Pretending to be a train and identifying as a gender are different things
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
If we accept that someone can identify as a different gender, we have to accept that someone can identify as a train, or a dolphin, or anything else. The logic is the same, so the whole idea falls apart.
The comparison sounds clever but it collapses the moment you look at it. A train is a vehicle. A dolphin is a different species. Neither of those is an identity: they are categories of object and animal that a human being simply cannot belong to. Gender identity is different in kind, not just in degree. It is an internal sense of self that exists on a spectrum, that humans have always had, and that every major medical and psychological body in the world recognises. The child pretending to be a train at the weekend knows exactly what they are doing, and so do we. That is play. Gender identity is not play, and conflating the two does not make a philosophical point: it just avoids the actual question.
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