This makes sense, but I guess my question is rooted in my sense that the front that we've chosen to engage to push for re-evaluating gender is the absolute most controversial front we could have chosen. A subtler approach at re-evaluating rigid gender stereotypes—taken decades ago when we instead began to push for reassignment surgery and pronouns—could have already paid off in spades by now.
As is, the rhetoric surrounding transgender issues essentially demands that we accept that there are boxes—male and female—which people ought to be sorting themselves into, and it terrifies social conservatives because it actively encourages people to sort themselves into the boxes rather than accepting the lot they were handed. A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now, instead of creating the polarized warzone we have today. As a bonus we'd have been making life more comfortable for everyone in the middle, people who don't feel the brokenness of rigid gender norms strongly enough to want to switch entirely but still suffer from feeling the need to live up to them.
If most transgender people experience a strong biological component that demands reassignment for biological reasons, I can understand why our chosen approach was necessary. But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?
> A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now.
That's happening. There's been a lot of progress, and it hasn't finished the job. Not even as far as cis people are concerned.
(I guess it would be coherent to believe that the subtler approach hasn't worked because of less-subtle approaches like a push for transgender health care. I think that's naive.)
It's a bit cliche, and you might be tired of hearing it, but for what it's worth this conversation brings to mind the "disappointed with the white moderate" paragraph in MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail.
> But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?
I think your sense of "sufficiently changing" isn't aligned with the sense of "sufficiently changing" I would need to tentatively grant that, if you think such a change is an easier cultural sell than "some people are born in the wrong body".
> If gender is a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like?
I suspect "identifying as" cisgender is the outcome of this kind of cookie-cutter pressure to much the same degree, if not more. This tends to go unnoticed even in conversations where people are directly engaging with the ideas. (Even though that's part of what "gender is a social construct" is meant to suggest.)
A rhetorical question for cis people: to what degree do you feel your cisgenderness is a result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? I suspect there's more meat to genuinely unpacking this than you might think. Trans people's answers to this might not be that different from cis people's.
"It's a social construct" is an invitation to peek behind (or at least recognize) an abstraction; but it's just a peek into a quite complex story.
"Social construct" doesn't necessarily mean something to rise above, or to dismantle, or to deny. Money is a social construct. Human rights are a social construct. Friendship is a social construct. Sure, one can usefully imagine oneself "above" those things at times, but it's unclear whether aspiring to that is a good idea, and realistically most people won't attain it even if they do. Culturally we must find some relationship to those things anyway, we cannot ignore them.
As I see it, gender is an aspect of a messy evolving cultural system. Yes, the concept of "transgender" is part of that system, though it certainly doesn't fit into that system in quite the same way as "man" and "woman". Trans people tend to challenge or pressure many aspects of this system in some ways that cis people tend not to, but that's not the same thing as denying the system in whole. (Some people do see "gender abolition" as an aspirational ideal; many don't.)
Broadly, I think "is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.