@BonfireLady
Making your analogy was fine - I was jumping in because the second part of the analogy was a bit of a strawman and I think we’re steelmanning.
the nub of gender identity relies on a belief that TWAW and TMAM.
Okay, let’s take this belief right there. If you grew up in Europe, North America or AUSNZ, you might not appreciate how the laws of our secular society have been based on a broadly Christian morality. Christians don’t often need to change laws according to their beliefs, because most laws already take our beliefs into account.
However, the belief that someone born into one sex can in reality be the other sex isn’t a Christian belief. The belief that they can has already required one law change.
What follows from believing one sex can be another? Steelmanning ahead:
You will need provision for changing legal documents, obviously. You’ll require anti-discrimination legislation, because most of the subset of ‘gender misidentified at birth’ were misidentified because of visible differences from their ‘real’ sex. Visible differences have a history of resulting in discrimination.
Someone who is ‘gender misidentified at birth’ will need access to the appropriate facilities for their ‘real’ sex - medical, sanitary and so forth. Those resistant to giving them such access will be displaying prejudice, just as those people in the US who resisted sharing facilities with different skin colours were displaying prejudice. Their visible and physical differences from their ‘real’ sex are not their fault (in fact, they’re the entire reason they were misidentified at birth).
There will need to be laws preventing verbal abuse. Continually referring to someone as the other sex is abusive, as is using the wrong sex pronouns. Again, that they have an appearance inconsistent with their ‘real’ sex is not their fault. Genital differences are also not their fault.
Similarly, trying to segregate those misidentified at birth from their correct sporting category is also discriminatory. Admittedly, many of those misidentified as ‘male’ will find themselves far more highly ranked when placed in their correct category- but there are always important physical differences between sportspersons. This is just another one of them.
Being misidentified at birth may also cause serious mental health issues, especially if a child is forced into behaviour not appropriate for their ‘real’ sex. These mental health issues may require correction with surgery, to adjust the physical body that caused their misidentification into something more compatible with their ‘real’ sex. As with other medical treatments, surgery may need to be performed while the patient is a minor and laws should reflect that.
End steelmanning.
Basically, if you are happy to accept that we can’t tell people what to believe when it comes to their gender identity, then you also have to accept that someone who genuinely believes they are a woman is going to think that - well, that pretty much everything we say on this board is rank discrimination against a minority who simply had the misfortune to be gender-misidentified at birth.
They are also going to work to destroy every advance that women have made as a sex-class in the last couple of centuries, because the very idea of ‘sex-class’ is discriminatory. It excludes those ‘gender-misidentified at birth’. To believe that a certain subset of women are biological men is to discriminate against the misidentified.
Sometimes, what people believe doesn’t really affect us. Sometimes, it will affect us massively, in ways we might not yet understand. My belief is that TWAW, TMAM is one of the ‘affects us massively’ beliefs.