The mind of a person, in its authentic and self-aware form, has no gender. Any gender normative behaviour is imprinted by habit or selected by the subject by choice, because that's how they choose to identify.

This person then has two options: to not mind what body they have, because it's irrelevant to who they are; or to select to alter their body because they don't like it, or prefer the aesthetic properties of another body enough to make the alterations.

Analogy: imagine everyone is born and given a car. All the cars are identical in speed, economy and safety, but differ in terms of status and social stigmas attached to the badge on the hood.

When they're old enough to drive it, if they think philosophically about it, it's irrelevant what brand the car is, provided that it works, and we'll say for argument's sake that all the cars work.

However, plenty of people would pay to change their Skoda or Honda for a Mercedes or Tesla badge, and vice versa. This is because the brands have acquired a series of associations in the public consciousness -- Mercedes is associated with prestige, wealth and luxury; Honda with reliability, value for money, fuel economy, and so on.

Some of these associations are deliberate results of marketing and design, and some (in particular negative connotations regarding the drivers) have been earned through what are essentially memes.

Many people jokingly stereotype Mercedes and BMW drivers as assholes, and others stereotype drivers of Japanese or Korean cars as poor -- because they're not in a German luxury car, not because the Japanese and Korean manufacturers don't make expensive luxury cars.

Let's get back to bodies. Since you cannot currently swap your body for another one, and since it has yet to be determined conclusively that there is a neat Cartesian division between mind and body (evidence suggests that the contrary is true, and that the line between mind and body is pretty blurry), people must resort to paying for modifications to their body to acquire the looks they want.

The aesthetic construct of the body is obviously tightly coupled to the modifier-type person's sense of identity. It isn't simply that they want to be more beautiful, they want to feel more beautiful, and they want beauty to be a defining characteristic.

This may stem from abuse in their developing years teaching them that their looks are coupled to their identity (you're ugly so you aren't good enough to play with us) or it may simply be their nature -- this debate is volatile, but more importantly it is irrelevant.

Why is it irrelevant? Because it doesn't matter whether working to unwind the abuse to help people accept their natural body would reduce the popularity if plastic surgery or not, to try and make that judgement across the whole human race or indeed the subset that seeks out body alteration is both dangerous and not possible to do without misjudging someone. There are always outliers, people who get plastic surgery because they see no harm in it and just want something they see as an imperfection removed or corrected. And that's okay, it's every person's choice and no one should be made to answer for their choices in life provided that they didn't hurt anyone else in the process.

This simply covers cosmetic alteration, of course.

When coming to the question of gender re-assignment, it is not so much more complicated as it is more delicate. For starters, it's a bigger change that enlarging breasts or straightening noses.

And while philosophically it makes no difference to the authentic, self-aware person's mind, in reality it is the culmination of a decision in that person's mind to change gender (which may not simply be a desire to look different, but rather a way to visibly manifest and perhaps even justify/normalise their desire to behave in line with gender norms that oppose their biological gender.

Additionally, even if the person behaves no differently and just wanted to change for no apparent reason (for argument's sake) it will have a far greater effect on how the rest of society will perceive that person compared to cosmetic enhancements.

Sure, people can be judgemental of others who get breast enlargement or nose correction, botox, whatever. But more people are likely to be more judgemental of people who change genders.

The very notion, while considerably more mainstream and accepted than even 20 years ago, is still likely to evoke intolerance and discomfort in a lot of people -- they have simply been taught by TV or direct experience that they have to be selective with whom they confide their feelings to.

The rudimentary answer to the question "what is a woman?" is a female human. And in a world where no one is judgemental, there is no historic prejudice, no patriarchal shaping of language and power, etc, this is all there would be.

But that's not the world we live in.

We live in a world where women were historically treated by many cultures as inferior humans who were only necessary for the production of offspring and the performance of housekeeping. Where women who tried to prove that they were anything more were mocked, criticised, ostracised, abused or just killed.

We live in a world where man formed languages in direct reference/deference to himself, and some of our languages even attach genders to certain objects.

We live in a world where a man is defined by his power, and a woman by her beauty and by how closely she matches whatever manifestations of the female gender archetype are en vogue. In other words, by her ability to attract a man.

Ultimately, the same primitivism that caused women to be sidelined as cooks and mothers lies embedded in the marketing machine that pumps out glistening glossy airbrushed idols and bombastic celebrities for women to emulate today.

The real danger of this, however, lies in the reaction. Women do not see through this ruse to make them buy perfume and eyeliner, instead they react the opposite way and try to emulate the male stereotype.

This is like Camus compared to to Heidegger. Heidegger says Sisyphus, keep bringing the rocks, it sucks but if you can't accept that it sucks, you're just deluding yourself and that's no way to live. Camus says rebel, run away, fuck the rocks, rocks are whack.

My point is that a lot of feminists looked at Sisyphus's wife getting her nails and think that carrying rocks is awesome because it's not feminine, and then another wave of feminists come and see other feminists carrying rocks and decide that it's better to embrace being feminine and go to get their nails done. And then you have your actual feminists who look at Sisyphus, his wife, and the other feminists and think how utterly absurd the whole picture is, and work to change the problems in society through literary criticism and post-structuralist psychoanalysis.

The reason why people have problems with gender re-assignment is that they have thousands of years of history and opinions making them make emotional and thus bad judgements about the whole situation, and most importantly, not thinking critically about why they are making those judgements. They're just on autopilot.

What is a woman? A woman is a female human. What is a female human? A human with a female body.