The hardest thing about starting my transition journey was convincing myself that it was okay to be trans. Not in the sense that it was okay for other people but not me to be trans, but also not in the sense that I thought it wasn't okay to be trans.
I try to see the good in everyone. The standard progressive mentality of viewing conservatives as bigoted has always, to me, fallen into the same category as religion, in that I would need more proof than just stating it, and nobody seemed able to provide it.
Thus the challenge I faced at the start of my transition was asking why, if being transgender was okay, did a huge chunk of people not support it? And what answer could that question have that wouldn't reference there being good and evil people, while also allowing transgender people to exist?
Through this question I became more involved in politics. I began to try to understand my own moral framework, and the moral frameworks that underlie modern politics, to try to come up with an answer to that question. My belief was that if I could understand what made my politics different from someone who is opposed to transgender people then I could ignore their criticism on account of it coming from a different moral framework.
It did work, quite well actually, for vocal criticism. I understood my political philosophy and theirs and knew that while some people would be opposed, that I wasn't, and that in a diverse society we're bound to run into people with differing political philosophies from our own.
It works less well when the criticism is from the legal system itself.
I had been delaying on getting a new passport to get a better passport photo, because with each month that passes I continue my transition further and further. Because of how slowly the Biden administration had acted in the rollout of the X gender marker on passports, I had assumed I would have a similar timescale to change the gender marker on my passport before that policy was reverted.
I was proven wrong immediately. Apparently transgender passports were a day 1 priority of the trump administration. So now my passport has the wrong gender marker for at least another 4 years.
It doesn't sound like a big deal, and to be honest, after a couple days, it wasn't. The trump administration redefined gender to be based on the gametes you have at birth in law. I don't have gamete dysphoria, I have gender dysphoria, and thus as long as everyone understood that the marker on my passport was only an indication of gametes and not my gender I didn't really care.
It does make me less motivated to change my name with social security though, knowing I can't change my gender marker. I needed to change my name on my passport to have a legal document with my correct name, but social security can probably wait another 4 years.
Then, more recently, the UK supreme court ruled that, for the purposes of the equality act, trans women were men, and trans men were women. The EHRC then came out with a whole document describing their guidelines given the new ruling that consistently referenced trans women as biological men, and trans men as biological women.
This bothers me in a way that the trump executive order definition didn't. Trump is an individual, and so the executive order definition almost seems like a personal criticism in my mind, one with no legal power. Trump's agencies are following the executive order but only because they're under the executive branch.
This, however, is a much larger legal redefinition. And a legal redefinition bothers me because laws are supposed to be the consensus of the population, a sort of aggregated morality. If, legally, trans people are considered their birth gender, then it feels as though society considers them their birth gender.
Which, of course, is what causes the gender dysphoria in the first place.