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-at all these steps, there is possibility of error in the identification. you're trying to translate a really basic, gut-level awareness and bring it up to the level of a conceptual statement. it's very hard to pinpoint what's wrong and people misattribute all the time. this is just introspection! in any instance of this, even a much more trivial one, it can take a wrong turn and yield an answer that’s off, which you might not realize for a long time. i might feel vaguely bad.. manage to trace it back to this morning.. realize it’s centered somehow around my sister.. eventually land on it being a certain comment i made in the conversation at breakfast.. and determine that i feel awful because i was overly critical of her. it could seem like the right answer because i’m getting close, so i might settle there. but with even further investigation and discrimination, it could turn out to have been a different emotional shade completely: i thought it was guilt for what i said, but actually it was regret that i hadn’t spoken up back when the honesty could have made more of a positive difference to her. or alternately, it could be that i snapped at her defensively, i got hurt by something she said just prior to this and the part of the conversation i'm fixated on is a decoy- the negative feeling actually coming from whatever insecurity she managed to brush against. i really like your description, that you start to try to put it into words, getting more precise: from “bad feeling” to “something wrong” to “this is somehow related to sex”.. eventually way down the line maybe you come to something like “i don’t identify with my biological sex, but with the opposite gender” that feels true. but that has been derived, there is so much that has gone into reaching that conclusion. it's not beyond challenge, and that’s what someone is doing when they express skepticism about the claim. they’re not automatically right making a call from the outside via observation or from their armchair of course, but this person doing the introspection is not necessarily right either just because they're up closer to it. friends and therapists help people disentangle and get to the root of what they’re actually feeling all the time; there is no rule that says the subject is always understanding themselves correctly.

Then you are at odds with a phantom, because that's not my position at all. I don't hate nominalism because it says concepts are man-made, I hate it because it says man-made concepts have no basis in reality because only particular concretes exist.

Neither. Such statements are normative. Gender and sex identify metaphysical characteristics but ideas like "a rational woman cannot want to be President" are different. For example, it is incorrect to say that "human beings are selfish". It would be correct to say that "humans should be selfish". In a similar way, it is incorrect to say that "girls play with dolls". It would be correct to say that "girls should play with dolls". I'm not sure what word I would use to denote such normative characteristics. Perhaps, "feminine" and "masculine" would be good terms. In popular usage, "feminine" may denote some characteristic that is "becoming of a woman" (woman qua woman). It is normative. For reference, Cambridge Dictionary defines "feminine" as "having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for a woman". The "suitable for a woman" part is normative. Of course, other dictionaries define things differently, stressing qualities traditionally associated with women, but that definition may be derivative (derived from the traditional standards of society). These 2 words come the closest. I think this is also the way AR used the words 'feminine' and 'masculine'. In this sense, these two words do not identify characteristics that humans universally possess. They refer to virtues (in the same way that "selfishness" refers to a virtue everyone need not possess). They refer to characteristics that one must possess. Femininity and masculinity are treated as virtues in popular usage (validating their usage as normative concepts. By comparison, gender isn't treated as a virtue. It is a metaphysical concept). However, the dictionary definitions aren't very good. So new definitions: male = male animal; female = female animal; man = male human; woman = female human (of a certain age); feminine = characteristics that are becoming of a woman; masculine = characteristics that are becoming of a man. Male/female are sexes. Man/woman are genders. Feminine/masculine are virtues. Sometimes, the term "manliness" is also used to denote the corresponding virtue. Virtues aren't arbitrary. (Again, disclaimer: English isn't my first language. I don't even know what a subjunctive is. I can only talk about the simple, obvious meanings of these terms)

Is there something about the Rand quote or the first couple paragraphs with which you disagree? I'm mostly relying on Rand and Wikipedia for my understanding of the subject, but if you want to point me elsewhere, that would be great. I think nominalism is essentially the rejection of universals, and the idea that words have no basis in objective reality, they are merely names for categories of particular concretes. This is expressed in "non-binary" gender theory by applying the rejection of universals to concepts of "male" and "female." There is no "male" or "female" concrete thing in reality, therefore they don't really exist and are socially constructed concepts. Hence: "non-binary" which is just a six-dollar word for "not male or female."