@polypostwonder I'm not sure if you're still here but thank you for starting this thread. I've now had a read through of all of it and will add a response, as promised.
Firstly, I (think I) can only see comments against my first question, so I'll stick to that topic.
TL:DR
I am potentially in the minority where I agree with you that people treat each other based on perception of their sex and I also quite like your use of "liminality" in relation to this perception, but I'm going to give a heads up that you'll likely find my thoughts on this difficult to read (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are not an autogynophile BTW as I have seen nothing specific that makes me think you are). Sadly, I don't think there is a way we're going to meet in the middle on this. I'd love to be wrong but thank you for stepping forward in what I will take as a good faith attempt to do so. It's genuinely good to see you expanding on your thoughts and not just saying "sex realists believe [X]" as on many previous threads. I am responding in good faith.
More detailed response
Everyone knows their own sex. Not everyone feels comfortable with their own sex, some of whom wish to be perceived as the opposite sex. On this we appear to fully agree.
This is where it starts to get tricky:
Pretty much every person in the whole world "exists within the expectations of sex categories". Very rarely it's unclear.
Those were my words from the other thread but there was an important part on the end of it (paraphrased): it is, however, almost always possible to tell someone's sex, most obviously from their gait.
On the treating people according to perception of sex point, this one is easy. People interact based on the sex they perceive someone to be all the time, without genital inspections or SRY gene tests. Without that perception being accurate there would be very few children born (heterosexual dating would take a lot longer and be very awkward if these two things needed qualifying first), there would be no sexism (without the same qualification) and so on.
On the liminality part, I think you're absolutely right that there is certain level of androgyny in some cases that confuses people in different ways. I'm going to use an analogy but want to make it very clear that I am not intending to dehumanise anyone. The analogy is the uncanny valley that exists with humanoid robots. See screenshot and link below.
To explain the analogy: firstly, I am referring to perception of sex, not biological sex. Secondly, I'm referring mostly to edge cases i.e. where it's not obvious to everyone what sex someone is. However, I have an example which suggests that edge cases are calibrated to the person doing the perceiving, not the person being perceived. To shift the analogy into sex perception, I'll adjust some words from the link below as follows: The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that a person appearing to be almost the opposite sex will elicit uncanny or eerie feelings in observers. I.e. something will feel 'off'.
My example
There is a male teacher at my daughters' school who wears a dress and uses a female name. I know I'm not alone in recognising this teacher's sex but several people (including me) have had difficulty in navigating conversations related to this. I will take some different perceptions in turn, starting with my own:
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Me
The first time I saw this teacher was over 2 years ago. I immediately clocked the teacher's gait and thought nothing of it - other than I had better lower the sound of my voice, so as not to cause upset. The window was open when the teacher walked past and I was talking with a senior member of staff about my daughter being gender questioning (at that time) and experiencing autism-related puberty distress. At the time I had never heard of autogynophilia so wouldn't have thought about strange things that have since come to light, such as this (middle-aged) teacher occasionally wearing anime-style stripy socks or having LGBTQ+ posters on the classroom walls. I don't see the teacher very often, as it's a huge school and most of the time when I'm doing school drop off/pick up, the teacher isn't walking past. It's probably only been about 4 occasions in 2+ years.
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My oldest (autistic) daughter
She recently asked me how you could definitively tell someone's sex. I said the most obvious way was to observe their gait. I then gave the example of Mrs X, assuming that everyone knew Mrs X identified as a transwoman. The rainbow lanyard was the obvious giveaway as to why I thought everyone knew, if nothing else (I didn't see the LGBTQ+ posters in Mrs X's classroom until nearly two years later, when I was in the classroom for a parent consultation - the room was being borrowed), so I assumed it was pretty uncontroversial as a subject. I made sure I sounded objective, and simply focused on identifying someone's sex. No mention of stripy socks or activitist posters. My daughter was upset with me and blurted out (as her sister then got into the car) "Mum says Mrs X is a man". I pointed out that I had actually said Mrs X is a male and that I deliberately avoid using the word "man" (or any pronouns whatsoever) in situations like this, because those words are the ones people argue over. She then got very angry with me that I had been avoiding pronouns for Mrs X for a very long time - from the moment I found out Mrs X's name in fact. It turns out Mrs X used to be her [subject] teacher and had previously spent lots of time supporting her during her mental health crisis. No red flags there, guv, honest. Anyway, my daughter later told me that she knew Mrs X was trans (so could clearly perceive sex) but was cross at me for not "being respectful" by using she pronouns. I tried explaining that my lack of any pronouns came from a place of respect but to no avail.
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My other daughter
She was also very cross with me for being "mean". However, she was completely convinced that Mrs X was a woman. For calibration, she was also completely convinced that Craig Revel-Horwood was a woman when we saw him on stage in the West End as the Wicked Witch of the West. She did notice that Mrs Trunchbull was a man, when we later saw Matilda but it's fair to say that her radar for sex perception is not quite there. Possibly because she hasn't yet encountered a personal reason why it really matters, so can't be bothered to think about it. I hope she never does a reason for it to matter.
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The senior staff member from point 1
I was in school for a meeting (related to my daughter's autism provision, not this) with this staff member recently. During the meeting the staff member told me that there was a note that concerned her in CPOMS (safeguarding system) that she wanted to ask me about. It said my (autistic) daughter had told her that I wouldn't use preferred pronouns, even for adults, and that she found this upsetting. My daughters already understand why I don't for children (but that relates to my second original question, so I'll leave that there). There was no other context and, given the school hadn't decided to send the police round for some supposed hate crime, I took the assumption that my daughter hadn't mentioned this teacher's name when talking about why she was cross at me. For clarity, I had suggested to both my daughters that relaying this conversation in school was not a good idea, given neither of them clearly understood my position on this and would likely misrepresent me. Thankfully, they accepted this but both were pissed off at me for my supposed disrespect. I said I could add some context and explained the gait/teacher conversation, without mentioning the teacher's name. The staff member said rather tellingly, "I know which teacher you mean, and you're wrong. Very wrong". Now obviously I could be, but I don't believe I am. Either this teacher has spotted who the influencial staff are and has curated a sob story about always being perceived to be male, or I'm wrong. I can't think of any other explanation for the staff member saying she knew exactly who I was talking about.
Why it links to the uncanny valley analogy and why it matters
In the example above, 3 out of 4 of us had perceived the teacher's sex correctly. Yet my autistic daughter and I were the only 2 who were cognisantly aware of it - and she thought it was mean and unnecessary to notice. That means 3 out of 4 of us had experienced an uncanny valley style disconnect at some point in time i.e. for all 3 of us, something didn't quite sit right in sex perception terms. Personally, I allowed myself time to validate my original perception before feeling settled on the fact that I was right in the first place. The senior staff member has clearly decided to fight those feelings of unease. All 4 of us have a certain empathy for how it would feel to be wrongly sexed. I have fully accepted that I could be wrong and have kept everything objective. It should be no more or less hurtful to have one's age mistaken than one's sex. It certainly shouldn't leave anyone wondering if the police might be sent round.
That school spends a lot of time telling all the children why it's apparently so important to be kind and use preferred pronouns. So why isn't it? Sticking purely with my original question 1, here's one example: this teacher goes on residential school trips. Personally, I think that a school coercing its staff and students to perceive a teacher to be the opposite sex and (I assume) let that teacher enter opposite sex spaces with children in them is appalling. No teacher should deceive their way into an opposite-sex space. To do so is a red flag in and of itself. To also have qualities that suggest at least the potential for nefarious motivation (i.e. from a safeguarding perspective - which is how schools manage risk) doubly so. Nobody has a voice to call out how appalling this is, including me - unless I want to face a huge backlash for wrong think.
Conclusion
I don't mind or care if you want to go "stealth". Go for it. I would hope for your children's sake (you've mentioned them on another thread) that you'll tell them about your past at some point. But that's none of my business. You wouldn't be the first parent to hide a big secret from their children. But what I do care about is anyone stealthing their way over someone else's boundaries and enforcing their beliefs on them. Everyone knows their own sex, regardless of whether others perceive it correctly or not. It's perfectly possible to subtly self-exclude without "outing" yourself. Obviously not the same thing but I once spent a whole night drinking what I said were gin and tonics - there was no gin in them but I was in the early stages of pregnancy with my first child and didn't want to tell anyone. I managed to avoid getting into rounds of drinks and nobody noticed.
It's not othering to recognise that not everyone shares your belief and to accommodate this accordingly.
Disclaimer
I've seen you called out for me-railing on lots of occasions. I actually empathise with this, as sometimes offering a personal perspective is the only way to explain a viewpoint. See above. So as not to derail with a merail, I'm not going to answer any questions from any other posters about what I have written above. But if you've read all of this and got this far, OP, and have any questions yourself about it, I will answer them as best I can within the confines of anonymity and the board guidelines.
Link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley