That's fine, so let's not dull the axe by chopping at problems that aren't there.

The reason I objected to your statement is that it's doing this kind of chopping. Indeed, it's chopping at the shared reality: "How does one objectively determine that an identification is “genuine?” Seems like a black box to me."

In practice, part of our shared reality is that we can, in fact, come to a plenty-good-enough determination of many subjective states of being.

It is understandable, but wrong, to adopt an attitude of denying every sort of transgender experience because we may not be convinced by some sorts--indeed, trans people themselves aren't (typically) convinced by Avi Silverberg's (transient) identification as a woman for the purposes of breaking the Canada women's powerlifting record (previously broken by the less-transiently-identifying-as-a-woman trans powerlifter Anne Andres).

It is also understandable, but wrong, to react to pointless challenges and harassment by declaring that there never need to be challenges--unfortunately, a good deal of trans advocacy has wandered well into this regime, but it is also the case that there has been and continues to be a lot of gatekeeping of gates that don't need to be kept--for instance, fully transitioned trans people who pass easily and use the bathroom that matches do not need Republican legislatures telling them that they have to use the obviously "wrong" bathroom.

There's a heck of a lot of intellectually immature lazy retreat to extreme and binary views of things instead of grappling with the shared reality of it's complicated.

If you want to take a strong stand for people who deeply identify as, and take what steps they can to appear as, a different race than the one that we would pick for them, knowing their genealogy, in parallel to the strong stand we might take for people who really, really feel like they're in the wrong body and take what steps are available to change their sexually dimorphic characteristics to the ones that match their self-image, sure, that seems like a noble fight.

But, upon witnessing reflexive intolerance to the former group, it is not justified to decide that reflexive intolerance of the latter group is fine. The problem is the reflex: no, you can't! might be the right answer, but if so it ought to be a thoughtful answer, not a rationalization of a gut feeling that arose after 0.3 seconds of consideration.

And then there are a lot of gray areas which need to be discussed and thought through, keeping in mind the needs of everyone in society; if multiple sides make bad arguments and are insensitive to others' needs, it doesn't lessen our obligation as advocates of shared reality to come up with a reasonable compromise, even if in practice it does make it a heck of a lot harder.