Unfortunately, it's common on HN for commenters here to see things primarily from a male viewpoint, and assume that female-centred perspectives are less valuable or less intelligent or even bigoted in some way. Please do keep an open mind when listening to women share their experiences and perspectives.
For situations where one's birth-assigned gender is relevant, the terms "assigned male/female at birth" (AMAB/AFAB) can be used. The researcher's claim about tech diversity could have been framed as, e.g., "a recent uptick in tech diversity can be ascribed to counting trans women by their self-identified gender rather than the gender they were assigned at birth". That comes across as much more sensitive and academic than "men identifying as trans", which just has TERF written all over it.
The reality of trans people is that their gender identity does not match their biological sex, either at birth or at any time thereafter. That's what being trans is.
And no, you cannot change your biological sex. Gene therapy and brain transplants aren't there yet.
None of this trivializes trans people, rather it is your argument that trivializes the experience of women who were born and raised female and the distinct experiences and perspectives stemming from that.
Gender is cultural. There are cultures with more than two genders, but they continue to have the same distribution of X and Y chromosomes because sex is biological.
When transitioning, some sexual traits may change, some may stay the same. That doesn't mean a trans woman is still a "man" in any sense.
No, it's an organised system of different parts whose development is coordinated to deliver a specific function: that of reproduction.
We have sexed bodies - female and male - because of our differential reproductive roles, and have evolved molecular mechanisms to drive development of those sexed bodies to support each reproductive role.
Describing sex simply as a "bunch of physical attributes" completely ignores that it is an evolved system function for reproduction, predicated on female and male gametes.
I have thought about this, and as a cis male, do I have the right to deny any other human their experience of being male ?
If someone lost their male reproductive organs in an accident, from disease or at birth - should I single them out and police their gender ID ?
Is someone more male than me ?
Am I more male than someone else ?
After this mental exercise I realized I can’t gatekeep another person’s experience. Everyone alive has paid the price of admission to exist as best they can with whatever they have.
I think this basically gets it, but I would say it somewhat misstates the case: gender is easily distinguished from biological sex (maybe not separated from it; the general correlation and the fact that behavior necessarily has a biological basis suggests that gender identity may itself be among the many dimensions of biological sex traits), but the categorization of people into two groups based on a subset of biological sex traits is not, itself, biological sex, it is ascribed gender. Biological sex is multidimensional (in the usual sense of the entire spectrum of traits that are considered within the ambit of sex) or not binary (in the narrower sense of ability to perform in one, both, or neither of two possible sexual reproductive roles.)
Sex essentialism, like race essentialism (whose arguments and methods it generally apes) defends social constructed exclusive categorization by misrepresenting social statuses ascribed based on some subset of physical traits as essential biological categories.
>A trans woman is female, a trans man is male.
These are explicitly biological terms. A trans woman is NOT female. Even if you only argue the lesser claim that "trans woman are women", I have never seen a convincing follow up to the inevitable response, "what are women".
I am amazed at how people who claim to care about their fellow humans can so easily demonize a huge swath of them in favor of a tiny minority. Just admit it: you are engaging in power politics, just like everyone else.