I suspect you're too narcissistic to appreciate this point, but do you notice how much time you've spent in this reply telling me, a complete stranger, what I have and haven't done and do and do not think? I know from experience that this is your M.O., but trust me when I tell you you aren’t nearly as insightful as you imagine yourself to be.

I'm not trying to play the middle. I never have. I write what I believe to be true. And I'm not being defensive, unless you think defensiveness is anything other than saying "Ah yes, you're right oh wise one," when somebody half reads what you've written and then projects their insecurities onto it.

The reason my article is not like writing "the trouble with the black community" is that I'm not writing about the trans community at all (this is what I meant when I suggested you hadn’t understood the article). If you wrote an article called the trouble with "Black" and were talking about how that single word conflates a whole bunch of people with different ancestries and cultures and perspectives, it might even be interesting.

I'm writing about a word, "trans," which has become hopelessly overloaded. I say this verbatim in the article. I'm talking about how this word, and the various ideas various people have in their head when they say it, makes it almsot impossible to have an honest, sensible, compassionate conversation about trans issues.

Some people, when they hear the word "trans' think only of perverted men in dresses trying to sneak into woman's spaces. Some people think only of transvestites. Some think only of people who transitioned with no regrets and are perfectly happy. Some think only of their trans friends who would never hurt a fly and just wants to live their lives in peace.

ALL of these interpretations describe real people. But none of them, obviously, describes the trans community as a whole. And if you're trying to talk to somebody whose interpretation is different to yours, and don't establish what you're talking about, you end up taking past each other. This is especially true when you have people trying to set policy with these conflicting definitions.