To something in the first paragraph of Jackethan's post, the part about just wanting to act like some sort of stereotype, I've come across examples of some like that and some that aren't. One of my oldest and closest friends is a male to female transsexual and she is far from a stereotype and not married to traditional ideas about gender roles or entitlements. She's a very unique and interesting person. There was one other male to female transsexual person a year ahead of us in high school and once out of curiosity my friend went and had a conversation with this other person. My friend was absolutely horrified at what she encountered. This person indeed was a terrible stereotype. All they seemed to care about were things like shoes and purses and such. My friend was just aghast and so much wanted to be distanced from something like this, just thinking how much that is NOT like her and that she does NOT want to be casually lumped in with and seen as like that other person. Though my friend does seem to look and act a lot more like you would expect of a female than a male, she doesn't seem really hung up on focusing on things like the gender stuff, really it seems more like the issue is just about being really freaked out and disturbed at having been born with a type of body that just doesn't seem like what it should be. Interestingly in my friends case, maybe something really did just go screwy since a few years ago while examining something else, a doctor found out she actually does have XX chromosomes, if I'm recalling what she told me correctly.
As for the larger question of what these people are and how to treat them, the way I've always viewed my friend is that she is what she is - as we've labeled it, a transsexual person, male-to-female. She's a person born with one type of body that for whatever reason seemed to not line up with something else about her in how she could think of herself, so she sought to do something to make the two of them line up with each other. Neither I nor she is trying to deny her medical history, the fact of the type of body she was born with, but I treat her as a female basically because for all my intents and purposes, she effectively is. (Though since I don't have much difference in how I treat people based on if they are male or female, it mostly just means I refer to her by female designated pronouns.) There is nothing in our daily doings and interaction with each other or other people which makes her past physical state a relevant factor. Maybe she takes some sort of medications or something regularly, but it isn't as if there aren't plenty of regular females that do. Maybe she's infertile, but so are many females, especially ones over middle age, and she doesn't want to have kids anyway.
