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.

I don't know that you completely understood the scenario I was suggesting. Here is an image of Brian Michael Smith, a transmasculine actor: https://ew.com/thmb/vJSjLdP7CReb9n_px75hvqj5yYI=/1500x0/filt...

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?