Consistent methodology regarding transgenderism?

From what I can tell, much of what could be called the “skeptic community” seems to be fully on-board with the emerging narrative about transgenderism. But what I’m not seeing a lot of is skepticism applied towards that position. Of course, skepticism is not the same as “rejecting”, but it is a demand that those making a claim bear a burden of proof. Put bluntly and (while not intended as such) no doubt inflammatory, the claim that a person of one biological sex “feels/identifies” and should be acknowledged as another seems like an “extraordinary claim.” I’m not aware of “extraordinary evidence.” I’m struggling to see the difference between this and the many faith-based positions that skeptics rightly criticize. If a skeptic encounters someone saying “I know, deep down inside, that God exists. He listens to my prayers. I know him like a friend.”, we can acknowledge the subjective experience while being highly suspicious of the objective reality being claimed. I do not intend to be disrespectful, but how is this different than a biological male claiming to be a trans female, or vice versa? It is an internal experience very real to them, but does it correlate to anything external/objective? And to be skeptics, shouldn’t we ask how this could be tested/verified? No doubt some people who claim to be trans are wrong (whether they be honestly mistaken, joking, or lying for some other reason). So, as skeptics, shouldn’t we ask how we can tell the difference? And if there isn’t a way to test/falsify the notion, “withhold belief” in the phenomenon?

One possible methodology for verifying could be examining the brain patterns. Ignoring the irony that this test presumes a general validity of the gender binary, it has some merits. You claim to be a woman in a biologically male’s body; we have found general patterns of activity that correlate with women; your individual brain activity more closely aligns with our model for women than men. But would we really want to say that only people who pass this test are “really trans”?

Outside of this, most of what I’ve seen is people pointing out genetic rarities that exist outside of a strict binary. These biological factors a no doubt valid in their domain, but I don’t see how they falsify “species homo sapiens is sexually dimorphic.” Species Homo sapiens is bipedal, but some people don’t have legs. Species Homo sapiens has less hair than their ape cousins, though people with hypertrichosis often have more hair than any non-human ape. Hell, Newton’s model of gravity is still used in most cases even though it has exceptions that GR is required for. A model need not be considered completely false/useless because there are outliers. An important and relevant side note is that intersex and trans are two distinct things; most intersex people would not identify as trans, and most trans people have no intersex condition.

One other thing worth mentioning is the apparent absence of the phenomenon in immediate-return, foraging, nomadic hunter-gatherers. Phrasing it that way seems redundant, but there are many tribes called “hunter-gatherers” who do not reflect our prehistoric ancestors. I’m referring to groups like the !Kung, Hadza, Pirahā, Penan, Netsilik, Korowai, Mbuti. Many will bring up the Two-Spirit phenomenon at this point, but that is actually largely irrelevant. Those groups were not in this category of “reflecting our prehistoric ancestors”. Even though some of the tribes that had the Two-Spirit notion were non-agriculturalists, their tribes actually had a history of agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands, and (often forced) Western migrations and encountering the Bison caused them to adopt a nomadic-hunting style. But they still maintained large social groups, in the hundred and sometimes thousands, which is quite different from the bands of 20-100 people that we as organisms evolved for. Larger and thereby more complex societies have emergent properties beyond what our evolutionary history has prepared us for. If transgenderism is genetic, innate, or somehow a “normal” thing for species Homo Sapiens, it should be found in the groups most reflective of our origins, and to my knowledge it is not. They don’t even have taboos for it; just like they don’t have taboos against using particle colliders…. If, however, it is as Dawkins suggested large a cultural, mimetic phenomenon, it isn’t surprising that it would be more prominent in larger complex groups. **see footnote 2 for a distinct but relevant point**

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*Obviously, part of the discussion is linguistic; depending on how words like “sex, gender, man, woman” are defined. That’s not the part I’m addressing; as long as terms are defined a path to mutual understanding is possible.*

**I’m also not interested in the legal aspects here; that is a separate discussion. Many aspects of the legal system(s) are dependent from objective reality (such things as “money”, “property”, etc.); I’m interested in the ontology of transgenderism here. The ontology could affect policy, but need not.**