For me, gender is how you express yourself in the world and the concept of transitioning is very simple: you transition at that moment you decide to present in the world in a way that is different from your sex assigned at birth and that you are doing so because the gender in which you have lived does not match with your own gender. Transitioning is a journey and all journeys are of different lengths and happen at different speeds. The destination for one person can be completely different for another, and both are valid.
To my way of thinking transitioning is the journey one takes when changing sex completely by way of surgerery, nothing wrong with that at all. I think a preson who has transitioned is ?one who has gone the whole way with surgery; I also think that someone who spends ther entire time en femm and not in drab and has not, and is not interested in sex change surgery must be considered to be trans gender
I started life a lost man now I am a found woman
Not sure I have anything to add to this thread. But it has been an interesting read. Thx OP. At the end of the day it's just labels, we are who we are.
My opinion surely doesn't count for much on this topic. In the end, I would just take someone's word on it if they say they have transitioned. Since I'm not a government agency, a doctor, or an insurance company, that should suffice.
I do think one's opinion on the overall topic is heavily influenced by one's age and the kind of media messaging we receive in our youth. When I was a young kid in the late 60's, early 70's, I was fascinated by the occasional news story of someone having a sex change, and fantasized about what it would be like if maybe someday I could do the same. But the sensationalistic messaging in those news stories always hyped up the utter rarity of such operations, the huge expenses, the necessity to live in some foreign country like Sweden for year or two, and the implied threat that your name and photo would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world and you'd be treated like a freak show if you went through with it. There was also the clear message in those stories that you weren't a woman until the operation... or even afterwards depending on what society decided you could be. So I can totally understand why some people my age or older are not so open-minded about any of it. They were trained that way.