Thank you Kari, for the thoughtful, heartfelt response. But it serves to reinforce my point. I would love to respond to your claim that you have never been a man. I would even like to agree with it, if I could. But it would be absurd for me to even begin to evaluate it, let alone understand it, or for us to have a conversation about it, without first defining what a man is.

I'm not sure either why your brain and body seem to function better on estrogen than testosterone. But we know that biology is full of anomolies, exceptions, mismatches, and mysteries. It seems to me that we can make room for these things, study them without judgement, and have compassion for those who suffer as a result of them. I am not convinced, however, that the only solution is to redefine (or worse yet, reject the very notion of a definition being important, or possible) traditional concepts of sex and gender.