It's language isn't it

It’s also continental philosophy taken literally.

Descartes said ‘I think therefore I am’ and a whole load of whacky nonsense followed until you have some people believe that what you ‘think’ is more ‘real’ than what is objectively true.

It’s a non-reconcilable problem.

so how to describe someone who is gender non-conforming?

As a person.

Men and women should be able to present themselves and be interested in things in whatever way they like, within their sex class. Men who like wearing lipstick and ‘feminine’ clothes are still men, and other men should be able to accept that, so that they don’t need to pretend to be women instead. I grew up in the 80s, when men wearing makeup and ‘feminine’ clothes was standard for many. We all fancied pop stars dressed in big blouses and with more and better makeup than any of us girls could achieve. None of them needed to say they were women to be accepted. They didn’t need to believe they ‘felt like women’ in order to justify their choices. Those transsexual individuals whose body image was irreconcilable with their feelings went through the whole process of transition, including surgery, and went quietly about their new lives. How is it that we have become so much less tolerant and accepting of difference now, 40 years later?

Women who wear brogues and no makeup, or who mend motorbikes and have buzz cuts are still women, and it’s so interesting that other women are wholly accepting of that, in a way that men find hard to replicate when confronted with men who demonstrate what they perceive as ‘feminine attributes’. I wonder why this is?

It seems to me that the big change that’s needed here is for all men to be educated in the fact that men who don’t share their particular views on clothes or interests are no threat to them. In the same way women do with ‘non-conforming’ women, they need to just let other men get on with living their lives however they like, while still being men. It takes nothing away from them. I believe there’s a big dollop of homophobia in all this, so we also need to go back and begin that education all over again.

In many contexts (at least in the West), it was more accepted for L G or B (or straight people) to be gender non-confirming in the past. Very butch Ls were still women, very feminine Gs were still men. ‘Gender-bending’ and ‘androgynous’ styles (as called then) were rife in the 80s and 90s. Drag was risqué performance for adult audiences. Woolf’s Orlando was fiction, and an extended in-joke and love letter between two women, not a textbook. None of this was controversial. No one thought a man in eyeliner and lippy was literally a woman. Straight men claiming they were lesbians trapped in men’s bodies were seen as making a bad joke. Most old school Ts just wanted to get on with their lives, accepted biological reality, didn’t behave in angry, violent, fascist ways, and certainly didn’t want to coerce lesbians into having sex with them.

They could always just call themselves transwomen?

I really don’t care about people having hurt feelings when their sexism is confronted. They need to learn at some point.

Men could identify as feminine without having to identify as a woman. A woman is someone with XX chromosomes, with a few rare exceptions with intersex disorders.

That’s why for a language to work and for people to have conversations, it needs a logical structure and semantic definitions.

Without decent type definition, you cannot predict what a computer program is going to do. Same with real life.