Sorry, got a little discouraged. I agree with a lot of what you said about language. For example, if I understand correctly, part of what you said is that colloquial usage of words often necessarily generalizes, and so can gain some distance from strict and scientific usage. Absolutely. It's not only true, it's likely impossible to avoid so maybe I shouldn't put too much stock in the minutia. I guess my question there would be, should we care at all? Beyond the specifics here, if a colloquial definition gets too far from the scientific one, should we lead it back? Language does only work because meanings are, to a degree, agreed upon. Perhaps for this case the distance, if there, is insignificant.

I do struggle a little with what I feel is, to an extent, an iteration of "people are whatever they say they are," because that seems like a bad precedent to set. Even trickier there is that I am obviously knowledgeable about people's experiences than them, as you said. It becomes kind of an impasse.

Regarding transitioning to a gender that is changing, that makes sense. Although to my understanding, that's just one out of the three. Another is transitioning to a gender that incorporates your original gender and seems not to imply fluctuation. The other is ending up with no gender identity but the absence of a gender identity is somehow a gender identity.

But ya know what? Most of my argument does rely on language that is unnecessarily rigid and specific, when things are more nuanced than that, which you nailed. Thanks for giving it a go. I think you earned a Δ