Wu claims to be expert in subjects that the layman probably doesn't know an awful lot about, but someone who knows the subject can shoot her down. Jake is ignorant about everything, right down to the basics of adult life. Jake can't even keep his own lies straight.
The trans thing is what I find most baffling of all. It's his entire selling point, the only thing he has to make himself stand out from the legions of would-be game devs and writers. With a five-second Google search, he could come up with reams of information on being trans, people's experiences of being trans, living as a trans woman, medical issues, the psychology of the condition and everything else he could need in order to construct a convincing narrative. But he doesn't. He just pulls a massive Googleshng out of his capacious arse that manages to get everything so incredibly, spectacularly wrong that even the most obsessive TERF would be blown away by how badly this man misrepresents trans women.
I mean, dysphoria is absolutely essential to the status of trans people as a protected minority. The reason there are rules and policies regarding transphobia is because the official story is that trans people cannot help it, they were born that way, and to live as their birth sex is distressing and debilitating to them. And here's Jake basically saying, "Nah, it's fine." Jake is placing being trans on a par with being a punk or a goth, a fashion statement that can be dropped when necessary.
This goes to the heart of why "self-identification" is never going to be a viable plan for trans people.
If you want to say being trans is about being dysphoric, wanting consistently from childhood to be the opposite sex, feeling wrong in your body, all of that stuff, then there's going to
have to be some gatekeeping.
You can't have self-ID and say that being trans is about dysphoria or anything else, because it's not, then. If anyone can ID into it for any reason, with no one to check whether you have a specific set of symptoms that validates your condition, then you lose the ability to say "trans people need government-paid cosmetic surgery," or anything else about trans people in general. You also have to accept things like half of trans prisoners being sex offenders.
Is it fun to have to jump through hoops to get your condition acknowledged? Nope. Ask someone with multiple sclerosis or leukemia how fun their diagnostic process was before they could begin treatment. And yet, even though the diagnosis sucks, you can't just obtain treatment for it based on your say-so, or even based on external observation of some basic symptoms that could be those diseases. Mental illnesses and learning disabilities require months of waiting for diagnosis, interviews with teachers and friends (imagine the shitshow if that were a requirement for trans gatekeeping), assessment questionnaires, and so on.
And that gatekeeping is good for people with those conditions, because if all you needed for an ADHD diagnosis was a consent form, every speed freak asshole would give themselves a diagnosis, and before long, everyone would just assume ADHD was code for "amphetamine addict without the social skills for a dealer." Who would this hurt most? The people with "classical" ADHD, whose condition would now be a joke and a much bigger impediment to getting a responsible job. This is already happening in Silicon Valley, because of unscrupulous doctors happy to give Adderall to anyone who talks about feeling spaced-out and distracted after working a 70+ hour week and getting 4 hours of sleep a night.
The people hurt most by self ID are classically-presenting transsexuals. At least when women say our language is being taken away, we have the protection of the fact that most people really are just being polite, and know that "woman" means something about someone's sex. The transsexuals, though, are genuinely going to be lumped in with gnomebeard incels, stocking fetishists, multiple personality freaks, and tampon voyeurs. Very few people will give enough of a rat's ass to think there's a difference. Since I started TERFin' a long time ago, the people I've had my sympathy increase the most for are the transsexuals, who mostly know they're kind of fucked in the head but would just like to be left in peace to be fucked in the head, like most of the rest of us.
