Hey there, I really want to have this conversation, but this wall of text is making my head spin. And more importantly there's too much for me to be able to respond to in a coherent way. ,This is almost 2000 words long! I'm not trying to police how you express your ideas, but in the name of conversation, could you keep the length down a bit?

I'll try to reply to the key points in bullet form.

1. I don't think cis people consider themselves the "default owners" of gender. Male and female have existed as broadly immutable categories since time immemorial and are used to describe animals as well as humans. Typical behaviours exist in almost all animals that is divided along these lines. Gender isn't simply something cis people made up.

More importantly, our society is structured around these categories in some instances because they are useful. Especially for keeping women safe. So what you're asking for is a restructuring of the way society functions and protects women. This isn't necessarily unreasonable. There are good reasons to challenge gender norms. But there's a significant burden for you to make sure that your proposed restructuring doesn't make it harder to protect women.

2. Your point about legal protections being built upon notions of gender is falling foul of the conflation between sex and gender that I pointed out earlier. Protections for women are largely built around sex. It's just that for most of human history, sex and gender have been treated interchangeably.

That said, in the case of bathrooms, I completely agree that while most people think they're segregated by sex, it's far more accurate to say they're segregated by gender. And specifically, gender expression. In fact, I wrote an article making exactly this point. There are numerous very strong arguments for the position that strictly enforcing sex segregation in bathrooms would make women and trans women less safe.

But sport, for example, is segregated by sex. Gender doesn't come into it because gender doesn't affect physical performance. Similarly, in situations where people are forced together, prisons for example, the question of whether we're really segregating by sex or gender becomes extremely important. Because people can't just leave if they are uncomfortable or in danger.

3. The elephant in the room for most of this discussion is that we're still applying gender norms to trans women. Most of what we're saying here applies to trans women who "pass". But of course, that's not the case for many trans women. And more to the point, there's a significant push to make the standard for "womanhood" nothing more than, "I say so".

So again, if, as seems to be the case, the goal is restructuring society so that "woman" becomes a category that I can simply opt into, then this fails the requirement of continuing to protect women as effectively as our current society does. You talk about only focusing on cis women's oppression and protections, and I hear you. But it's extremely important to remember that women are around 51% of society. This isn't a small issue we're talking about here. And the protections they have, have been extremely hard fought for for centuries.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't restructure society. Societies change all the time. But how they change is important. And the arguments I hear coming from most of the trans community don't take women's needs seriously enough. To borrow your phrasing, they're focused only on the oppression and protection of trans women. Given that women are a group that's at least 50 times as large, this is unreasonable.