The one thing I don't understand about the mental illness of denying your gender, is why it is limited to gender.
Well, that's one of my points, although I wouldn't call it denying your gender or mental illness, rather choosing your gender. In the vast majority of cases we can speak of someone as male or female based on biological characteristics but there are cases (statistically few) of hermaphroditism, which today are called intersexuality.
What I don't agree with is: here you have 86 types of gender, choose the one you like the most, and if you get tired tomorrow you can choose another one.
When I say that someone is a man or a woman, I am referring to objective biological characteristics, not to a feeling.
If we do not limit what I have put in bold to gender, we reach obvious absurdities as in the example of the diets below.
I see no problem in people feeling whatever they decide and I think is pretty much their own thing. I think that, in the name of tolerance, there is too much public attention to gender and gender identities, but I guess the reason is that it has been something hidden and secret in most societies and still considered criminal behaviour in many places and something rejected by society in others.
I am all right with whoever speaking about it, I have enough critical thinking and experience of life to decide what I believe or not but, to start with, if we are not talking physical gender, then what is exactly "gender"? Is it, for example, violence exclusive of the "male" gender? Is it caring only for the female?
Now if we are we simply talking about sexual preferences....
No, we are not talking about sexual preferences. Gender may or may not be linked to sexual preference. You can feel non-binary today and like women, tomorrow you can feel male and like men, and the day after you can feel female and only like male-female transsexuals. That's the theory, and I'm giving you simple examples, it can get much more complicated.
I think it's fine for you to have the sexual preferences you want as long as what you do is between consenting adults, but the issue of gender, especially in the case of fluid, is a mental masturbation .
If we were to apply it to other areas, we would think that the person is not right in the head. If I tell you that today I feel 70% vegan and 30% carnivore, it is normal that you would think that I am an idiot and if you see me the next day and I tell you I'm doing the keto diet, you see me again the day afer and I tell you I'm only eating fast food that day, etc. you'd think I was crazy.
If gender is an abstract feeling of who you are...
I do not agree with this. When I say that someone is a man or a woman, I am referring to objective parameters. Maybe you were biologically born a man and you feel like a woman. I can understand that. You may be born a man and like men. It is normal, there have always been, even in the animal kingdom and there will always be. But come on, the 86 genres and changing them as I feel like it is a joke that passes for cool nowadays.