yes it's highly offensive, it is a still-acceptable form of othering of usually trans women that needs to be stamped out

My transphobic uncle literally corrected me using this shit when I came out as trans.

"I am trans."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I'm a woman."

"You mean you identify as a woman."

Gender is real as a social construct but fake as an actual thing. Nobody is any gender. Except for trans people, they paid the iron price so they get to have gender. If you want to have gender you have to earn it.

Every now and again I see something like "women and people who identify as women". Absolute load of garbage.

Maybe this is just autism but I don't really understand "identifying" with stuff in general? Like- I am a leftist. An atheist. A white American. A reptile lover. The closest I can kinda come to is where I prefer describing myself as gay rather then lesbian, but both words describe me and I "am" either. I'm just listing factual statements. I don't really understand how I'm "identifying" as those things. They are just literally true.

I identify as therefore I am

Not disrespecting, but as someone who changes their mind a lot, I personally feel differently. Gender is a part of identity, and one's identity is in large part, well, what one identifies as. I am a communist because I identify as one. I was a man when I identified as one. I now have no gender because I don't identify as one. Similarly, I do say that I identify as my sexuality.

Being written off as a 'misguided queer' for that is rather frustrating, I must say.

On official forms in the UK now, they ask what you identify as so I guess everyone filling out forms now says they identify as whatever. For example it will say:

Do you identify as:

Man

Woman

Other

Prefer not to say

OOOOOOO right there with you. It really takes less effort to not use the phrase ever too, and I can never think of a time that I heard it where "but they /are/ X" isn't just as if not more respectful (provided that mentioning someone being trans is a respectful/necessary detail to include within context).

"They were born as a boy but they're a woman now." Vs "They're biologically male but identify as female." Like you can practically FEEEEEL the calipers in someone's hand when they say the second thing.

Fuck even just "well my sister /used/ to be my brother" in casual conversations where that detail is relevant (and she's out btw) communicates the information just fine (and also it's a little funny every now and then when it takes someone a second to put what I'm saying together imo lol).

How about people who are gender fluid? They might identify as a man, woman, or neither, depending on the circumstances.

agender people are taxonomically nonbinary and most nonbinary people are trans (except for maybe some of the handful of kids raised by tryhards, but that's probably rarer than the people who had an error on their birth certificate that turned out to be prophetic)

we identify as the more specific labels because they're useful.

when i hear that construction i assume there's a little more to it if you were the person's close friend but it's not practical to go through a whole dissertation on microlabels and exceptions or qualifiers when we're just passing acquaintances.

How do people feel about the "i use x pronouns"?

To me it gives a similar energy. Even though I think most people say that because others do.

I don't know. I have some alterhuman identities, and I don't think I physically am those things. But also I have been trying to figure these things out mostly without access to communities or other people who have been in these worlds longer than I have. I find myself saying "identify as" a lot diplomatically too, but that's probably something I shouldn't cede.