...Does "My pet Spot is a cat; therefore all animals named Spot are cats." become a valid argument if the guy who points out "But my dog is named Spot too." isn't showing anyone would actually be harmed by his dog being a cat?
The problem here, and it keeps getting pointed out, is that "cat" is an invented category here. The boundaries of cat are arbitrary, even if the circumstances to allow the arbitration to shift are mountainous.
The problem is the fact that we are using "woman" and "man" and the categories aren't actually closed here, so when you say "they are a woman" what you are really doing is using figurative language.
What you are actually doing is replacing simile with a metaphor, ie "that person is LIKE the platonic woman, moreso than they are LIKE the platonic man", never mind that these platonics are created from... You guessed it, an arbitrary population selection.
It's a failure to preserve figurative language, and failing likewise to understand that you are inserting imagination where only mechanism belongs.
The above is a fantasy on your part. I didn't say "they are a woman"; I didn't say anything was like the platonic anything; I didn't insert imagination. You made all that up out of your own careless reading. If you reread my exchange with LP again, you'll see the two categories we were discussing membership in were not "man" and "woman", but "trans" and "have any interest in transition". LP brought up those categories; he made an inference about their membership; I analyzed the logic of his inference. That is all.
The problem is that given how obsessive and absolutist and essentialist people are, especially over gender and sex, people will tend to take offense if you point out something they wish to see as binary all-or-nothing is actually shades of gray; they will <expletive deleted> in your <nonsense snipped>
My point here is that generally, there is and has always been a variety of interests as regards hormonal change.
In some respects, I find the whole cultural construct around sex as regards binary viewpoints and transition between them
ill informed at best.
I don't really think that our language is actually structured well to reflect reality here, and the conflict is created by the fact that people are trying to use culture to explore the reality in a way our language is badly formed for.
My stance is simply that most people want to experience the puberty that their gonads will give them. We should allow this.
Some people wish to experience a puberty mediated by hormones produced by their near relatives within some number of generations (almost exactly "1": a father; sometimes 0 a brother, sometimes in strange ways, both parents or neither) but not by them. We should allow this.
As it is more difficult and causes effects that we recognize can be consented to only given the time to mentally mature, we should do this following some period of delay.
And, believe it or not, some people wish to have neither hormone ever touch them. We should allow this too, under the same conditions.
I don't see why that's controversial.
Plastic surgery and body mods should be 21+, and there's no excuse beyond pre-existing local ignorance of the options at appropriate ages for needing any of the surgeries imaged in this thread by people far more crass than I.
Medications make the results people want happen without ever needing a knife, and as you note, I addressed the whole topic of consent agnostic to whether someone thinks they are "trans" or not.
I don't think hormones should necessarily be about that.
I think they should be about enabling people to achieve the body and mental state they seek. I see no problem with people using steroids to make their body very large and muscly at the expense of needing to do more work to on being kind and empathetic with others in the presence of a drug known to have effects against that outcome.
I don't think that has anything to do with judging people as "man" or "woman".
At some point, a lot of people who don't want testosterone decide that it's easier to take one medication or less rather than one or two, and yeet the twins or triplets, or the lonely fruit as the case may be.
Again, no judgement on whether people are changing in any way other than hormones and their direct effects needed to be made to say that.
Finally, I think there are valid concerns as can be stated about separating people for the reasons of physical security without invoking any prejudiced mechanisms, and these can all be summarized around the clear good faith of whoever it is in taking actual steps to change their hormonal balance in some formulaic way.
The clearest aspect of this is deciding whether they want to openly communicate, through choice of bathroom use, whether they are castrating themselves.
Personally, I don't like to be public about that, but some people would rather be private about the existence of a penis despite their lack of balls, or temporary situation on the way there.
I'm not really sure I support switching rooms before hormonal intervention starts; I'm more conservative than .ost in that I think adults thinking of changing hormones should have to shift one step at a time: from testosterone to nothing, from nothing to estrogen.
Call me crazy but I think the correct path is blockers, then hormones, then living some way if you feel like it, and then doing with your nuts whatever is most convenient. At least for people who want estrogen or androgyny and have a hard time getting it otherwise.
At that point, this philosophy enables the power to make the statement that you aren't making sperms or on masculinizing steroids of some kind, without being out and public about having a penis, nor having any ethical obligation to mention it short of "definitely some time after 'wanna go get a coffee?' and before 'lets get a room'".
We can at least have the oft-disappointed expectation that people will be mature adults about it if you explain to them that this is how to accomplish it.
As noted, this too can be done without letting people play stupid games around terminologies that were always bad anyway, no matter how good an idea they seemed at the time, or how well they have served.
None of that requires any political discussion on whether "women" can ever become "men", especially when nobody anywhere ever has been "woman" or "man" by their definition except by arbitrary declaration for building of arbitrary groups from objective individuals for the sake of hiding the fact that they are still. Fucking. Arbitrary.