Part of the question is -- do you think society needs to distinguish between male and female? Should we have any single sex environments? Should all gym showers be coed like Starship Troopers? Should all prisons be co-ed? Should college freshmen being assigned roommates be assigned male and female pairings? If I, a man, tell my wife, "I made a new friend and we are going out for drinks tomorrow", should my wife care if this new friend is male or female?

And if you say yes, society does need to distinguish these things, is the essential matter for needing to make the distinction "how this person identifies" or "the person's actual biology"?

The transgender stuff is downstream of the modern trend to downplay all distinctions between sexes and eliminate sex segregated spaces.

I think you should look into concepts like "nonbinary" and "genderfluid"

I have. Perhaps my Mike example was bad, because I agree that most transgender people in 2024 are not lying or crazy.

I think the entire concept of "gender" being separate from "sex" is an anti-concept. I think nonbinary and genderfluid are anti-concepts. The purpose of words and concepts in a languages is to group natural kinds together for the purpose of common knowledge and communication. An anti-concept is something that groups unlike things together, that confuses and makes it harder to think and communicate about the underlying natural kinds.

Claiming to be "gender fluid" is pure nothingness, it communicates nothing real to me. I wouldn't actually care too much if "gender fluid" was created as a new concept with its own name, but it is a problem that "gender fluid" overrides and eliminates the concept of biological male and female, which I do care about.

Part of the problem is the word "gender" which originally was purely a grammatical term but since has been given about a half-dozen different directions.

If "gender" refers to the degree that someone acts and presents according to societal stereotypes as masculine or feminine, obviously we are all "gender fluid."

If "gender" is simply a synonym for biological sex, which is its most common use (I blame Austin Powers for ruining our ability to use the word "sex" on questionnaires), then "gender fluidity" is obviously false --there is no such thing in humans or mammals as being fluid in biological sex.

Either way, then, someone declaring themselves "gender fluid" is just nonsense, depending on the definition of "gender" it is either false or it applies to everyone.

It also matters when being "gender fluid" is not just some personal oddity that I can joke about, like someone being into astrology, but is treated as something I must respect and if I don't, I get fired or banned from events for code-of-conduct violations.

Going back to my Mike example, perhaps a better example would be, imagine my co-worker Mike has a picture of a girl on his desk, and talks about being a "dad" and has a "girl dad" t-shirt and when I'm talking about being a dad, he chips in with "ah, in my experience as a dad blah blah blah" ... And then I find out that the "child" he is a dad of is one of these "adopt a child" charities where he has never met her and sends her $30 a month to this girl in a foreign country and writes a letter once a year. OK, that's nice and all, but you aren't really a dad. Now Mike may not be lying or delusional. Be is participating in a campaign to redefine the word and concept of "dad" in a way that confuses rather then clarifies. He also is to some extent "stealing valor." And I object to that and I would object being forced to participate in that.