These are all specific constructed definitions of "sex" that do a poor job of modeling the reality of variation in humanity.
There is no fundamental law of the universe which says that sex must be defined through gametes or chromosomes.
In any case, all this definition stuff is secondary to how our actual lives are affected by this nonsense. As a transfeminine person I've been using women's bathrooms for many years without incident, but most GCs would want to make that illegal. Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts. All my friends and coworkers use my pronouns, but many GCs would refuse to. The list goes on.
GCs say they want me to live a life free of discrimination but also want to put me in situations where I'm going to face discrimination, like making it harder for me to update my documents. It's all lies fueled by distrust and hatred.
I'm just a normal person who wants to live my life in a self-respecting manner. I don't ever want to interact with a GC but I'm forced to because their policy recommendations keep getting in my way. I really want to do better things with my life than deal with a bunch of boundary cops.
> I've been using women's bathrooms for many years without incident, but most GCs would want to make that illegal
Doesn't CA have a mandate for single-occupancy, non-gendered bathrooms, which are anyway more inclusive of genderfluid folks and those who do not identify with the gender binary?
> Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts.
Well, that's quite bad. Those GC folks should be made aware that male breast cancer is a thing too.
No, I don't present as a stereotypicallly feminine woman. I don't have long hair, I don't wear dresses, I don't have many interests typically associated with women, I didn't play with dolls (or trucks) as a kid—instead I played with hex editors and DRM protections on software. But my body clearly needs to be estrogen-dominant to work well, and I very strongly prefer they or she pronouns.
"Trans people want to reinforce gender stereotypes" is yet another GC lie based on selection pressure from the medical gatekeeping we've endured for decades. Even today, in parts of Europe and in much of the world you'll be expected to wear a dress and makeup to your doctor's appointments, otherwise you won't get access to the hormones your body needs. (The SF Bay Area where I live doesn't have that as much.)
I want to repeat: Cis people are the ones who reinforce gender stereotypes, not us.
There are many trans women for whom femininity is not an important aspect of their individuality as well. There are trans butch dykes. Of course there are. Once you start looking at us as human you'll see that we have as much variation within our group as anyone else.
> No, I don't present as a stereotypicallly feminine woman. ...But my body clearly needs to be estrogen-dominant to work well
The stated purpose of feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy is specifically to alter secondary sexual characteristics in a feminizing or masculinizing direction, respectively - so yours seems to be a comparatively uncommon use of such HT. Given that "medical gatekeeping" is merely a fact of life that applies to all sorts of substances and that there are also many arguments for gatekeeping access to steroids specifically, the proactive step forward for people like you would be to get your specific medical need described in the medical research literature so that, in the longer run, policies around access to steroids can be changed to more naturally encompass cases like yours. Blaming GC positions for such issues is just not very sensible.
I'm aware of what hormones do, I did plenty of research before getting on them. I take hormones so that my body is feminized, which I like. But I don't present as a stereotypically feminine woman in terms of long hair, dress or makeup. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand.
I'm usually perceived as a gender-nonconforming woman, which is how I'd like to be perceived as. The only reason people like me are uncommon is selection pressure due to medical gatekeeping. There are a lot of trans people who have no interest in conforming to gendered expectations, but are coerced to by the threat of losing access to medically necessary healthcare.
Medical gatekeeping is not "a fact of life" that can't be changed. There's less of it where I live and it works out just fine. Informed consent is the modern protocol and the rest of the world should adopt it, but GCs in places like the UK oppose that and want to reinforce silly stereotypes like "if you don't wear a dress you're not a real trans woman".
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edit to respond: sigh, no, transness does not hinge on gender expression. It hinges on gender identity and subconscious sex, neither of which are the same thing as gender expression. Gender identity is only somewhat related to social conceptions of gender expression.
What a lot of GCs do is deny the existence of gender identity. But that's just empirically false based on the evidence from millions of trans people worldwide, which includes literally me as a human being, writing this comment right now.
It is important to note that this is a contingent fact about Homo sapiens—it is possible that a different species with our level of intelligence doesn't have anything called a gender identity. But humans do.
Please read Whipping Girl. It goes into all this in quite some detail.
> There are a lot of trans people who have no interest in conforming to gendered expectations, but are coerced to by the threat of losing access to medically necessary healthcare. ... GCs in places like the UK ... want to reinforce silly stereotypes like "if you don't wear a dress you're not a real trans woman".
Well, historically, the broad shift from a focus on "transsexual" status and "sex change/reassignment" (focusing on primary and secondary sex characteristics) to one on "transgender" and "gender reassignment" (focusing on some canonical gender expression) was driven by consensus within the trans community.
If anything, the more traditional or "gender critical" POV is that the earlier 'transsexual' focus was in fact appropriate, in which a transfemale person can be transfemale no matter what they express as, whilst "cis", "trans" or "fluid" gender expression is a bit of a red herring.
There is no fundamental law of the universe which says that sex must be defined through gametes or chromosomes.
In any case, all this definition stuff is secondary to how our actual lives are affected by this nonsense. As a transfeminine person I've been using women's bathrooms for many years without incident, but most GCs would want to make that illegal. Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts. All my friends and coworkers use my pronouns, but many GCs would refuse to. The list goes on.
GCs say they want me to live a life free of discrimination but also want to put me in situations where I'm going to face discrimination, like making it harder for me to update my documents. It's all lies fueled by distrust and hatred.
I'm just a normal person who wants to live my life in a self-respecting manner. I don't ever want to interact with a GC but I'm forced to because their policy recommendations keep getting in my way. I really want to do better things with my life than deal with a bunch of boundary cops.