Doesn't challenging the legitimacy of gender misgender trans people?

"Doesn't challenging the legitimacy of gender misgender trans people?"

It's a question that's haunted me for six and a half years. How can I speak my truth about gender without hurting other people?

I just realized a way to explain how this conflict is not a conflict at all.

Imagine that society forces everyone into one of two roles which dominate their lives from before they're born to after they're dead: Artist or warrior.

Obviously there will be many people born who fit really clearly into the artist, as opposed to the warrior, camp and vice versa. And some of those will be miscategorized--their inner warrior is so strong that all the socialization to be an artist can't overcome it, for example. They'll go to great lengths to transition because they can't survive in the wrong role, it's so suffocating. But the vast majority of people will accept their training, either because it fits, or because it's the best option they have.

Some people will be both, the warrior-poets who combine two essences that their culture sees as contradictory. Others will need to be neither, want to curl up in the logic of engineering or follow other dreams that are too far orthogonal to both art and war to be stretched into their assigned existence. And in this society, these people will be defined according to their relationship with this imaginary binary.

But just because someone drew a line, and some people fit on one side or another, doesn't make that line legitimate. It doesn't make it a good way to organize a society or a useful way of understanding the immense variety and similarities among people. It doesn't mean it's natural, no matter how much it fits with some people's natures.

And that's how it is with gender. No, in this narrative I am not centering the priorities of trans people who want to be recognized as real whatever-their-genders-are. They have their own narratives and spaces to speak, and anyone who wants to understand trans voices needs to read a diversity of them. But I'm saying they are real, just as some people are undeniably born artists. The idea that gender isn't real is not to say that someone can't be born to fit into a certain gender--it's to say that most of what we believe about gender, and the idea that everyone has one, is a myth or a non-natural and oppressive requirement of society, a lot like an over-powerful religious institution. I'm talking about erasing the line, not the territory on either side of it.