for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it.
Yes, of course, but he issue is whether that imposes obligations on other people beyond politeness.
We can try to generalise that question beyond sex & gender: if you are weird, non-average, out of the mainstream -- to which degree should society bend and accommodate itself to your strangeness?
I think politeness is a pretty big deal, and a large fraction of what transgender people want is basically politeness plus ordinary decency.
I confess it's not clear to me what "the issue" actually is here. VoiceOfRa was evidently annoyed or offended or something by that list of false/oversimplified things people believe about gender, but rather little of the list is actually about transgender people or involves what he describes as "a man claiming to be a woman" and as "delusions and hallucinations" and I don't know what sort ...
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.