That's a cheap shot and you know it.
I am not above criticism. Criticize me with facts and prove me wrong. I don't talk whatever way i like. I try to use universal and commonly accepted terms understood by the overwhelming majority and as defined by the dictionary. Again, my point is fact based and logical. Yours is not.
The point you made is that you get to decide which pronouns you can use and that, by others insisting on you using other pronouns, they are
imposing. They are not imposing; they are criticising. To phrase it as an imposition it to put yourself above criticism.
When i look at the definition of "He" in the dictionary it states "the male". When i look at the definition of "male" i get
"an individual that produces small usually motile gametes (as spermatozoa or spermatozoids) which fertilize the eggs of a female". It's a generalization, of course, but we all understand why.
It doesn't say anything, at all, about what the person feels. I am not inclined to adjust human kind's definition of a word just because someone doesn't like the way it sounds.
I would't call a a 1,5 mts tall, caucasian with brown eyes and ginger hair a 2 mts tall, green eyes, latino with brown hair. I like facts and what he/she is asking me to call him/her is factually incorrect.
If he/she gets offended by facts then that is out of my control. Again, happy to use
Gender:
The state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones)
That is, a person's gender can mismatch with the person's biological sex. Your biological sex may be male, whereas your gender is female.
You have chosen to refer to a person based on their sex and not their gender. Whereas gender forms a person's identity, sex does not, and social convention is that we refer to people by their identity. If a person is born to English parents in England, moves to France before their first birthday and lives the rest of their lives in France, do they not get to be French?
Height, weight, race, hair colour are all innate (well, with dye, perhaps not hair colour). Gender is not because of the various physiological, cultural and psychological effects.
It is not, agreed, but since there is no medical test to confirm it, it comes down to what a person claims and whether a psychologist/psychiatrist believes him/her. That opens a pandora's box of loopholes for people to exploit.
If people can start getting cherry picking sexes, what's to prevent them from doing so with other aspects? Race, height, eye color, ethnicity, weight...
There are 7 billion people on the planet so the most bizarre things are possible, and there is a very slight chance that one or two people are being disingenuous with their gender.
But the vast majority - hundreds of thousands - are not. People are not actively choosing a significantly harder path in life to get a reaction out of social conservatives. Transgender people face much higher rates of suicide and depression, murder and abuse. In countries without free medicine, the costs associated with transitioning alone are a big sacrifice. Why would
anyone choose that? It's a claim that used to (well, still is sometimes) be levelled at gay people: that it is a choice. It is not.
The default position should be to trust the person transitioning. There may be special consideration for athletes, but again, I have big doubts that anyone would go through such an ordeal just to gain a competitive advantage.
)
