Gender is a concept that is inextricably parasitic on biological sex. If you try to disentangle it from sex, then it has no criterion for existence and vanishes, hence the logical final step in the secular extreme trans activist argument being the dissolution of gender per se concomitant with the deprecation of biological sex. If you remove gender, sex remains; if you remove sex, gender vanishes.
Gender and sex are independent in that sex doesn't determine gender. You're confusing sex with the human body in general. Really, sex and gender are just two different interpretations of the same human body. Behavior defines gender and anatomy defines sex. As long as a human body can behave, it can have a gender. Behavior depends on anatomy for its existence, yes, but only because I can't perform behaviors if I lack an anatomy. But anatomy doesn't determine behavior. If a woman limps her wrist, she does so because she chooses to or others taught her to do so. She doesn't do so because of the anatomy of her arm, at least as far as we know. Any sort of knowledge claim about her anatomy determining her limp wrist requires experimental evidence. If we want a biological explanation for this social gendered behavior, we need to do some particular experiment. But such an experiment not only presupposes our social, cultural, non-scientific understanding of gender, but also can only provide rational support for particular claims about the phenomenon the experiment studied. Particular experiments don't warrant the broad, sweeping generalizations you defend here. For that, we need an overwhelmingly large amount of experimental access that you lack access to We don't need to study biology to understand the social meaning of a gendered quality, e.g. a limp wrist.
you have no right to take issue with anyone who disagrees with your practice given its arbitrary and ultimately meaningless foundations
Our unconditional respect for the intrinsic value of humanity is far from an arbitrary and meaningless foundation for my recognition of people as members of the gender they identify as!
In this case you would be a transphobe by your own lights because the exception you're trying to make doesn't work.
Why not? Gender identity categories apply only to humans.
...unless they're wrong about it, which you said is entirely possible.
Nope! Even if they get their own identity wrong, only they themselves can be right or wrong about their identity. We only know they got their old gender wrong because they know their current gender is the right one, at least as of now. No one else but me knows what my gender is.
The other problem is that you say that you're an anti-essentialist while deriving an essence from their identification...this makes you even more of an essentialist because you're insisting on essences that are obscured; you're an obscurantist essentialist.
Again, you're confusing essence and definition. Identification is non-essential since it can change. An essentialist definition of a gender defines all members of a gender by the same quality that can never change. While all members of a gender must share the common property of identifying as this gender, that just means that all members of this gender share a non-essential definitive quality, because gender categories are non-essential, so no two people need mean the same thing when they identify as, for example, a women. Any two women can identify as women for entirely different reasons, and based on entirely different womanly qualities. So gender identification partially defines gender, but gender still lacks any essence.
