Originally a comment by Artymorty on Next phase.

The “whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge” part conflates identities with biological sexes, and that’s the most dangerous part.

It’s one thing for a young person to imagine in her own mind a suite of gender-role personas, like characters in a story, and then to declare which of these imaginary gender-role characters she has cast herself to play. So far, so foolish.

But to then cross over into declaring that these different characters have different biological sex characteristics… that’s where the irreversible harm comes in. Harm to herself, because she’s likely to develop psychological distress over the mismatch between her imaginary character’s body and her real-life body, and harm to everyone else, by promoting the erasure of women’s rights by undefining the words man, woman, male, and female.

Human experiences are inevitably richer than the categories we carve out for them.

I want to say to that writer, it’s you who’s impoverishing the human experience by turning the biological sexes into cardboard characters. Real life is a lot richer without all the hokey gender horseshit. As Julie Bindel said twenty years ago, “Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.” Even the names gender roleplayers choose for themselves have a whiff of soap opera cheese to them: it’s a world of lissome, wispy Chloés and rugged, raspy Chases.

If Gender: Phase Two involves discovering that none of the characters you’ve created in your mind are three-dimensional enough to capture your true complexity, then Gender: Phase Three will be discovering that the whole exercise was a colossal waste of time and energy. If you’re lucky, you get to Phase Three with most of your body intact. But many won’t. And publications like Nature share the blame for that.