When I was at university I had some humanities professors who were studying this kind of stuff. It was a lot of postmodern analysis, looking back probably critical theory. One professor pointed out that dictionaries were a very 19th century thing, the standardization of language. There is a fascinating "hidden" history in Europe of many languages being eradicated or wiped out by the central government insisting on one or a few national dialects. Reading it felt very similar to the schools that were run for indigenous people in the United States and Australia not so long ago.

In any case, my point is that some folks out there are doing research into this but it's not the kind of stuff that really gets in the headlines.

Who says we don't? We're in the middle of a culture war fight over some very old word definitions like "man" and "woman" and dictionaries absolutely have been called out for not adding new definitions, but instead changing old ones.

It's not about your "existence" any more than political debate about immigration is about my "existence." You exist, I exist. But what obligations do other people have to us? What accommodations should society and individuals make, and which do they have no need to make? What aspects of culture should change or shouldn't change? What should we teach kids in school about complex subjects? These are proper subjects of social and political debate.

Recall that this is happening against a backdrop where 90% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, support employment protections for LGBT people. Bostock is already the law of the land. So the obligations that are in dispute here aren't even basic civil rights, but instead broader social and cultural changes. People have every right to vigorously debate proposed changes in the social and cultural norms they're expected to follow.

The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up". Being an immigrant is different, nobody questions that an immigrant that themselves attests to being from country A and is now living in country B is making that up.

Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender. I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently. And even before 2020 the truth is that disputing the legitimacy of transgender people is a low salience issue for a lot of people but very activating for others (much like immigration) so the proportional impacts of what seems like an unpopular opinion is inflated.

The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.

> Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender.

Bostock involved multiple consolidated cases, one of which specifically involved gender identity.

> I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently.

No, the issues have changed (see above). This is common and unsurprising. People are generally a lot more accepting of civil rights than attempts at social engineering, especially social engineering directed at children.

> The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.

IDK what this response is supposed to mean exactly but I certainly have people in my life that think that being "trans" isn't "real". And as far as politics goes this is certainly also fairly common position to hear from prominent people.

"what to teach young children" certainly seems to be an issue, an issue where politicians are sheepishly pretending to do one thing while actually doing another through ambiguity. This all seems very easy to understand. It certainly reflects the idea that trans people either don't really exist or their existence is something so terrible that children can't be exposed to even the idea of their existence.

I express no opinion about whether this is a cause worth fighting for, but there is absolutely no reality in which there would not be a fight over such a breathtakingly ambitious objective.

There are basically two poles - male and female. And there is anything inbetween. Not a digital 0 or 1. More like geography.

And just because I'm living right now in some country more towards the north than the south pole I don't have to define my identity by creating new words enforcing everyone to use them. Why should I bother anyone where I'm coming from and where I'm heading? Except people maybe I see the interest to open up myself?

The most important question to me is always what's the reason behind all the need to fight?

IDK, if every time you encountered someone they referred to you by the wrong name, after being corrected every time they do so, that wouldn't affect you? I think that if someone consistently feminized my name and used feminine pronouns for me over the course of multiple interaction I would get pretty pissy, downright hostile.

In most cases, people have apologized directly and the conversation moved on. In very few cases they moved on without apologizing. In virtually no cases did they ignore my hint.

Yes, there are rude and ignorant people out there. And they will always be.

From my experience, it is manners that lead to better interaction, not syntactical changes in language. Because you can't create empathy with neologisms.

And the best way to deal with rude people - stay away from them ;-)

I'm sorry you feel that way and that it depresses you.

> I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans.

Well, that's the point, isn't it? The "culture war" isn't as straightforward as all the parties involved would like us to believe it is.

My personal method of detection for calling someone 'he' or 'she' is whether they look more like a man or more like a woman. Even if I later learn that the person is a man and not a woman (or vice versa) I'm still going to call the man-looking person 'he' and the woman-looking person 'she'.

And this is where the problem starts - it really doesn't take much for the average female to look masculine or for the average male to look feminine (at least enough to pass as the other gender). When I address someone as a man and in response get a tantrum for being transphobic it makes me wonder why a man who identifies as a woman still wants to present as a man (and vice-versa, of course).

When someone with a neatly trimmed and cultured beard insists that you call him 'her', they're more interested in stirring up controversy than in what they self-identify as.

So, yeah, there is a Culture War of sorts, but it's between the people who want to push other people's buttons and the people who don't think that other people should be able to dress, talk, act and call themselves whatever they wish to.

You presumably aren't in either camp, so good on you.

> I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.

I do have a serious question though - we know that your gender is unimportant for most things. Some things (like the gender tickbox on hospital admittance forms) you'll need to reveal your biological sex.

What about prisons? If a transperson is convicted of a major crime and is sentenced to prison, do they go to the prison that matches their self-identified gender, or to the prison that matches their biological sex?

Once I get vaginoplasty, maybe I'd go to a women's prison, but I'm really not sure.

> ”schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having);

Anyway, it instantly reminded me of this highly upvoted discussion about a site that asked visitors to guess whether a building was a school or prison just by looking at a photograph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605867

It's easy to argue that Foucault oversells his point, but his fundamental observation is an important one: the systems of regimentation and categorization at the heart of our schools, hospitals, and prisons is not particularly different between the three, is remarkably modern, and shares the same purpose (to observe and measure us against metrics for education, rehabilitation, healing, metrics that establish normative control over our lives).

Like rain on your wedding day