It's not unthinkable, but in practise there's usually strong pressure in play: sunk cost fallacy, children to support, the threat of social ostracism. This is mostly true for wives rather than husbands because of female socialisation (this is sadly where gender actually becomes relevant!).
As the author himself says:
"It turns out that I like women so much I’d like to be one of them"
That's not how sex works. I like women a lot too: liking them a lot doesn't mean you want to be one, that's called autogynephilia and can be treated with talking therapy.
However if it's a true expression of his attitudes and preferences then perhaps if his wife decided to masculinise her appearance e.g. injecting testosterone to deeper her voice, cause male-associated health growth, have elective surgical interventions like a double mastectomy, he wouldn't receive it as well as his wife seems to have. That's definitely speculation on my part of course!
To answer your original question about how it's supposed to be meant: it won't matter one jot what any investors he once met may think or not think about his lifestyle choices if he's trying to impose a fantasy on his wife.
Autogynephilia is a long-discredited theory, though I suspect from the content of your posts that you would deride any more recent work as being politically or socially biased.
Let's assume it isn't, though. The inventor of the concept, Ray Blanchard, spent decades helping people transition. He didn't use talk therapy to talk them out of it! He developed one of the first protocols for figuring out whether a trans woman needed hormones! From his Wikipedia page:
> Blanchard supports public funding of sex reassignment surgery as an appropriate treatment for transsexual people, as he believes the available evidence supports that the surgery helps them live more comfortably and happily, with high satisfaction rates.
Even Blanchard would absolutely not describe a trans person as just "liking women a lot" and leave it at that. The premise that a trans woman is "just living a fantasy" isn't true and was widely recognized as not true even by previous generations of investigators on the topic. I don't understand why you insist on it.
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We're also speaking in another thread, but that thread got flagged (not by me), so I'll put my reply to it here.
All of this sort of handwaves past my point, though. Maybe you are right about the actual number of intersex people. My point is that it's a small but non-zero number. We can just talk about the number of "ambiguous" people, e. g. people where you can't immediately discern their physical biology from the way they present themselves to you. Would you agree that number is at least 1%?
> As to your question as to why does "woman" have to mean "adult human female" - because that's the dictionary definition.
But the dictionary definition can change, and in fact, has. Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge have all made adjustments to the term to encompass the idea of transition, gender fluidity, etc. Your original term is the primary definition but not at all the only one.
Putting cards on the table: I don't believe that if the dictionary changed its definition, you would change yours. It seems to me you'd deride them for "being political" or "bowing to pressure" or somesuch. I think you are using your definitions for "woman" and "female" because you prefer them, not because you believe the dictionary is an arbitrator of truth.
> Notice that arguments about the treatment of "intersex" people (those with disorders/differences of sexual development) are used to buttress the position of people who feel like they're the other sex, but are otherwise biologically completely normal.
Trans people aren't always or often biologically "completely normal"; numerous studies have revealed potential biological bases for gender dysphoria, related to issues with hormones and other development in the womb. They only look normal to you, which goes to my next point:
> I totally agree with you that there are some people whose sex is hard to judge immediately, often, but not always, because they've gone out of their way to make it ambiguous. Everyone else can be clocked at 100 feet in a dark alley - we're evolved that way. [...]
> A few awkward social faux pas over people who look or act androgynous - for whatever reason - doesn't justify exploding a category that works and serves everyone well almost all of the time. I don't feel guilty over my use of sexed pronouns even if I occasionally get it wrong and this insistence that I should... isn't convincing.
If you saw this person walking towards you, and you thought they were a man, and then later found out they were actually transmasculine, would you feel guilty for not referring to them with she/her? Would you correct yourself to referring to them as she/her afterwards, even in conversation with them? Why or why not?
This is a really thorough reply to what I said and very thoughtful, thanks.
Regarding "liking woman a lot", I was quoting the original author - it seemed like an autogynophilic statement to me, the idea that you are sexually attracted to something so much you want to become it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding!
Yeah it's interesting what you say about Blanchard... the fascinating thing for me about Blanchard is the measurement of groin blood pressure to test for arousal in response (rather than relying on self-reporting), I think his solutions were sexist and backwards and a great example of how blinkered medical professionals can be.
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If we expand the dictionary definition of woman to include some men, we then need a new term to describe... well, actual women. I know a lot of people want to adopt the term "cis woman" for this, but I'm going to stick with "woman". If this is just my personal aesthetic judgement that's fine, the burden of proof is on others to expand it and I don't think the justifications are very good.
Regarding the actress you mentioned, Brian, I can totally see I might mistake her for a man as she's gone out of her way to masculinise her appearance.
I wouldn't feel guilt if I used male pronouns then later realised that was incorrect (according to my own rules) - perhaps surprise?
I wouldn't even feel temporary embarrassment because she's gone to lengths to look male.
I would correct myself to use she/her - even in direct conversation. That might be awkward but it's fine.
If I was in a country, organisation or situation where my livelihood was at risk for using sexed pronouns, I would avoid using pronouns entirely as regrettable prudence. This isn't hypothetical: parts of my social life overlap with these kinds of people and I steer through it, often by saying less, but I won't lie to someone directly.
I don't feel guilty about saying I don't believe in god/heaven to a catholic priest, even if the logical implication is that, from my perspective, they've wasted their life and chances of a happy love and sex life. It's unfortunate but really has nothing to do with me, it's all based on a set of attitudes and beliefs I don't participate in (and personally find regressive).
> Regarding "liking woman a lot", I was quoting the original author - it seemed like an autogynophilic statement to me, the idea that you are sexually attracted to something so much you want to become it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding!
> Yeah it's interesting what you say about Blanchard... the fascinating thing for me about Blanchard is the measurement of groin blood pressure to test for arousal in response (rather than relying on self-reporting), I think his solutions were sexist and backwards and a great example of how blinkered medical professionals can be.
To be clear, I don't agree with Blanchard's typography or think it is correct to modern science. But it was never as simple as how it's typically portrayed. I suspect the author of the original post was being sort of ironic/humerous, though it reads as "this is the Blanchardian sense of why I want to transition."
The main thing I want to stress though is that Blanchard was never in the "every person with sperm must use he/him and be masculine and every person with eggs must use she/her and be feminine" camp. He definitely was (is) sexist and backwards, but I think at the time, he was genuinely trying to help people. Ego seems to have gotten in the way of his updating his views and ideas to match reality as science evolved.
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> Regarding the actress you mentioned, Brian, I can totally see I might mistake her for a man as she's gone out of her way to masculinise her appearance. I wouldn't feel guilt if I used male pronouns then later realised that was incorrect (according to my own rules) - perhaps surprise? I wouldn't even feel temporary embarrassment because she's gone to lengths to look male. I would correct myself to use she/her - even in direct conversation. That might be awkward but it's fine.
> If I was in a country, organization or situation where my livelihood was at risk for using sexed pronouns, I would avoid using pronouns entirely as regrettable prudence. This isn't hypothetical: parts of my social life overlap with these kinds of people and I steer through it, often by saying less, but I won't lie to someone directly.
This goes to what I've been saying in the other threads. It's hard for me to comprehend why this is so important. I can understand easily the arguments about sexual assault, participation in sports, and so on - whether I agree with them or not. But needing to use pronouns that are equivalent to someone's genitalia or sperm/egg creation status so stringently that you'd go out of your way to correct yourself to that (and probably offend Brian and people around them quite a bit, in the process), and that you feel uncomfortable being around people who do what you consider to be the wrong thing... it's hard for me to grok. Code-switching into the terminology that's comfortable for the environment you're in and people you're with is incredibly common and ordinary, we do it all the time.
Why is that particular thing so fundamental and important?
The Catholic priest example doesn't make sense to me. You might tell the priest that if he asked, but if you were having a friendly conversation with the priest and he said "have a blessed day!", would you stop and go "Actually, God's not real, and I won't call you Father, Dave, because I don't believe in Catholicism"? I'm Jewish, and I'd probably call a priest Father and the pope Your Holiness, because it's polite in that context. It's not an admission that I accept Jesus, at least, not to me.
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Is it so unthinkable to you that someone's spouse could support them transitioning? That reads like projection, maybe, to me.