The number of upvotes your original comment got suggests that there may well be other readers with a similar objection. (Though of course it might just be Eugine’s socks.) FWIW I haven’t at all got the impression from what you’ve written here that you hate trans people or (would) treat them badly or anything like that.
it is misleading without saying that actually many cis people don’t have such feelings
The difficulty here (and maybe I haven’t been clear enough in expressing it) is that you aren’t comparing like with like. The strong feeling (at least some) trans people report is a dysphoria that (so they say it seems to them) arises from being in the “wrong” sort of body, and there’s no reason to expect equally strong feelings to arise from being in the “right” sort of body. It’s more the mechanism than the feelings that’s claimed to be the same here.
Imagine that some people report having terrible vertigo, and other people say “ha, you’re just making it up”. And then the following proposal is made: your brain gets information about orientation and movement and so on from various sources, one of which is your inner ear; sometimes your inner ear can report different things from those other sources, and that’s when you get vertigo. So vertigo is a thing that arises from a mechanism present in everyone; what’s different about vertigo sufferers is that mismatch. (Of course there are plenty of ways in which vertigo is disanalogous to transness...)
It wouldn’t be much of an objection to this account of things to say “But a lot of people without vertigo don’t have any particularly strong feelings of having-the-right-balance; we just go about our lives and don’t notice it at all”. Because the point isn’t that everyone has strong feelings about it all the time, it’s that everyone’s brain is considering these things all the time and when that goes wrong you get those strong and unpleasant feelings.
The number of upvotes your original comment got suggests that there may well be other readers with a similar objection. (Though of course it might just be Eugine’s socks.) FWIW I haven’t at all got the impression from what you’ve written here that you hate trans people or (would) treat them badly or anything like that.
The difficulty here (and maybe I haven’t been clear enough in expressing it) is that you aren’t comparing like with like. The strong feeling (at least some) trans people report is a dysphoria that (so they say it seems to them) arises from being in the “wrong” sort of body, and there’s no reason to expect equally strong feelings to arise from being in the “right” sort of body. It’s more the mechanism than the feelings that’s claimed to be the same here.
Imagine that some people report having terrible vertigo, and other people say “ha, you’re just making it up”. And then the following proposal is made: your brain gets information about orientation and movement and so on from various sources, one of which is your inner ear; sometimes your inner ear can report different things from those other sources, and that’s when you get vertigo. So vertigo is a thing that arises from a mechanism present in everyone; what’s different about vertigo sufferers is that mismatch. (Of course there are plenty of ways in which vertigo is disanalogous to transness...)
It wouldn’t be much of an objection to this account of things to say “But a lot of people without vertigo don’t have any particularly strong feelings of having-the-right-balance; we just go about our lives and don’t notice it at all”. Because the point isn’t that everyone has strong feelings about it all the time, it’s that everyone’s brain is considering these things all the time and when that goes wrong you get those strong and unpleasant feelings.