> All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".

No, very literally the opposite of that. I'm saying if someone calls themselves a man, I believe them. I don't care if they wear dresses or slacks, I don't care if they're muscular, I care what they tell me their identity is, because it's not my job to decide other people's gender. I'm not the gender police.

This is what's great about queer communities and why they tend to be so accepting of non-gender-conforming expressions. Because their criteria for gender isn't what your chromosomes are, or how you dress, or how you act, or what your presentation is, or what stereotypes you fit into -- their criteria is asking you your gender.

And it turns out that's a really supportive environment to be in if you're a man or a woman or any other gender identity and you aren't in total alignment with social expectations of that gender. It turns out that having people ask what your gender is and just saying "okay" regardless of how you present - is pretty great and goes a long way towards removing the pressure to present in a specific way or live up to social expectations for that gender.

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> A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting.

I love the gall of repeatedly misgendering trans people against their wishes, and then acting like you're defending their gender expression by doing that. If a man calls himself a man, just hecking believe them. You deciding for someone else what their gender is is not feminism, it's sexist prescriptivism. You looking at someone who tells you they're a man and saying, "well, you just feel that way because etc etc..." is not you breaking out of gender norms, it is you putting people into a box based on your personal criteria for what makes a man or a woman. It is you denying them agency to identify outside of that box.

That's not progressive, you're not helping them. You're imposing your social criteria for gender onto them, very openly against their wishes -- it is a denial of their agency. But oh of course, they don't know what they want, right? They're just confused, right? You can't trust them to know what their gender identity is, you have to treat them like children and talk about how they're being pressured into whatever decisions they're making. /s

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> What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection?

I'm curious, when you say that a "woman" calls themselves a "man" -- what criteria are you using to decide for them what their gender is? I mean, you're saying they're wrong. You're saying they're not men, so you must have some kind of test or standard that you're using to determine for them what their gender is, since you're so confident that they're wrong about themselves.

Is that test perhaps... what their chromosomes are? What genitalia they were born with? What's in their pants?

You can say you don't care what's in their pants, but you obviously do or else you wouldn't be misgendering them. You have a test you're using for whether they're a man or a woman, a test that they're not measuring up to, and I can pretty confidently guess that test is biological.

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Look, in the interest of being charitable here and trying to build bridges, I want to at least take the chance that you're saying all of this because you genuinely just don't understand how transgender identity works. Earlier, you said:

> this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.

If transgender identities worked that way, it would be toxic and sexist. Calling someone a woman because they act in a certain way or wear dresses, or calling someone a man because they like football -- all of that would be extremely sexist.

To be very, very clear, transgender communities don't do that.

Transgender communities do not impose gender on anyone, your gender expression and presentation are not your gender identity. If you are a transgender man and you are still in the closet, and you act in a traditionally feminine way to everyone around you, transgender communities will... ask you what you want them to refer to you as.

There is no imposition here or expectation that you act in a stereotypical way. Trans theory rejects the notion that other people get to decide for you what your gender is -- regardless of what you wear, how you act, or how you think. If you're saying all of this because you legitimately believed that transgender people were going around saying, "sorry, but you wear a dress, that makes you a woman", the really good news is that nobody does that. You can be a man and wear a dress and act "feminine" however society defines "feminine", and you can still use he/him pronouns and you will be welcome in trans communities as a man. Trans communities are extremely supportive of this, this is not a group of people running around saying "if you act too feminine then you're a girl now, sorry we're just deciding that for you."

The only people who are deciding for you whether you're a man or a woman based on their own criteria -- are terfs and gender-critical movements.