system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Identifying with a sex doesn't actually make you that sex.

Pretty straightforward but I'll try to break it down into multiple points. The simplest problem with 'I identify as a woman therefore I am a woman' is that we never allow people to simply identify their way into a category. We normally have criteria in order for us to determine if an individual actually belongs to the category. I say normally because religion is an exception to this, and it's interesting because religion doesn't deal with reality, while sex does. So in short, simply believing yourself to be a member of a sex doesn't therefore make you the sex you claim membership to.

There's also the problem of essentialism. Now a lot of people believe "woman is a female, which means she's built to carry eggs" to be biological essentialist. Well how is "woman is anyone who feels like they're a woman" not gender identity essentialist? Since in this case simply claiming membership to the sex makes you that sex. This is, as you can see, not an objective system based in reality. It's now subjective AND essentialist. Also, "I'm a man because I identify as a man" is circular and I'd hope definitions of sex and gender were more robust than that.

And before anyone gets into sex vs gender, I get it. Gender is the social construct, but it is still rooted in sex. Why else would we classify a boy in a dress as 'gender noncomforming'? They're not made in a vacuum, although I'd prefer if gendered expectations didn't exist. Also, for most of history, woman=female and man=male. That's why when we speak of attraction, we speak of physical bodies and not someone's identity. I'm a man and I'm attracted to women. Now, could this possibly mean I'm a female bodied person who feels male attracted to male bodied people who feel female? To virtually every person around the world, no. To unlink gender and sex when no one (besides maybe a few navel gazing college students) does is absurd.

Also, I wanna touch on gender dysphoria. To my understanding, it's when the mind's perception of the body doesn't match with respect to sex and thus causes immense distress. How do we make the leap to say 'this is a woman trapped in a man's body' and not 'this is a man whose brain gets triggered at the sight of himself as a man and would feel less distressed if he were a woman'?
gpt
> To unlink gender and sex when no one does (besides maybe a few navel gazing college students) does is absurd.

This is factually incorrect.  The whole reason why we now treat gender and sex differently is because entire academic disciplines needed to distinguish between biological characteristics and the social expressions associated with those biological characteristics.  This distinction is not at all marginal in academics and is in fact widely recognized in biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.  In fact, even if you wanted to argue for gender essentialism (i.e. the idea that gender is entirely reducible to sexual difference) you would literally not be able to do so coherently without using the terms “sex” and “gender” to signify the very difference you are trying to reject!

The issue here is simply that some people prefer to believe in a simple reality using simple terminology, whereas others (particularly people who have more education) are willing to recognize nuance and use language to express nuance.

So you say “woman is woman” because you want to avoid any recognition or understanding of the nuanced relationship between sex and gender.  Other people will say “as far as gender goes, a trans-woman is fundamentally a woman” which is a much more nuanced statement which better captures the whole of reality.  Specifically, a reality in which people with particular sexual characteristics will present themselves as a different gender and adopt all of the socially-constructed characteristics of that gender.  This is obviously a mouthful, which is why it is easier to simply say “a trans-woman is a woman,” which unfortunately triggers people who prefer simplicity over nuance and/or refuse to recognize the conceptual difference between sex and gender.