you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
Of course [...] you’d likely find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
This is looking like a distinction without a difference.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)