> So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology.

I have some scepticism about all this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.

There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)

For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.

Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.

> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.

Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?

I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria

> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset.

The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty. Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse