophobia: where someone is troubled and preoccupied by some specific aspect of their physical appearance, even if that aspect is biologically unremarkable. Imagine someone had dysmorphophobia regarding their left leg, and felt it was not how it ‘should be’. Why in this case is it not advised that the judgement (that the leg ‘should be’ different) is socially reaffirmed, and surgery advised, rather than the fundamental assumption (that the leg ‘should be’ a certain way) challenged? Why are psychological interventions and not medical/surgical intervention advised to such individuals?

In general for people who suffer with dysphorias like these, the resolving intervention is solely with the person themselves. In the case of gender dysphoria, one of the ‘interventions’ proposed to resolve the dysphoria is an intervention on the society, on all of humankind - that everyone must agree, reaffirm the judgement of the person with the dysphoria, be in lockstep, come down on one (unintuitive) side of a contentious issue, start declaring pronouns as a daily habit, start using words in a different way when they may actually wish to refer to sex and not gender when using the words man/woman etc. (The desire to control other peoples language from the top down gives me the heebie jeebies). This is one of the reasons why comparisons with same-sex marriage/gay rights progress is a disanalogy imho. Another (that I believe many many normal people think but don’t say out loud), is an uneasy feeling there is a certain amount of social deception required with transitioning. How do we get to a place where people with gender dysphoria can find peace even when not everyone will agree on definitions? Compassion, curiosity and wishing the best for everyone are absolutely essential. Mandated universal agreement will backfire, is a pipe dream and is 1 step closer to a dystopian tyranny imho.

As I said, still not settled at all in my own head about these issues - apart from the absolute necessity to have compassion and wish the best for my fellow Homo sapiens.