Yes. In Shakespeare, you have women dressing and (successfully) acting as men, taking on male names and accomplishing male roles. In short, "identifying as men". Which was your goal post. Do you need to shift it?
So now pretending to be the other sex for ulterior purposes counts as "identifying". Got it.
Viola called herself Cesario and passed as male because she needed freedom of movement and needed a job, not because she actually thought she was a man.
"Ulterior purpose"? That phrasing says more about how
you see women than how Shakespeare did. Viola is the unquestionably the heroine and main protagonist of the play, and everyone understands by the end of it why she did as she did. There was no crime, nor is there any punishment unless you count marriage to Orsino as one. Her needs were practical, yes. But she most certainly identified as a man, for several months. No, she is not a "trans man" in the modern sense, and I didn't claim that she was. Cultures change. But the basic facts of sex and gender - that both are bimodal in distribution but fundamentally fluid in nature to some degree, obliging every culture in history to deal with the exceptional cases somehow - do not change. Nor do those facts vary from culture to culture or over time, but cultural and religious attitudes about those facts certainly do. The question is, what kind of culture do we wish to be?
I choose freedom, and always will. To
that ideology, I am very really loyal, as loyal and "ideological" as I am generally accused of being about whatever other stupid culture wars you all are fighting today. I will be damned before I let the government define how I am "allowed" to identify or on what terms.