Hey! I appreciate your thoughtful response and am so glad to learn from other queer voices. :-)
I hope I can be as thoughtful in my own replies as well as I make some tweaks and/or address things. I likewise don't intend to come from anywhere negative at all:
1 - I don't have much of an issue with this as a general idea. This is a minor wording thing but with the reference to XX (and XY) chromosomes, I feel it would be more accurate to just say, eg, (traits associated with) "being female"/"female people", etc, since I'd say the traits are associated with being female in general, not just xx chromosomes. Or, at least, "associated with people who have xx chromosomes", rather than the chromosomes themselves?
Per the chromosomes thing, I do personally see those as the best way to word it (and said 'typically' hopefully to cover the fact that intersexuality and epigenetics and a much bigger picture exists), but I agree with more of a 'having' than 'the chromosomes themselves', so I will make a tiny change there.
"estrogen dominance is a type of hormonal imbalance", so I feel maybe the wording of this could be more clear.
Very good point! I will clarify that.
I feel this is essentially saying that one would want to be perceived/seen as (and assumed to be?) a woman by others and not as a man, and that this isn't referring to stereotypes.
Exactly. Maybe oversimplified, but if I put on one of my old dresses, I want people to immediately and instinctively see 'man in a dress' - not 'woman'.
referring to someone by a word typically used for people of one gender is, in my view, already making assumptions.
The way I see it, the mental processing has to start somewhere. I'm a pretty concrete thinker, so I feel like gender can't be real without some assumption at the very, very beginning of it all (from which we don't want others to follow in an ideal world.) But this first one is what's important to socially dysphoric trans people IMO- whether the first, instinctively perceived assumption is 'man', 'woman', 'nonbinary', etc.
My main issues with this lie with having the criteria of "deep" dysphoria (right?) as a necessary prerequisite.
Hmm…I guess I didn't think much about the 'depth' of each criterion. The goal of the writing was (hopefully) not to lay our prerequisites aimed at other trans people, but to lay out points aimed at gender-critical or far-right ideologies. I wanted to respond to the unfortunately popular sentiment that sounds something like, 'see? gender is meaningless and you can't define it, so trans people don't need to transition!'
Any non-binary person who uses they/she (etc), to whom "she" is fine/good/normal or maybe who isn't that bothered by people assuming they're a woman by looking at them, but who wouldn't want to be assumed to be a man or called "he" would meet be a woman under this criteria.
Oh…I was honestly imagining in my head that completely separate definitions exist for nonbinary people, and that these should not be used to categorize them. That is why I say the 'disclaimer' thing in the beginning.
I read over your non-circular definitions piece and really enjoyed it! I think we are ultimately on the same page. I admit I am still having trouble wrapping my head around (if I understood it correctly) how someone's 'internal sense of belonging to [a] gender' can be divorced from their desired external perception, although I do see how the internal sense of belonging may not align with the lived experience of external perception.
Either way, it is all so enlightening to think and hear more about!
