Are transgender people the gender they say they are?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Unless you are unfortunate enough to actually have gender dysphoria, then this is an irrelevant question. How we treat the people that have it is significantly more important than philosophical concerns that are ultimately both irresolvable and pointless. And in general it is best to treat people as they would wish to be treated.

This. The insistence on litigating this on an ontological and grammatical rather than social and interpersonal level is both a strategic mistake on the part of the trans community and its allies and an act of prejudiced bad faith on the part of biological essentialists.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

But I didn't say they shouldn't be prescribed at all. I've reiterated several times in this thread that I don't support a blanket ban on them.

Out of genuine curiosity (you might have already answered, but keeping up the discussion with you is taking enough time as it is and I really don't want to have to read even more of this thread if I don't have to), do you have a problem with puberty blockers being prescribed (by medical professionals going through the properly appointed medical channels) to children when they are actually going through puberty, as a stopgap measure until they're old enough to decide if they want hormones? Because that's obviously the key issue here. Puberty blockers aren't going to do much good at 18.

I hope Dule doesn't mind if I answer for him here--he's made it clear that he doesn't oppose that, no. What Klobmentum and others have been criticizing him for is that he does oppose the prescription of cross-sex hormones to minors, a course of treatment that has significantly more dramatic and irreversible side-effects (infertility, for instance). This is a question on which I'm agnostic myself.

Personally, Antonio, I don't think the intermediate phenomenon of "gender" that you lay out is actually necessary to support your position, which is more or less my position as well. If we all agree that both "sex" and "gender roles" manifestly exist and that they are clearly separate things--which, in this conversation at least, we all do, because none of us are strict-observance Judith Butler acolytes and/or followers of the Bobover Rebbe--then the idea that a person might wish to inhabit a series of gender roles other than that associated with the sex that they were determined to have at or before birth should be able to stand as it is. I think even Dule would be somewhat more receptive to that line without this interpolated theoretical construct; indeed, pre-1990 or so, "gender roles" was what both trans activists and feminist theorists meant when they said "gender" as opposed to "sex".

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Anyway, the statement "trans (wo)men are (wo)men" is pretty silly for how utterly meaningless it is.  It just begs the question of what a (wo)man actually is, a question that trans activists answer with absurdly circular claims like "a woman is anyone who says they're a woman" lol

That slogan has always struck me as the trans equivalent of "love is love" in that it's a slogan intended more for the consumption and promulgation of well-meaning cis/straight allies rather than for the community itself. I wouldn't use it as a yardstick to measure gender in the same way I wouldn't the latter as a yardstick on sexuality.

This is true, but the resort to tautological definitions when challenged creates the misleading and unhelpful impression that the people attempting to educate others on these issues think their interlocutors are stupid.