As you can see via the asshole that wandered in, be careful when espousing opinions here--people will see what they want to in your words.
While I understand you intend it as supportive, it's tough to see what you wrote that way. I'm going to read it as an attempt at being supportive, but steeped in decades of old thinking. Like a lot of questioning folk, that means you're focused on other people's penises--and that trivializes the discussion tremendously.
What we have is a situation where certain people are, provably, objectively, testably, mentally-female or mentally-male. When those folks experience dysmorphia because their externals don't match, that's when they opt for changing their externals.
It's not necessarily about presented gender--for some it is, the desire to be "treated as a man" by society, to pass--but for others it is the desire to have their own external experience match their internal expectations.
There are plenty, plenty of trans folk who don't have "the surgery" (which is, by the way, not a single surgery. There's no switch to flip someone to "the other" gender). For a wide variety of reasons, all the way back to the basic "I don't want to".
Put more bluntly: it's not about you (you, plural). It's about them.
Why should it matter, for any purpose other than excretion and sex?
Why should it matter for those?
Excretion: if someone wants to use a urinal and they can do it without making a mess, go for it. They'll be ahead of 20% of the cis men I encounter.
Sex: if only people would write "I like penises" on their dating profiles, we wouldn't need to proxy our squishy bits using (perceived) gender.
BTW--it also matters for certain health syndromes (notably, some people won't get ovarian cancer; some people won't have prostate problems; etc.), though way less than insurers think (routinely denying gynecological services to men, even when cis men need them). Again, we should treat those based on whether someone has a prostate, not whether a doctor thought a quick glance at their baby anatomy meant they should be labeled 'male'.
(A software analogy: each of these things should be an interface, but we're societally stuck on subclassing from a single superclass.)
You're on the edge of rejecting the prison of binary gender. Yay. I highly recommend doing that--but not making it required of others. Male and female are constructs, complicated ones based on something that is approximately true for the majority of humans, but they're not the only options on the table. However, some people really _do_ identify as a man, or as a woman, and not something else, so smashing the binary does a disservice to them--denying them an identity they do ascribe to, that does fit their brain and mind and sometimes body.
hardware vs. software
We think of the mind as making decisions, but the brain is the mind is the software is the hardware. The distinction between the two isn't clean. (It isn't clean for computers, either--oh, we pretend it is, but environment affects code execution, abstractions leak, and only on a chalkboard does an algorithm run the way it's "supposed" to.)
It's a lot less clean for humans. The brain and mind are deeply affected by things as simple as blood sugar levels, as complex as testosterone and progesterone and estrogen. The body is affected strongly by the mind's state.
Casting surgery as a rectification of software and hardware pulls for a single, summary, simple solution--and that just doesn't exist. Sex and gender are a complex combination of physical nature, societal nature, culture, behavior, architecture, linguistics, psychology...it crosses a huge swath of the human experience. Embrace that richness, that ambiguity.
Who knows--maybe in a few more years more people will accept that some women are trans women, and that means a different combination of experiences and situations than cis women, but they still should be treated as women.
Or maybe we'll be stuck with assholes. But I hope not..
no subject
While I understand you intend it as supportive, it's tough to see what you wrote that way. I'm going to read it as an attempt at being supportive, but steeped in decades of old thinking. Like a lot of questioning folk, that means you're focused on other people's penises--and that trivializes the discussion tremendously.
What we have is a situation where certain people are, provably, objectively, testably, mentally-female or mentally-male. When those folks experience dysmorphia because their externals don't match, that's when they opt for changing their externals.
It's not necessarily about presented gender--for some it is, the desire to be "treated as a man" by society, to pass--but for others it is the desire to have their own external experience match their internal expectations.
There are plenty, plenty of trans folk who don't have "the surgery" (which is, by the way, not a single surgery. There's no switch to flip someone to "the other" gender). For a wide variety of reasons, all the way back to the basic "I don't want to".
Put more bluntly: it's not about you (you, plural). It's about them.
Why should it matter, for any purpose other than excretion and sex?
Why should it matter for those?
Excretion: if someone wants to use a urinal and they can do it without making a mess, go for it. They'll be ahead of 20% of the cis men I encounter.
Sex: if only people would write "I like penises" on their dating profiles, we wouldn't need to proxy our squishy bits using (perceived) gender.
BTW--it also matters for certain health syndromes (notably, some people won't get ovarian cancer; some people won't have prostate problems; etc.), though way less than insurers think (routinely denying gynecological services to men, even when cis men need them). Again, we should treat those based on whether someone has a prostate, not whether a doctor thought a quick glance at their baby anatomy meant they should be labeled 'male'.
(A software analogy: each of these things should be an interface, but we're societally stuck on subclassing from a single superclass.)
You're on the edge of rejecting the prison of binary gender. Yay. I highly recommend doing that--but not making it required of others. Male and female are constructs, complicated ones based on something that is approximately true for the majority of humans, but they're not the only options on the table. However, some people really _do_ identify as a man, or as a woman, and not something else, so smashing the binary does a disservice to them--denying them an identity they do ascribe to, that does fit their brain and mind and sometimes body.
hardware vs. software
We think of the mind as making decisions, but the brain is the mind is the software is the hardware. The distinction between the two isn't clean. (It isn't clean for computers, either--oh, we pretend it is, but environment affects code execution, abstractions leak, and only on a chalkboard does an algorithm run the way it's "supposed" to.)
It's a lot less clean for humans. The brain and mind are deeply affected by things as simple as blood sugar levels, as complex as testosterone and progesterone and estrogen. The body is affected strongly by the mind's state.
Casting surgery as a rectification of software and hardware pulls for a single, summary, simple solution--and that just doesn't exist. Sex and gender are a complex combination of physical nature, societal nature, culture, behavior, architecture, linguistics, psychology...it crosses a huge swath of the human experience. Embrace that richness, that ambiguity.
Who knows--maybe in a few more years more people will accept that some women are trans women, and that means a different combination of experiences and situations than cis women, but they still should be treated as women.
Or maybe we'll be stuck with assholes. But I hope not..