Clearly we have been sloppy with defining our terms.
As I understand and use the term “transsexual”, it encompasses people who sincerely identify as a sex different from what I’ve been calling their “biological sex” (wiki refers to it as “assigned sex”, I’ve also seen ‘birth sex’; in the context of this discussion I think ‘chromosomal sex’ is a mutually intelligible way to express the same idea). Wiki also makes a distinction between ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’, where the meaning seems to be that transsexual = transgender + surgery (hat’s being a bit glib, but true enough for present purposes). In other words, a transgender person has the subjective experience of feeling like the wrong sex, and a transsexual person acts on that experience to become the sex they feel they should be.
I would call the person in your story a transvestite: she doesn’t subjectively feel that she’s a man trapped in a woman’s body, she feels like a woman. She dresses like a man on occasion “for the lols”, as you put it. But my impression is that transvestism is not understood as an acute form of gender dysphoria, but as an entirely different thing. It’s roleplaying rather than a fundamental aspect of personal identity.
So perhaps we need to refine the constituent parts in the composite concept of sex. On the one hand, there’s how one perceives oneself, and on the other how one is perceived by others. On a separate dimension, there’s one’s social and one’s biological sex. That gives four quadrants:
(
\begin{array}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Social & Biological \ \hline
Perception\ by\ others & 1 & 2 \ \hline
Self\unicode{x2010}perception & 3 & 4\ \hline
\end{array}
)
So, for example, a cis woman who dresses as a man will have sex M in quadrant 1 and 2 (though 2 is by inference), and sex F in quadrant 3 and 4. A transman, by contrast, will have sex M in 1, 2, and 3 (if they are post-op), but sex F in 4. If they aren’t passing, they may have sex M in 1 and 3, and F in 2 and 4. Delusion is possible, as when a transman has sex M in 4, e.g. he really expects a genetic test to show that he is a man.
My position is that these four quadrants are different facets of the composite concept of “sex”, and can have different sex valence. You say that “it doesn’t make much sense to refer to and fundamentally think of a person as being one sex in some situations and another in other situations”, you’re treating sex as a unitary concept, such that all the quadrants should always have the same sex. But that’s not what I’m arguing. Rather, I’m arguing that a person’s sex can be static in each quadrant, but that in different contexts we care more about different quadrants (e.g. doctors care more about 4 than 1).
There is no single “overall…totality” of sex in the way you’re using it.
So, returning to the story, your character is not transsexual in the sense that her quadrant 3 aligns with her quadrant 4: she feels like a woman (3), and is biologically a woman (4).
Sure, but men are also more likely to sexually prey on men than are women.
In any case, the incidence is so low that it doesn’t more harm than it prevents to force people into a bathroom contrary to their sexual identity.
I know a lot of “two-day” or “cultural” Christians, and I don’t doubt their Christianity. I don’t think being a bad Muslim is the same as not being a Muslim at all.
Yeah, but not all things I can say about myself are like religion or (as I argue) sex. As I said to Thanathots, ownership of property isn’t a matter of self-identity. Neither is being 6 feet tall. And, as I acknowledge here, people can have delusions and just be mistaken about aspects of their sexuality. But that’s not to say that all aspects of sexuality work this way. Some aspects are matters of identity, they are about subjective experience and people are local experts on their own subjective experience.
(I’m even open to the possibility that someone can be mistaken about their subjective experience, but those are necessarily very weird edge cases that basically never apply outside of a philosophy discussion.)