Thank you, cis person, for standing with us trans people.

I am no friend to Matt Walsh. I don't know how to say that strongly enough to express my true feeling. My impression of the man is that he is self-aggrandizing, self-promoting, self-righteous ... the list goes on. I would love to talk to him myself. He has had the easy break of dealing with people who either aren't capable of dealing with him or have been deceived, as you say Dr. Grzanka was.

I was surprised by your framing of essentialism as taking the position that sex and gender are the same thing. That is not my grasp of the term. Essentialism, as I understand it, in this context, is that idea that gender, as something potentially divergent from sex, has objective existence: "essence."

Unfortunately -- because so many trans people have bought into the radical feminist meme that gender is a "social construct" -- gender must be conceived of as essential in order for gender divergence to be legitimate. In order for being transgender to be real, gender itself must be real. I have encountered several trans people who grasp this intuitively, without understanding it logically.

The "what is a woman" discussion is easily answerable, even in Walsh's terms. Let us assume that only two alternatives for any individual are possible: either the person is male, or the person is female. The question then becomes, what makes a person female?

There are two alternative: (a) a human being is nothing more than a meat machine, and maleness/femaleness is strictly a matter of biology; or (b) a human being is something more than a meat machine, and maleness/femaleness may be at least partially non-material in nature.

Option (a) will be difficult for a religious person to argue from; but, assuming he can: the jury is out on whether genitalia and genetics are the slam-dunk on gender that social conservatives think they are. What do we not yet know? There is evidence -- not yet conclusive -- that brain morphology and function may deviate from genetics; and there are plausible theories how this might happen. Simply because something is not proven does not mean it does not exist. Scientism is not science; and Walsh is guilty of the former, by the way.

Option (b) makes the question impossible to answer. Can a female soul inhabit a male body? Some orthodox Jews believe it can. Intangibility does not mean unreality; there are numerous examples, showing that some of the things we value most are things we cannot prove are real, love being perhaps the most important.

What this means is that gender, as something that exists and that is potentially divergent from sex, falls into the category of belief. People who are transgender have a very good reason for believing that gender is real; people who are not transgender have no reason at all to believe gender is real, unless they possess some sympathy for people who are transgender.

Walsh's question, "What is a woman?" is answered quite nicely by his wife, who said that a woman is an adult human female. The real question is, "What is a human female?" Walsh will quickly run into problems with that one; his answer will either make gratuitous assmuptions, or be circular.

I want to note that your article seems to treat the terms "gender" and "gender identity" as interchangeable; and they must be different. As I noted, gender must be an objective reality for gender divergence to be real; gender identity, on the other hand, is someone's subjective impression or experience of gender.