Part of the reason why the mental disorder thing doesn’t stick is that a gender identity is pretty key to our self conceptualization of who we are as people. It’s really hard to explain it to cis people in a way that makes sense to them because so many don’t have a situation that is comparable. In my talks with cis people while some do have a binary gender identity that matches their physicality and they feel the same dysphoria / euphoria we do… they aren’t the norm I’ve observed. Most cis people seem to be without a strong gender identity. If they suddenly woke up as the opposite sex they might be perfectly chill with it.

But imagine you have a situation where you’ve always seen the world through the lens of a self where your brain recognizes members of the other sex as being your people. You struggle to empathize with members of your birth sex and you react with horror as your body changing not only triggers a sense of body horror it makes it so other people start treating you in a way where it’s like they stop recognizing you. Internally however this is a constant, your personality, veiws and every choice you’ve made, every social interaction you’ve ever had has been colored with this subtext.

I suffer from a fair amount of gender dysphoria, but I haven’t transitioned due to other factors. But if the option to suddenly just be happy in this body and conceptualize myself fully as the gender that matches this body… I wouldn’t take that option, the idea of even doing so is sickening. At some level this IS me. If you changed it you’d violate something deeper than just flesh.

A lot of people look at us first and foremost as a problem. A disorder not in that we are sick but that we do not submit to the order that is easy for other people who don’t want to take the energy to empathize or understand. That we fight to engineer our spaces to make living our lives more fulfilling to US is too much for some people who just try and discredit and flatten our expression to a narrow version of what is acceptable because we are expected to endure a permanent level of “tolerable” unhappiness… Largely for the sake of THEIR convenience.

Yes, we fight to change things but so much of this "I would fight for your freedoms… But " rhetoric is ignorant of the rubric we have for what constitutes a life worth living and a life worth actually fighting for. It’s hard to fight that tide because we are in the position of having to explain color to the blind when we talk about things like gender identity.

Ultimately I don’t care what random people “think” about me. But reflecting my own body back to me in language that refers directly to it means that you are doing something that makes me feel like shit. I accept a certain amount of random interaction as just the cost of doing business of going out in public but there’s certain places where I should not need endure that. Like the people who want to be my friend and feel some measure of closeness. Or in places made safe by our engineering where the general rule of the space is that no one should have to deal with the status quo outside where we can’t let our walls down. Our homes, queer spaces, or places where we’ve adequately advocated for our needs and the people in charge of that space have sided with our interpretation of a better status quo - physical and digital tangible territory claimed by us. The majority of spaces in the world value cis people’s comfort over ours but they whine over the implications that there is any other way of doing businesses because they are fighting for the social engineering that makes them feel most comfortable- just like we are doing. Some people and places it’s fine to have actual standards for behaviour because it allows you to actually relax in a public space without steeling yourself for the next random hit of having to perform for someone who really wants nothing more than you to not be their “problem” .