You and your S.O. are conflating gender identity, physical gender, and expression. Basic transgenderism is very simple: the uncanny feeling that your physical g

You and your S.O. are conflating gender identity, physical gender, and expression. Basic transgenderism is very simple: the uncanny feeling that your physical gender is wrong. You have male parts but they don’t feel like they should be there (kind of like a phantom limb), or female parts, or vice versa. There is ample research showing that this can manifest extremely early (3-4 years of age anyway), long before cultural training about gender roles can play a part. You cannot simply tell these people to try harder and accept their assigned birth gender; that’s like telling gay people they should be straight because it would be easier to fit in. Well, yeah, it would. But it doesn’t work. Now, there are certainly people who are not transgender in that specific way, but want to express aspects of the stereotypical “other” gender or both genders. That’s a different thing, and they have a right to that too, but it’s very wrong, and misleading, to put all these people into a single bucket. Of course, it should be unsurprising that people who are “physically transgender”, besides feeling there is a physical problem, might want to express themselves differently too. The fact that these two characteristics are often correlated may be what is steering you wrong.