While this is technically slightly more than saying "I'm a woman now", it's only barely so.
I think it's very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less "manly" probably also has that effect.)
And frankly, I doubt you'd refuse [...]
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to "be" female beyond that declaration, I'd attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn't, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don't think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns -- e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn't let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
it's not something you can just do on a whim it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn't that hard, it's easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other "male clothing", so anything a men would normally wear could count as "female clothing". The latter also isn't that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.