I will echo Ziggurat's observation. If that was your intent, your words failed to convey that intent.
Now I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole where we dissect a series of posts so we can figure out whether or not someone actually said something. What has happened here is the very common phenomenon where people spend lots of time arguing about what people said or didn't say. Instead, I'll just express my opinion on the topic of self-declaration. (Note: I used that term instead of "self-id" so that there is no confusion about the specifics of the UK law. I am not talking about a UK law. I'm talking about a general concept.)
If a person who is a biological female declares herself to be a man, or a biological male declares himself to be a woman, that self-declaration should be utterly irrelevant for any legal purpose.
Any legal recognition of transgender status that would convey any sort of privilege, right, or treatment associated with the opposite sex has to be part of a process involving medical diagnosis and/or procedures, in which medical professionals exercise their professional judgement. The specifics are too complicated to deal with at this moment, but I'm willing to share my opinions if asked.
Fair enough, I'm a bit tired today so I will happily accept that maybe I could have expressed the point better.
In my view there are two coherent positions on this.
1. The involvement of doctors in the gender change process is useful and important, and therefore must be maintained.
2. The involvement of doctors in the gender change process is not useful or important and therefore has no value and can be scrapped.
My first point is that it is incoherent to argue that the involvement of doctors is worthless while also insisting it is important to maintain that involvement. Can we agree on that point of logic?
If you want my view on the issue I think there are two separate things.
Doctors are medical professionals. If you want a medical diagnosis and access to treatment options then you need to involve doctors. If for nothing else then at least to ensure that your own decisions on treatment are informed ones.
The process of legally changing your gender is not a medical procedure. It's a legal one. That being the case I believe there is a strong argument to separate the two things and demedicalise the gender change process.
That's not to say there can't be any restrictions put on it - for example you might have a different set of rules for people with a history of sexual or violent crimes.
And then there are going to be more rules on top of that for things like top level sport.
You know ... from my point of view I'm not even that bothered if people want doctors involved and oppose Self-ID if they are then prepared to accept the outcome of the process. But it's clear that some people (some on this thread) are not playing fair on that. They want to make it as difficult as possible to legally change gender and then still insisting that even if you do then there is still no requirement to treat anyone as their new gender in any place that it would matter. (or even in some cases where it shouldn't matter).
For some it's simply all about opposing anything that would give transpeople more rights. So let's not pretend that isn't what they are doing and certainly let's not pretend that this is a mainstream view or even left of centre on the issue.
