You said "this makes sense", but the rest of your comment is essentially still in disagreement.
> 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".
> 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".