Oh, interesting. I've been flip-flopping around all over the place in the past couple of weeks.
I got "radicalised" to one extreme the other week, adhering to views like: the determinant of womanhood is biological, rather than social; a man who says he's a woman is either being disingenuous or deluded; it all looks like a lot of people with XY chromosomes telling people "Shut up, woman"; Mermaids are a danger to kids.
Then some of my views were challenged. Not so much by people saying they were going to beat me up, which tended rather to confirm my third point above; but by questions such as: if declaring yourself to be transgender is whimsical or frivolous, how come trans people experience such distress, and how come some are willing to go under the knife for their beliefs? Are some commentators scaremongering/ over-reacting - that is, are their fears really well-founded? And, ok, so a man can't literally become a female, but it is reasonable, is it not, for the word "woman" to be socially determined in some contexts, legally in others? (so, if I were at a social gathering in which, for some reason, men and women were expected to line up boy/girl/boy/girl , it would be rude to position a trans woman as a man; if I went into a gynaecology clinic, I'd be surprised to see a trans woman there).
I was very struck by the Swedish study that someone posted yesterday, which seemed to show some neurological differences between the brains of trans people and those of others. If it's right (I don't know much about neurology) then:
a) a trans person isn't deluded, in the sense that a person believing himself to be Napoleon is deluded
b) but that doesn't mean to say that s/he is neurologically identical to a person of the opposite sex. Rather, s/he is very unhappy with being his/her own sex and wants to live/ dress/ be treated as if s/he were of the opposite sex.
So I end up believing:
a) trans people have a right to be treated as if they were the opposite sex (I'm really avoiding the word "gender" here) and a trans woman "is" a woman in the sense that she may be treated as a woman in social settings; if she has a GRC, she may be treated as a woman in many legal contexts, too
b) but that doesn't mean that she literally has become female. She "is not" a woman in the sense that she hasn't got female chromosomes or all aspects of female physiology, even post-op.
c) It's distinctly impolite, possibly bigoted, for a person to insist on telling a trans woman, out of context, that she isn't really a woman, but perfectly reasonable for feminism to discuss its scope.
d) there's no reason why the degree of a person's gender dysphoria might not be on a spectrum, but sex is not.
e) The line between belief and delusion is slippery, and social contagion is real. If society believes something in general, an individual is more likely to believe it in particular. So, a person who believes that her next-door neighbour is a witch may be sectioned today; four hundred years ago she could get the neighbour into a lot of trouble. So if society believes that people can literally be physically male and psychologically female, an individual is more likely to believe that applies to them.
f) If this means young people having unnecessary surgery or hormones to change healthy bodies, this is a problem.