Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A disgrace to the name of Sherlock.

“I find it sad that people feel so threatened by someone saying there is something other than biological male and female,….the reality is that there are a small number of people, but a real number of people, who believe they’re born in the wrong body, believe that they don’t fit into the male-female definition.”

But bodies are only male or female. Even if you’re born into the “wrong” body, even if that was a real phenomenon, that “wrong” body is still either a male one or a female one. There are no other sexes. That trapped entity has no impact on the cells and tissues making up the body within which it is trapped. “Gender identity” can’t change that. “Feelings” and “belief” can’t change that. This is another example where sex and gender are conflated and confused for tactical advantage. If it is advantageous to distinguish the two, they will do so, without worrying themselves over having mashed them together moments before. Firm, consistant definitions spoil their ability to play this game, which is one of the reasons they avoid any careful examination of the actual bases for the supposed phenomena upon which they claim to ground their demands. Yet you’d think that they would want to have clear definitions of transness in order to filter out those who won’t benefit from treatment. They should be the ones most interested in filtering out disphoric children who will desist as they go through puberty, and to prevent needless detransitioning. If you claim in retrospect that some people who transition were never really “trans” to begin with, what does that tell us about the standards for screening, and how do you know that anybody is trans? Without research findings that answer these vital questions, “gender affirming treatment” is nothing more than the recruitment of dedicated footsoldiers who are less likely to leave because of the sunk cost fallacy, because they have sacrificed their very flesh, and mental health for the Cause. Any method that could reliably determine exactly which disphoric people would not benefit from “gender-affirming medicine” might well show that nobody does.

We’re back to an undeclared (but fluid, on-again, off-again) Cartesian dualism, and the failure to explain how the “Mental substance” of the mind interacts with the “Material substance” of the body, or the Catholic inability to explain in real-world terms what the difference is between consecrated and unconsecrated Communion wafers, and what skill an ordained priest has learned in order to make that change happen. The unevidenced, faith-based concept of “gender identity” fits right in with these carefully unexamined metaphysical bedfellows.