Adding another from Jolyon Maugham, a more trivial one but it itches my mind.

Your argument contends that trans men and women are somehow pretending to be men and women. And don’t also deserve protection. I don’t accept those contentions.

It’s that “somehow” that’s so annoying. Come on. The “somehow” is that trans people claim to be the opposite sex. That’s what “trans” means in this context. (There are other contexts. Transcontinental, transnational, translate, transfer.) Trans people explain themselves as “identifying as” the other sex. It has become socially mandatory to treat those claims and explanations as true and self-evident and rude-to-dispute, but that doesn’t translate to “we no longer even understand what is meant by ‘trans’ or how anyone could possibly think trans women are in any sense men.”

And how are we defining “pretending,” anyway? I don’t think all trans people are consciously deliberately perpetrating a hoax while laughing up their sleeves, but I also don’t think “identifying as” is identical to being in all uses of the word.

The current ideology is that trans people are both trans and the sex they transed into. That doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but then that’s the beauty of ideology: it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.

There can be a mix of pretending and sincerity, but whatever it is, the reality stays the same: people can’t literally change sex, so there’s nothing puzzling or opaque about saying that trans dogma is a gift to men who have reasons to pretend to be women…such as men in prison for example. Maugham’s pretending to be confused by the idea that some trans people could be pretending to be the other sex is flippant and annoying.