Despite knowing a couple trans people, I'd never seen this term that I recall. Some very interesting reading out there; hard to wrap one's mind around... but worth the effort.
I also got to read about intersectionality for the first time. There are aspects of this I've acknowledged for a long time, just didn't know a word existed for it.
SJWs in general are getting a bad rap from many corners now, and I think some of that is what I'd call a 'natural correction'. When a critical mass of people gets involved with anything, a few inevitably fail to understand alternate perspectives enough to consider how those views might harmonize with their own (due to rabbit holes of dogmatism, subconscious bias, inexperience, stubbornness or whatever else).
To me, it so very often seems to come back to one simple thing-- have you tried putting yourself in your neighbor's shoes lately?
Like many things, gender is a mix of both. It's an immutable core wrapped in various social and cultural markers we've come to associate with "masculine" and "feminine". And of course the range of possible cores is more of a continuum than a simple binary flag (even though we like sorting all the arbitrary markers into two neat piles as if that really means anything).
Considering we still largely refused to acknowledge something as intuitively obvious[0] as non-right-handedness less than two generations ago, I wonder how long it will take until we've learned to deal with the fact that gender (and sexuality) is as idiosyncratic as nearly everything else about an individual's identity.
[0]: Seriously. People generally have two hands. Why on Earth should we assume that there's something special about the one that is dominant for most people? Good luck explaining gender and sexuality to a society that can't even imagine not everybody is strictly right-handed.
I don't think the existence of trans people proves anything, in either direction, about whether or not gender is a social construct.
We live in a gendered society. Pointing out that some social roles are completely arbitrary doesn't actually change anything. Gender is in the home, on television, on the radio, in books, on the internet, in schools, and in the streets. It's being taught and reinforced everywhere. I don't think anyone could possibly credibly claim to have independently derived gender from their own innate personal characteristics that they were born with and thus have proved that gender is a biological reality.
To assert gender is real because you feel some kind of way after being brainwashed your entire life is... well, I guess that's actually very common but I don't think it furthers any kind of understanding or suggests anything about the way things should be.
I support everyone's right to live their lives the way they need to... but gender is entirely about arbitrarily restricting and labeling people's behavior and I can't endorse it--I'd rather live in a world without labels where everyone is allowed the full range of human expression.
Whenever I've heard a suggestion that I should just live as a feminine guy, it just makes me feel sick. Even in a world where no gender stereotypes existed, I wouldn't want to be male. I'd rather not live the rest of my life with a masculine face, body hair, a flat chest, male fat distribution, etc. My transition has nothing to do with social roles and everything to do with my body.
Before I transitioned, I actually had problems recognizing myself in the mirror. It wasn't until I'd been on hormones for half a year that I could actually remember my face.
Also, my own hobbies and interests are more androgynous than anything else, but I probably lean towards being more gender non-conforming as a girl than as a guy.
Yeah, it's long. It's worth it!
I've always viewed gender & sex as being an issue of parts or lack of parts a human is born with, and gender is their sexual personality or preferences.
Do you believe there are specific (limited in quantity) genders?
"TERF" is no more of a slur than "Neo-Nazi" or "rapist", and all those groups are the scum of the earth.
There is no moral difference between a TERF and a member of Stormfront or a known rapist.
It is akin to saying that the Black Panthers are good, when the KKK is bad. They're both bad.
Feminism == Masculinism == sex discrimination
Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.
In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.