Yeah, I do tend to think if someone is keen to take estrogen and likes the effects that’s a strong sign they might be a woman. The tweet is implying men also wouldn’t even consider taking the estrogen, as though to point out that cis men like being men, and that if you don’t like being a man and would even consider taking the pill, it’s a sign you are trans. That might also be generally true, but I think there is murkiness there.

Your use of words like “misinterpret” instead of “interpret” and “illusion” instead of “perception” makes me think your issue is normative rather than descriptive. It isn’t about whether you are trans, but whether you should be trans. Getting from is to ought in this way exists in the realm of ethics, not epistemology.

It’s important to understand how we can get from is to ought within the neurological view I talked about earlier. The first thing to understand is how and why our brain forms the connections that it does.

One important mechanism for our brains making connections is Hebbian learning: neurons that fire together wire together. If concepts occur in tandem with one another more frequently, like feminine and submissive, then they become implicitly associated with one another, allowing you to more easily bring up one idea when thinking about the other. This is how decades of popular culture depicting certain ethnic or racial groups as criminals can cause implicit bias to form without the person ever believing in it explicitly.

However, the brain can also modulate connection forming with far fewer similtaneous exposures. Think of frightening experiences causing a sudden phobia of whatever the person was experiencing at the time. If you get scared around a fluffy animal enough times, you might become scared of the animal without the scary thing itself. This is caused by “reward” or “reinforcement” mechanisms encouraging stronger associations to form in certain circumstances. The brain evolved to make connections form more strongly when the stimulus is more salient.

It may not be obvious, but this gives insight into how and why we want. We want because it helps us survive, from wanting to get away from that which is bad for survival and seeking that which is good for it. A lot of these wants like hunger or the desire to breathe are buried deep in our brains, as if we don’t satisfy them, we die. You can’t force yourself to suffocate by holding your breath, as you will fall unconscious and your brain will automatically start breathing. We want certain things and sometimes cannot change that. Even if we manage to hold off on eating till we die, we’ll be hungry till the end.

You may be asking why I’m focusing on wants rather than trying to answer an ethical question, but I’m doing this because I realized ethics has always been about what we want. We bridge the is/ought canyon by wondering where else our sense of what “should be” can originate. We evolved to want survival, so we think we should survive. We want pleasure, so we think we ought to have it. We want companionship, money, life, liberty, and happiness. We need no better justification than wanting it finding a way to exist with other people and their wants.

…

Finally circling back to your inability to fully accept that you ought to be a woman, you need to accept that your wanting it is enough. You clearly want to be a woman more than anything else, and other people being bigoted is all the stands against it on the side of other people’s wants. You deserve the same thing you think we all do.