This is a dangerous thing to tell people dealing with an abuser/a psychopath/BPD whatevertheyrecalled. I'm willing to state many people's feelings are not valid.
(Stronger statement: true selves don't exist and other people's opinion of you is often more correct than your self-identification.)
The feeling is valid, but the action could be inappropriate or damaging and that’s not okay.
“I feel Z so you need to stop X or do Y for me” is not okay.
1. You feel what you feel
2. It is not a moral failing to have a particular emotional reaction in the moment since these are not within our control (acting on the emotion is)
The word "valid" ends up granting connotations that the rationale a person applies to why they're feeling their feelings is somehow reasonable or correct. Many emotional reactions are not reasonable or justifiable and the most reasonable course of action may be figuring out how to repress that emotional reaction in the future - phobias are an excellent example here.
I think you're seeing that exact miscommunication here, others are reading "valid" in the normal use of the word while you're using it in this more colloquial fashion.
What I mean is you don't get to choose what emotions you feel. So making someone feel wrong/bad for feeling them isn't useful.
> two fairly incontrovertible things
You say this, but neither my wife nor I took either as incontrovertible until the last few years.
I don't have a better way of discussing it or bringing it up though. Do you have a phrase that works for this, but isn't prone to misunderstanding?
Not a single phrase because there's a decision matrix around the reaction:
1. Do I think I understand why the emotional reaction is happening? 2. Do I think the emotional reaction is healthy? 3. Do I think the emotional reaction is reasonable?
And how I respond depends on the answers to these questions. When the answers to the questions are "no" I fall back to building a space of emotional safety things like:
"Thank you for sharing your feelings with me", "it's ok that you're feeling that way", "feeling that way doesn't make you a bad person". These statements tend more conservative if I'm feeling it's important to remove misunderstanding.
However, does this claim not fly in the face of "identifying as" a particular gender, race, tribe, etc?
And what of opinions formed on the basis of incomplete and/or insufficient information?
Yes, but it also implies people identifying as cis might be wrong about it, so it's a pretty equal if unpopular standpoint. Nevertheless.
There are a lot of real life self identification situations that aren't accepted by society - mostly ethnic groups. Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren[0], Europeans who get mad when Americans claim to be sixth-generation Irish, are different cases here.
[0] her situation is not that unique btw - it's actually very common for white people in Oklahoma to believe they're part Cherokee. Since they believe this because their parents told them so, I don't think they're doing anything wrong, but it's the kind of unpleasant surprise you get when your 23andme results come back.