CMV: There’s a large degree of variance in how “strong” people’s inner gender identities are, so not everyone has a strong enough innate sense of gender to allow them to experience gender dysphoria.

The trans community generally adopts these 2 principles in communication (which I think are good):

• Trust someone when they claim their identity or experience is XYZ, just give them the benefit of the doubt, you don’t need “proof”.
• Other people’s experiences may be different from your own, so don’t push your experiences onto others as if it’s how things work for everyone.

These principles seem to be contradicted by the most common way trans people respond to cis people claiming that they don’t have an inner sense of gender and would just accept whatever body they’re born with (and the social treatment that comes with it). Trans people claim that everyone has a gender identity, that if not in congruence with their body, will always result in gender dysphoria. How do we know that this is true for everyone?

I think cis people should be given the benefit of the doubt when they claim “I don’t feel like a man/woman; I just am” because we cannot know that it’s false. In this particular situation, trans people are basically saying that their personal experiences override cis people’s experiences—violating the second principle listed earlier. What if that’s just a possible variant of the human mind, to not have an innate gender identity whatsoever, so some people are able to go along with whatever cards they happen to be dealt with no gender dysphoria, while some people cannot?

I think, just like there’s lots of variation between different trans people’s experiences of the transgender condition, the “intensity” of gender identity itself can also vary greatly. Thus, it’s not unlikely that there’re lots of cis people out there who truly do not have a strong enough innate sense of gender for them to prefer living as one gender more than another. Is it far-fetched to think that a substantial portion of the cis population (if not the majority) would just “go along with it”—and not try to transition back—if hypothetically they woke up in the bodies of their opposite sexes?