Well it doesn’t look like OP is coming back but here goes anyway.
I identify as a woman and ask that others respect me in that identity.
Male people “identifying as” women in a patriarchal, male supremacist society where women are still fighting for our human rights, and indeed seeing them rolled back more and more, is necessarily a misogynistic act that harms all women and girls.
Oppressors “identifying into” the oppressed class necessarily removes the ability of the oppressed to name and resist their oppression. We have seen it over and over again that falsely including any biologically male people in the category of “women” has nothing but negative consequences for women. The only people it benefits are the male ones, the oppressor group. What’s in it for women, the oppressed group? Nothing.
I’ll be fucked if I’m going to “respect” that. No. You are the one who should be respecting the right of female people to have a name that is ours and ours alone, not yours to appropriate. The right to be recognised as a discrete group, separate from male people, for legal and social purposes where sex matters. Full stop.
I am very aware of how I was born. I am very aware that I am different. I hate everything about how I was born. To be reminded of that constantly, sometimes even aggressively is mentally and emotionally exhausting.
Yes. You are different. You are male. Not female. Different. Not better, not worse, just different. It’s not our fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just life. You know you’re male and it’s the cognitive dissonance between that knowledge and the fantasy you wish were reality that is mentally and emotionally exhausting you: your inability to accept reality as it is - and that’s what you need to focus on.
Hating everything about how you were born is a serious psychological condition/MH issue for which you need and deserve support, but it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to demand that everyone else collude with you in a lie. It’s your responsibility to get the therapy/whatever form of treatment you need, to put the work in, to find a way to live with and ultimately heal whatever trauma caused this very sad self loathing.
Doing that kind of work is hard and painful, I know, but it’s your responsibility to do it if you want to be at peace with yourself, with who you are.
All I hear you saying is that you want to dodge that responsibility and make it the job of women to sacrifice ourselves, our needs, our rights, our safety, our integrity and our self respect in order to make you feel better about yourself, and save you the effort. Save you an onerous task no matter what the cost to us.
The job of women to be your service humans, in fact.
And I say again, no. Fuck that.
I am actually fucking furious that you have the nerve to come here and ask women to do your dirty work for you and try to make out we’re being mean to you if we won’t. No. You’re being mean. You’re being mean to all women and girls and to the women of this board in particular.
You’re trying to bully us from a position of male privilege, privilege that goes so deep you probably aren’t even aware you have it - because you’ve never known what it’s like not to have it. You didn’t suffer the psychological mutilation that goes hand in hand with being socialised female in a sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal world.
Yes, you have your trauma, and I have compassion for all individuals who’ve suffered trauma. But guess what? We have trauma too. We have more fucking trauma, collectively as a sex, than you can shake a stick at, than you could possibly imagine. And we have trauma individually, as individual female people who have grown up in a world where we were told from birth we were the lesser sex and were treated accordingly, and who have suffered the consequences of that, in myriad different forms.
We have trauma that you frankly don’t seem to give a damn about, while demanding that we put all our feelings aside in order to make it all alright for you.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
I will not use your pronouns. I will not call you a woman. I will not pretend that you are not male, not different from me, that reality doesn’t exist, that I am the bully and you are the vulnerable victim. You need to stop trying to bully and control women. If we don’t want to collude in your fantasy, it’s your job to deal with how that makes you feel, not to try and manipulate us into saying the words you want us to say, repeating the lies you want to hear, behaving the way you want us to behave.
We are not your puppets. We are autonomous human beings.
Do try to respect that.