When I first started trying to get my head around gender identity and what it all meant, I remember being baffled at how the meaning of words seemed to be constantly on the move.
"Sex and gender are not the same thing"
"Some people don't identify with the sex that they were assigned at birth"
Surely it's the gender that they were assigned at birth, if sex and gender aren't the same thing. And so on.
After multiple hours listening to Jammiedodger and others (so that I could get my head around the world that my then 13 year old daughter had stumbled into), and with the help of some incredible and patient MN users (my learning journey is all here online 😁), I came to realise that what I was listening to felt like a sermon. That's what springs to mind too when I read an opener like words have meaning, with everything else that then follows it.
But the difference between a religious sermon and what I heard on Jammiedodger (and, amongst other places, in the transparents' group I was in for nearly two years) is that it goes from the innocuous and uplifting to radicalism incredibly quickly.
Here's my agender sermon in return:
Firstly, let's tackle that word "agender". Under normal circumstances it would be simple to understand. It would be obvious that by saying I don't have a gender, I don't believe that anyone else has one either. But no, under gender identity belief, it means I'm queer because I sit between or to the side of gender. Go me.
That's the world that a 21 year old female has grown up in, as mentioned by PPs above.
My daughter is now 16 and still hates her breasts, hates periods and so on. It turns out that the reason she wanted testosterone was not only to have a lower voice (a voice of perceived power), but for a stronger body so she can "beat the bullies". Some of her issues are also sensory and about rejecting a change to her body that she didn't ask for: she's experiencing autism-related puberty distress. Three and a half years ago, she stumbled across some words that made sense to her. Perhaps she wasn't really a girl at all, because none of those "girl" words felt right.
I'm hopeful that she's going to navigate through this difficult stage of her life with a healthy body and a mindset that embraces the reality of being a female with the attitude that there is no right way to "perform" this "role". See above for examples of the performative femininity and masculinity that either sex could do... not to be confused of course with the action "to give birth", which can only be done by a female, irrespective of whether she bites off the umbilical cord and roars or spends her pre-labour stage baking cakes.
Any 21-year-old female has grown up in a world where the meaning of words like woman and man have taken on a quantum-like quality. In this (apparently) enlightened world, they represent infinite possibilities until you grab onto one and it fits with your own feelings about yourself. This is (apparently) empowering. In this world, you can be a man who was assigned female at birth yet goes on to get pregnant and have a baby. In this world you're not constrained by "biological essentialism" because you've already recognised that you're not a woman who society tells you is expected to have babies. You don't need to push against that sexist expectation because it doesn't apply to you. You're a man because you feel like one and everyone tells you that this makes it so.
But alongside this empowering freedom comes the inconvenience of reality. Words still have meaning there too. For example, if you're a female who takes the level of testosterone needed to change your body to resemble that of a man there are some important words with fixed and known meanings: womb atrophy (expected within 5 years), incontinence (impacting 95% of users), increased risk of cardiac arrest (4 times that of other females), early menopause (ironically, what your body wants here is oestrogen and progesterone) and more.
My sermon could continue and if you've got this far, thank you for "listening". I'll end by saying that if you're a 21 year old female who gives birth, the law will record you as a mother. Every child has (or had) a mother, without whom they wouldn't be here. If you've become radicalised to believe you're not a woman, you and your child may miss the chance to explore what that feels like because, unless you tell them the truth, until your child is old enough to figure it out (which is inevitable), they may never know that their mother was there beside them all along. At this point you've shifted from being a victim of harm to a perpetrator of it.