Sunk cost.
It's pointless, demonstrating with clarity as so many articulate women have done here, that there is no such thing as internal gender identity. That noone changes sex. That woman isn't a feeling, a goal, an aspiration, a performance. Trying to convince someone who has already stepped too far is futile. It's too late for them.
If a man already bought the lie, was vulnerable and suggestible and has already damaged his body irrevocably on a piecrust promise that this would make him a woman, a transwoman, a trans woman, a female, a transfemale, a femme?
It's too late.
Sunk cost.
He must convince himself that it was worth it. That some people agree with him, at least. The alternative is too awful. That he bought a lie, made a mistake, can't take it back, and now fewer and fewer people are pretending convincingly enough.
There are some men who've been through that process and arrived at that realisation.
But it must be much more tempting to cling to the façade.
To skate past the circular, magical nonsense of defending internal gender which 'if you don't feel it, it means it definitely matches your sex, only true believers have it revealed to them, like the holy spirit, but it's indescribable, inexplicable, without characteristics, and yet
definitely either matches your ovaries or your testicles'
I know we post for the lurkers.
But here's the thing I believe.
That piecrust promise is drawing more and more suggestible people into that snake oil world. And this is why I don't call men transwomen, or even trans, if I can help it.
Not because I'm harsh or abrasive.
But because I think it acts to lure an unending stream of vulnerable people towards an idea that hurts them.
Noone actually is trans. It's a misnomer.
We are all just our own sex, from birth to death and until we are dust.
I think every hint we give a vulnerable person that, ok, he might 'be trans', as if there literally is a state in which one's mind IS 'opposite', across from, one's sex, we are baiting a hook.
When we say, ok, I'll say you are a 'transwoman', we bait a hook.
We're saying, ok, I'll pretend ...this much... for you. I'll let you use a version of a female word which will validate your belief that you are sort of femaleish. I'll use that for you.
We're baiting a hook.
And people bite.
They cling onto that hope. Some sort of woman.
And it's enough, this baited hook that society validates to greater or lesser degrees that a person can 'transition', with words, with documents, with validation, with surgery, with hormones. The push might be dysphoria. But the pull is us. Any and all potential validation of any degree by society. Any degree.
That's why I tread as carefully as I can not to validate with carefully chosen language any aspect of a completely false belief.
Noone is trans. Noone is a transwoman.
These are misnomers we use, we who know noone changes from male to female, man to woman. We're using these words, although we know they're not right. But they're validation, a promise of pretence, that create a pull, a promised destination, where people will agree you've arrived.
If there was no pull, none at all, would so many transition? If you knew that all your efforts would change nothing, and you would be considered male, a man still by everyone, would you be as tempted? If absolutely no validation was forthcoming, no special words, no hints of prefix-womanness, or yes-you-transitioned, or your-special-trans-status? Would so many thousands be willing to put themselves through this only for society to truthfully say, but you're still exactly the same ordinary man you always were, only you've hurt yourself?
If the pull - from us - wasn't there any more, would as many people keep doing this to themselves?
I do not want to bait the hook.