As far as the things you didn’t say, the problem is that you didn’t say them. You addressed these issues but didn’t address the grains of truth that become exploited by genuine transphobes. Including those truths and how they’re used to create the myths might have been a more productive approach.

Now, here’s where we’re going to have some complicated dialogue — those conservatives are correct, and trans activists are incorrect. You CAN’T change your sex, at least not with current medical technology. Someday we’ll have cool tech like nanobiology and anatomy on demand (e.g. custom-made limbs and for trans people, genitals), but right now, the closest any trans person can come is cosmetic. I will not have sperm just because I get bottom surgery, and my girlfriend suffers a tremendous amount of dysphoria around the fact that she can never conceive children because she is trans. As much as people like Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles (I’ve watched Shapiro but not Knowles) might enable that fact to be used to invalidate transsexuality in general, it is still something even those who receive GAS must cope with. In the trans support groups I belong to, most of the older trans people seem to accept this and counsel younger trans people about it as well. We can change our hormonal panel, we can change our bodies cosmetically, but anatomically we can’t actually change sex. The insistence that we can is demonstrably one of the strongest pieces of ammo used against us.

I came on far too strongly in my first message in this thread, and for that I apologize. My frustration with trans activism and some of the myths they themselves perpetuate was showing, especially where the sex vs gender debate is concerned. I’ve been gathering my own hypotheses about the conflation of the two for some time now for my own piece about it, so I do admit that your initial response got my Irish up a little; I’m glad we’re dialoguing now, though.