Crazyweimlady
You're not the only one who is experiencing a disconnect here. Many people know perfectly harmless transwomen who just want to get on with it. As you say, just to try and experience life through their version of femininity.
Indeed, transwomen have been doing this for decades, and no one turned a hair.
But what's happened now is some sort of a perfect storm that has been created by bringing in different strands. The first one is what we used to call cross dressing fetishists. They are now considered trans (which they resolutely were not before). They are a massive cohort and have hijacked transgenderism in order to implement their fetish.
They are also the ones responsible for saying transwomen are biologically women.
Genuine transsexuals, like the one you know of, and people like Miranda Yardley, in no way assert that they are actually women. That the penis is a female organ- a lady stick, a girl dick and that homosexual orientation doesn't exist. That people are attracted to other people's gender, not their sex.
(Which means me, a straight woman, would be perfectly happy to have sex with a woman who identified as a man, but has a vagina. Patently nonsense.)
The second strand of people to enter this foray are violent, misogynistic men. Since you need do nothing to be considered trans, they can just spout their hatred of women with impunity, covered by that label, whilst doing nothing to deserve it. Just straightforward normal abusers.
So you've got men with a fetish and violent men hijacking the issues of a microscopically small number of people who have gender dysphoria, for their own ends.
I wonder how many other factions are waiting quietly until this goes through Parliament. Convicted rapists? Paedophiles?
The upcoming debate in parliament about whether to allow self identification seems to have pushed this all forward. Culturally, it's pretty much accepted that if you say you're trans, you are. Because it's also discriminantort to ask for proof, i.e. the certificate.
How many people are on here saying there are trans-children at their children's school. Legally, they cannot be trans. You have to live 'as the opposite sex' for two years and get a gender reassignment certificate (for which surgery is not necessary). You can't do that until you're 18. But it's already happening, everywhere.
Before the bill has even been discussed.