I’m not defending the idea of gendered bathrooms, so I want to plant a flag there.
But where bathrooms are gendered, the difference between a man who presents as a man and identifies as a man going into a women’s room, and a biological man who presents as a woman and identifies as a woman going into a women’s room, is that in the former case, the person is openly transgressing the social norm and it’s reasonable to worry that they will transgress other norms of bathroom etiquette. It’s the difference between someone going into the bathroom thinking “this bathroom is for me and people like me”, and someone going into the bathroom thinking, “this bathroom explicitly excludes me and I’m going in anyway.”
Communication is a two way street. Help me understand. Your story does not contain a trans character. What am I missing.
I don’t know the period, menopause, vagina, or womb situation of almost any woman I interact with. In almost all social situations, none of that matters.
Aren’t you sexualizing them?
I agree that transsexuality raises interesting questions about gender more broadly. Recognizing transsexuals seems to undermine blank-slate philosophies of the social equality of the sexes. A transwoman asking to be treated as a woman implicitly demands that women be treated differently.
If anything, the difference in confusion will be marginal. A transman who presents as male is generally well within the distribution of male traits.
As I’ve acknowledged, this is a real but distinct problem. I expect that transsexuals don’t think of themselves as having one sex in social contexts and a different sex in others, but as having one coherent sexual identity that they expect to carry with them into any context they enter. I think that’s something of a conceptual failure, but an understanding given the way our culture conceptualizes sex and gender, and the limits of how our language constrains expression of those concepts.
For the purpose of this discussion, let’s stipulate that s-sex means social sex, and b-sex means biological sex. With that distinction, it’s seems trivially easy to understand how someone could be s-female and b-male, and that there would be no tension in doing so. Then we could discuss whether s-sex or b-sex is more important in a given context. In a doctor’s office, b-sex is likely to dominate. In a business setting, s-sex would dominate (to the extent even that is relevant). For gift-giving, s-sex. For MMA? B-sex seems more important. For mental competitions, like chess or math olympics, maybe s-sex is dominant.
The point being, there are multiple distinct and distinguishable concepts tied up in sex that don’t have a necessary relationship with one another, and one or the other may be more salient in a given situation. There’s no tension or deception in understanding the world that way, and in many contexts our predictions about behavior, i.e. the “effectiveness” of our beliefs, will be better when we treat them separately.