> You tell them “you are not who you think you are, you’re wrong about your own life”

> Those are perfect examples—have you ever had a problem getting someone to refer to you by your preferred pronoun? Have you ever been denied access to your bathroom? For me, such things are unthinkable.

The only bathrooms I have owned were in apartments I lived in, and obviously nobody has ever prevented me from accessing those. I was apparently a fairly androgynous kid and was mistaken for the opposite gender many times until a fairly late point in life, but I didn't particularly try correcting people. Who knows. Either way, if people suddenly decided to switch the pronouns they use to refer to me, I can't imagine it being a big deal, and I would be confident that I will still wake up, experience and interact with reality like any other existing, corporeal being the day after.

> Well, their existence as a trans person does, when you reject their own identity and replace it with one you have chosen instead. So: yes, you’re telling the person that you’re talking to that they don’t exist, that someone else, with a different name and gender exists instead.

Are pronouns special in some way that other aspects of identity are not? I consider myself Good At CS, and multiple decades of my life have been spent on reinforcing/lending substance to this belief. I've certainly been in situations where people with minimal CS skills seeking to solve CS-related problems refused to listen to my proposals or acknowledge my expertise, and this stung, but at no point did I get the impression that I somehow faded out of existence in the process. More generally, what do other people's beliefs about me have to do with my existence? Am I like one of those tropey deities from fantasy novels whose powers and very ontology scale with the number and fervor of believers?

It seems to me that if this is your model of reality, classical liberalism with its distinction between negative and positive rights might not even constitute a meaningful philosophy to you. If a trans person only "exists" in the minds of other people, is there even a sense in which a person can be (negatively) not interfered with? The setup seems like a bizarre inversion of the (bad) "violinist argument" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion) that has been brought up for abortion, except now the trans person depends on other members of society to donate their epistemological resources instead of their kidneys in order to continue existing. I'm for the right to deny third parties the use my kidneys even if their continued existence depends on it, and I don't see why this principle should not extend to donating them part of my mental model of the world.

> That’s an odd solution—gay people want to get married also? Well then: nobody can. Making everybody miserable instead of happy is one way to put everybody on the same footing, but not one I don’t think many people would have been happy with. Definitely I’m glad they didn’t go with that.

That's a weird way to frame it. What benefit do I gain from being legally married? What part of it do I lose if s/marriage/civil partnership/g is run on the legal code, and I am now in a civil partnership as far as the law is concerned? If I don't lose anything, why should I be miserable?

(Do you think I derive non-misery from the legal construct that gives me tax breaks being called "marriage" in the books rather than something else?)