While I think JKR might have been a little too drastic, and that there can be solutions to make both trans and non trans people happy, I would have never attacked her that way, because I understand her concern that a solution based exclusively on the gender felt by anyone, if implemented not enough carefully, could undermine some biological females rights and even their safety. Examples have been made about men being allowed by a new clumsy law to access changing rooms and anti-violence shelters (that anyway must exist also for trans people, as they too are very often victims of violence) for women, but it just took me a few minutes to find another serious danger:
If self declared genre is made the only legally valid one, biological women could lose the right to have the same job opportunities, as the most ruthless employers could be tempted to fill all female workplaces with females that cannot get pregnant in a totally legal way. And non trans men claiming to feel women could undermine trans people rights too this way.
Anyhow, I understand that even in the worst case scenario, trans people aren't by any means the danger for women, the real danger would be a law that allow any man, even with bad intentions, to be legally considered a woman just claiming it.

Hey, I have some questions about transgender theory, and since you seem to have taken up its banner, I hope you don't mind me inserting myself here and putting them to you:

I was assigned male at birth, presumably on the strength of my phenotypical characteristics. I present as "male," and so I was labelled "male," and raised as such, and told that I was, in fact, male. I would like to accept "who I am," probably as much as anyone else, and maybe more than some (as I am fairly invested in such philosophical questions). So, what is the process by which I can determine whether I am cisgendered or transgendered? How do I know that the original assignation was accurate? How can I tell?

I don't want to anticipate too much, but here's my initial concern:

I am an atheist. Many times over my life, I've been approached by people representing various religions as they have attempted some form of conversion. When pressed for evidence for their claims, I have often been met with the answer that I should conduct some form of introspection. That the truth of their religious claims should somehow reveal itself to me -- in the form of a deep sensation of knowing. Which is to say, a feeling.

But I am mistrustful that my feelings, however strong they might be, necessarily reflect truth. Thus, if I were to ask of myself (or "God," via contemplative prayer, though to assert either construction seems a form of question-begging), "Is the Book of Mormon true?" and I get back some sensation of "yes," howsoever strong, howsoever compelling, I still could not take that as meaning that the Book of Mormon is, in fact, true. Because it may be I feel that way for other reasons unrelated to the truth of the matter.

So I worry that your answer might be along the lines of, "If you consult yourself, you'll know whether you are male or not." And that this "knowing" will again, really, be a question of "feeling." Yet it doesn't seem to me that "feeling like a male" is sufficient for me to say that I am one. If there is any reality to "being male" in the first place -- if it refers to any actual thing -- then that must be more than just my feeling on the matter. (And if it does not refer to any actual thing -- if it's just a label devoid of all substance, an empty sound that can mean whatever I wish it to mean, with no more seriousness than for me to pronounce myself a "mome rath" -- then what are we really talking about, and why should anyone care? Surely someone who claims to be male, and who asks for recognition on that score, must believe that being "male" is meaningful, is real, and refers to something beyond the mere existence of that feeling.)

Besides which, I'm not sure I could identify what it feels like to "feel male," or recognize that my experiences are those of a male. After all, I only have my own feelings, my own experiences, and I have no direct basis for comparing them against anything or anyone else. I've never not been myself; I've never been anything other than me. Even if I were to try to imagine what it feels like to feel like someone else, I am bound to do so through my own understanding and experience, and thus I probably do not have a wholly accurate understanding. It will still, really, be a self-exploration.

Likewise, if I "felt female," I'm not certain how I could possibly know it. I can't even imagine what it would feel like to "feel female," as though that should be a different feeling than I have currently. I wouldn't know what to look for. I mean, really, suppose that's the case. Suppose my experiences are "female experiences," and that I'm just unaware of it -- how could I be brought around to the reality of my situation? How would I recognize it?

Perhaps I could ask other men and women how they "feel," and try to compare myself with them on that basis? There are certainly ways in which I typically differ from the reported experiences of other men -- and sometimes I find greater sympathy with women. But my experience of that has always been on a case-by-case basis: I identify with some men in some respects, and not others; and with some women in some respects and not others. I've never found any consistent thru-line of "this is how men feel" versus "this is how women feel" in what I've seen or heard from others. Rather, I've seen incredible variation, and so I've always been tempted to explain my experience as just being that of another varied individual -- essentially unique; I've always assumed that, if I am male (as I have always been told), even if I differ from other men in every other respect, such variation is obviously possible. I am proof that it is possible.

But is this wrong? If I am sufficiently different from other men in my experiences (insofar as I can tell such a thing), does this mean that I should finally conclude that I'm not actually a man at all? If so, what is the nature of the experience that tells a man that he is a man, and a woman that she is a woman, apart from their phenotypical characteristics?

If you don't feel that you are a man, but instead a female, I believe the best way to determine whether this is a transgender identity is to speak to a therapist who has experience and training in this area.

That said, I don't believe it often requires any form of deep introspection or meditation in order to establish transgender identity. A key feature in those who are transgender is that they felt a consistent and often inescapable feeling that they were the opposite gender over a long period of time. If you are comfortable with who you are, that is all that really needs to be said about that.

Now, I understand the aversion to accepting thoughts as reality, but I feel there is an issue with the line of questioning you've presented me. You are comparing using "feelings" to make determinations about the world and using "feelings" to make determinations about yourself. It is entirely valid to doubt your feelings on the world, but if you are consistently sad for long periods of time and have a lack of interest in normal activities, it is also entirely valid to look at your feelings as a way of understanding yourself and understanding that you likely have depression. It is no different with transgender identity. Using your feelings to understand your feelings is entirely reasonable and expected.

But real quickly, I want to address one more point. What does it mean to "identify" anyways? This seems to be somewhere people often get tripped up. To identify as male is somewhat different that identifying "with" something. "Identifying as male" refers to how an individual sees themself. "Identifying with men" is typically a means of comparing yourself to individuals. Individuals express a lot of variation, as you have said, and that is entirely natural. Variation isn't inherently a symptom of a mismatch in self-image, it could simply be an individual's form of expression. This is precisely why you shouldn't look to define yourself based on your relation to other individuals. Self-image in this sense is something that comes naturally at a young age. While it may take time to truly accept it isn't really something that you should go in and try to change to better align with some subjective reality you have experienced.

This.

In the past few years she has been pandering a lot to the far left Twitter mob.

It's all fun and games until you have a different opinion. You can just stay quiet or speak out and live with the consequences.

She chose to speak, now she must face the consequences.

As for the actors, they are just in damage control mode because if they dont say something that means they are in agreement.

I'm starting to get really sick of all this cancelling about the slightest problematic shit and mostly being done by people that are far worse and are mostly not a part of those that should be offended.

The Jenna Marbles thing this week broke my heart,she made racially offending but not meant to be offending jokes years and years ago and people now bring it up as a reason for why she should be destroyed while she was always such a sweet person.

To be fair, Jenna Marbles kind of cancelled herself and I think that demonstrates the opposite of what you are trying to say. She recognized the harm of her behaviors, apologized for them, and decided to take a step back from Youtube because she wasn't having fun and she didn't want to have a negative impact on people. She didn't need to do it, and there wasn't an angry mob demanding she do it. If you check her social blade account, you'll see that she lost no subscribers, and in fact gained 100k subscribers. She made the decision on her own. 

I think that "cancelling" someone, as a phrase, has lost almost all of its meaning. The scope of the phrase has become far too broad. It seems to have become the new bogeyman, in place of "SJW" for people to rail against the "snowflakes" while saying nothing of actual importance...

bolded :I see she is destructive for her own good self because this whole culture has made her believe she is bad or was bad and when good meaning people selfsacrifice themselves for those things and for hatefull people that will never forgive them,i just feel sad about it.

Sec bold: If you and others in here understand what it is then i'm happy enough with the meaning it still has,it is indeed broad and the behaviour is shared with almost all different groups of people and it is partly instinctive to humanity but it is always good to try and make others selfaware of that.

Feel free to feel sad. However, justifiable criticism should not be considered cancel culture, but somehow it is. The concept of "regret" should not be considered cancel culture, but somehow it is. Again, this is my issue with the phrase. You can't just stretch it over hundreds of unique cases and then go "Cancel Culture Bad". It is empty language at that point, because "cancel culture" is not bad. "Cancel culture" isn't really much of anything. There are aspects of internet justice which are bad, but there are also a lot of good things stuffed into that box.

Thanks for your reply. Trying my best to format sensibly on this forum, and it's a struggle for me. I'll ask your patience.

Anyways, I don't feel that I'm not a man, but instead a woman -- I don't feel particularly that I'm a man or a woman, and I don't know how I would recognize either condition. I don't really know what it feels like to "feel like a man" or to "feel like a woman"; I only know what it feels like to be me.

I've been told that I'm male, all my life. At least in part, I'm asking you how or why I should either accept or reject that. If I weren't a man, but a woman, how would I know it?

(I'll add that I'm aware that there are also "non-binary" gender identities available, but adding more options doesn't help me answer the fundamental question I have as to how I should recognize which one is true of me.)

This is what I feared: that it would come down to a "feeling." Is that all there is to gender -- to being male versus female? Is it nothing more than a feeling? But even so, it doesn't really help me. Even if I had this feeling that I was the opposite gender, and even if that was all that was required to make me of the opposite gender (because that's all that the opposite gender consists of: feeling different), I wouldn't know whether the feeling I was having really was the "feeling of the opposite gender." How would I know that "this is the feeling that the opposite gender experiences"? How would I know I was right?

Do you understand my question about this? It's like, imagine that I was trying to tell between two different flavors, apple and orange. Ideally, I could take a bite of an apple, take a bite of an orange, and now, having experienced both flavors, I would be in a position to judge whether any given flavor was "apple" or "orange" (or something else).

But now imagine that I've only ever eaten apples. That's the only flavor I know. But someone tells me that the apples I'm eating don't necessarily taste like apples, they might taste like oranges. Fair enough -- I couldn't say that wasn't possible -- but how could I know whether that was true in my own case? How could I decide that the apples I'd eaten didn't really taste like apples, but oranges, if I had tasted no other flavors for comparison? If I couldn't taste any other flavor.

As to being "comfortable" with who I am, I don't know that I've ever felt particularly comfortable with anything in the world, and certainly not myself. I don't associate life with comfort, generally speaking. But diagnosing any particular discomforts to some fundamental disconnect between my gender and phenotype, or social categorization? That doesn't seem like something easy or obvious. Honestly, it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would require deep introspection or meditation to even begin to assess honestly.

I accept that I might not "feel like" a certain style of shirt on a given day, and not need to dig much more deeply into it before changing my outfit. But to feel as though my body is somehow mismatched with my soul or spirit or mind (or however we conceive of our internal reality)? Imo, that's a profound notion worthy of profound contemplation, especially before taking any irrevocable, life-altering action on its basis.

I agree that feelings are meaningful. Feeling sad is meaningful and the simple fact of feeling sad, over time, may indicate depression (because this is how we understand or define "depression" in the first place; it is tautological). But the divide between "using your feelings to understand your feelings" versus "using your feelings to understand the world" may speak to the crux of this issue.

If gender is nothing more than a feeling (and nothing less -- I don't mean to demean feelings themselves, as they are meaningful, and important), then perhaps this is one issue settled (while opening what I believe would be a near infinite number of other cans of worms). But is that true?

I guess one way of approaching this question is: can a person ever be mistaken as to their gender identity? Can someone assigned female at birth mistakenly believe that he is female, when the truth of the matter is that he is transgendered, is actually a woman? Can a cisgendered male incorrectly interpret his feelings as meaning that he is really a woman, when he is actually a man? Is there some reality beyond the fact of their feelings and beliefs, which can then be discovered? Or is the only reality, "I feel this way," so "this is what I am." And if that's so, is it something that can change (as, in my experience, feelings can change over time)? Can a man feel like a man, and thus be a man, but later feel like a woman, and thus be a woman, and then, later, a man again?

But wouldn't we agree that not all things are open for this sort of identification? There's the "joke" some people make about identifying as an "attack helicopter," but no, of course not. Of course a person is not an attack helicopter, even if he sees himself that way.

Perhaps we would say that a person could not earnestly see himself that way, and that the "attack helicopter" line is just disingenuous rhetoric? Yet people do mistake themselves at times, and see themselves incorrectly, do they not? A person might consider himself highly intelligent, and identify himself as a genius, yet we don't grant that this makes him a genius. Because eventually we believe that "genius" refers to something real, something in the world, and that's what makes a person a genius or not, not the mere fact of identification. Rather, we strive to identify what is real.

It's maybe more to the point (while potentially also distracting) to consider the case of Rachel Dolezal. I may be mistaken on the details, but it's my understanding that she identified as black and "passed" as black (to a strikingly successful degree). Yet I've heard many or most (of the progressive voices that usually advocate for transgender theory) dismiss her claim to identity, because: being black is considered something real, and not a matter of how one feels. I may be ignorant on this issue (almost certainly), but it seems to me that gender (or sex, at least) has greater external reality -- a sounder biological basis -- to it than race. Sexual division has the pedigree of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; race appears to mostly be a social fiction of the last few thousand years, at most. Yet between the two we consider race to be the thing immutable, a fact of one's biology, and beyond the power of one's feeling or identification to change? Does this make any kind of sense?

Yet for the purpose of determining one's "gender identity," I don't see what possibility exists apart from "defining yourself based on your relation to other individuals." Before a child can determine whether they're really a "man" or a "woman," male or female, they have to have some idea of what these concepts mean. And how are they to know -- how do they learn it at all, if not by examining external examples of "man" and "woman," and drawing conclusions based on the people they've met? And how are they to subsequently come to an "identification" without comparing themselves against what they've seen?

I just don't see how a person is meant to "feel" their way to an identity, without any experiental basis for comparison, and further without defining themselves in relation to the people around them. But if this does happen as a comparison, as I think it must, "naturally at a young age," then isn't there the possibility for error? Suppose a child came to believe that "men" were one specific way, because that is all that they know, all that they have seen, and then proceeded to define themselves in those terms -- either "I am like that" or "I am not like that"; thus "I must be a man" or "I must not be a man."

Couldn't that be a mistake, accounting to not understanding the variation we've agreed upon, and that men can actually be many different ways, many different things?

Yes ofcourse,i think the same as you say in your comment except for the cancel culture not being bad.

I'm always against mob mentality and surely when it is as cowardly and entitled as this one,when i speak of cancel culture i speak about those that are out to destroy others and i do find it a bit odd that you think that term needs your defense.I'm not stretching it out over all cases and i only comment on what i have seen myself.

Bolded: That is obvious indeed and i never thought otherwise,what you assumed does not even come close of what i was trying to say.