Burnwinter but there are people who identify with animals.
I liked your gym bro gambit at the end, but this is where I do think the wokey-wokesters get things a bit twisted.
Identifying is a very strange concept that isn't well conceived. My trouble is that is suggests preference, a sort of flippant notion of choice grounded in impulsive desire or convenience that is akin to deciding whether or not you want pickles on your cheeseburger.
Trans, in my understanding, is not a fetish or a sexual preference, although a trans person retains both as does anyone else. Rather, it is a response to dysphoria, the literal carrying of pain, which combinations of genetic and epigenetic factors cause a person to be subject. The pain, including its specific causes and its reduction, manifests according to possibility and circumstance. For some it may be a social release valve, for others it may be hormone therapy, but what seems to be consistent across trans experience is dissociation as a technique for survival, especially in environments that restrict other options.
Pain is good at bringing people together. Communities form around people experiencing dysphoria and all the adjacent challenges that brings in an unsympathetic world. Just because there is some perceived silliness or absurdity expressed within these communities does not mean that what brought them together was silly. We see such activity in more traditional fraternal and sororal orders as well, religious or otherwise.
I personally believe it is possible to over-identify, but sometimes it's better to go too far and find your sweet spot than to never go far enough and carry unnecessary pain.
We know that genes are expressive and the properties they confer are emergent. We know that epigenetics are real. We know that we have latent qualities or properties that make up part of who we might be, but may never become manifest. In this frame, identifying as anything, including as cis, is no more or less ridiculous than identifying as anything else. But when you are carrying pain, identification is one of a myriad of strategies that may reduce that pain, even if it might become counterproductive after a point (like any therapeutic).
Muñoz posited disidentification as an alternative, to which I am more sympathetic than the identity politic of fighting fire with fire. It reminds me of the Palestinain sumud or even satyagraha. Rather than assimilate into bigoted binaries or set out explicitly to counter them, work to transform cultural logics from within, valuing the importance of local struggles of resistance over grand gestures of structural change.
