Was it ever claimed to be pure self-realization?
That's essentially what "self identify as" is on a functional level. The whole point is that somebody can feel like something without "justifying" (not the exact word I'm looking for, too much of a negative connotation but it's close...) it by associating it with anything external or objective.
Again what criteria a man who identifies has that a man doesn't is just being aggressively not answered, to the point that the very question seems to bother some people.
It's not just that transpeople don't want to codify what traits of the opposite sex they feel they have, not codifying it seems more and more the point.
Have you ever met a trans-woman who didn’t manifest femininity in some way?
Again to answer this question I have to agree that "manifest femininity" is some meaningful concept.
Identifying as a woman doesn't magically give you a vagina and XX chromosome pairings. Wearing makeup and dresses doesn't make you a woman because those things are meaningless culturally manufactured and arbitrary.
Either way I can't conceptualize the person as actually "being" a woman in any way that makes sense to me.
It seems like this objection is about bearded lumberjacks in plaid flannel shirts just deciding one day they want to call themselves a woman, but does that ever happen? Have you ever met someone like that? I haven’t.
No but that's the only scenario in which this is necessary. Everything else is already covered by "Want to be the other gender" or "Don't want to be held to arbitrary traditional gender roles."
There's no context where "Need to literally define as the other gender" fits into any of that.
I have met women who were unusually tall, had adam’s apples and largish hands for women and wondered if they were trans or not, but it would never have occurred to me to consider them as anything other than what they claimed to be.
Again this requires you to assign the criteria of tall, large handed, etc to one gender or the other and I don't do that. That's not a woman who identifies as a man or a woman who has a man's soul or a woman who whatever... it's just a woman
Not every characteristic has to be an "identity."
Well, some people were born with an “outie” who feel that doesn’t match what they feel.
That's meaningless. You can "feel" that you're not the height, weight, skin tone, or whatever but you.... are. This entire debate hinges on "I feel like an X" somehow, someway literally making you an X.
They also didn’t choose to feel that way, else they would choose the much easier option of cic-normative identity.
Elephant in the room. Because being a special exception that the labels don't apply to is really, really, really important to some people.
I didn't want to bring this into the discussion because it's such a painfully loaded and misused term that generally doesn't make discussions go to a better place but... we're talking identity politics.
She’s a woman if she says she’s a woman is pretty uncomplicated for me and you, but that doesn’t mean it was easy for her.
Again "It's difficult" doesn't make it meaningful or factually correct. Especially when people reject functionally identical ways of looking at it because it doesn't make them feel special enough, which is unpleasant truth, what at least some of this.
I don’t see that it’s necessary to grok the nuances of their existence and approve of their chosen gender identity before I go along with it.
It's necessary because if I don't "grok the nuances" and make sure I word everything within their worldview I'm a hateful transphobe bigot even if, as we've already established, it changes absolutely nothing about how I treat the people in question.
You can't go "Oh you don't have to agree to go along with it" when that's exactly, literally what is being expected of me.
It really seems like you don’t need to do anything other than use their preferred pronoun, and you’ve already got that figured out. What are we arguing about? It seems like we agree on the most important parts.
Because I don't buy for one second that it's really anything as simple as a goddamn pronoun. We aren't having the biggest civil rights battle since gay rights over nothing but pronoun usage.
