So, this is an interesting set of questions, and I think it's a little disingenuous to say that you're asking gently when you presume that I'm not interested in having a civil conversation and continuing to respond! I like to discuss things, and the reason why I responded to vivarism in the first place was because I thought it was a conversation worth having. ;) Promise I'm not scary! I think you might be reading some conversations you've had with other people into my attitude.

Honestly, the thing is: gender is a weird construction that's a mix of biology (the way the body interacts with hormones), social construction (how people perceive certain bodies in the world and what their roles "should" be), and internal experience (self-perception and connection to existing social roles versus not). None of these things constitute the whole on their own. To be perfectly honest, I *do* think we should refer to people who have prostates or testes as just that when speaking in a medical sense because it's *accurate* and applies to all people who do have those organs, including intersex people who might not, say, be a man by both assignment and self-ID, but might still have some of those organs. Intersex conditions account for over a hundred million people at a minimum in the world, and that's not a small number of people! And anyway, it's true that I'm a person with a uterus. Calling me that doesn't make me not a woman, you know?

The reason I tend to speak of gender in terms of experience is that I think that it's honestly completely legit to conceive of your gender as a choice rather than going for the "born this way" narrative. My position comes from my take on gay rights activism; while there was a push for a long time to say "well, we can't *help* it, we were born this way" and have rights turn on that idea, if, say, someone *did* say "I'm choosing to be gay" or "I'm choosing to be bisexual" they should still deserve the same rights to love who they love. Like, I fully hope every lesbian out there can wake up every day and go like, "hell yeah, this is the life I really want to live" like I do.

I don't think I said anywhere that there's no biological dimorphism! Certainly that exists, and hormones are an incredibly important part of growth. People, like, need those to live, but also they can do odd things naturally--the original reason for puberty blockers was to slow down puberty for children who started it too early to the point where it caused distress and dysfunction. In the case of young people with gender dysphoria, it is, to a point, treating the same thing and letting them defer things until they're older.

Straight up, though, if you look outside--would you say pushing transness on people is the status quo, really? Because what I'm seeing is the opposite. It's likely that most people have never met a single trans person, but the papers of record in both the USA and the UK are frequently publishing editorials saying that trans rights have gone too far, and the United States government has just started pushing for sweeping changes to remove trans people from all official records… along with *any* mention of gender-based discrimination and violence, toward trans people or not. There are still far more countries where being trans is illegal than ones where it's tolerated; in more than half of the states in the USA, the attitude toward trans people is icy if not outright hostile. I think it's easy to get a skewed sense of perspective in certain circles on the internet, where, yeah, it might feel bad if a lot of people don't share your perspective and you feel attacked over it. But the reality is that many of the most powerful people in the world agree with you. I think it's worth interrogating what it means when your views align with theirs.

I think it *is* important for everyone to get to tell their stories, and for people to go into any medical procedures with a clear idea of what's going to happen and what the risks are. I would never want to push back against someone talking about their own experience. (And honestly, I find it sad that people treat KC Miller so cruelly? I think that's really out of line of whoever posted that screencap, for example, especially since attacking people over their appearance is just really shitty. Believe me, I'm a leftist, I *definitely* don't agree on everything with people in my own political camp, haha.) But everyone should be able to make their own *informed* decisions about what to do with their body. Sometimes that means two people will have the same experience and nevertheless choose different paths of their own free will--and I think that's something to be cherished about humanity.