> If she pretends to be a man instead, she isn't challenging gender roles, but is implicitly agreeing with the harmful idea that women must adhere to some roles, men must adhere to other roles, and anyone who doesn't do this is defective and must change themselves to fit this mould.

I appreciate your rational input. And to be honest, I don't completely disagree with this part. Trans people are not unaware of it either. However, [I must explain that] I was using "gender roles" in a very broad way, including pronouns like "she". This person doesn't need anyone to use specific words to describe their sexual phenotype if they don't want it. We don't have different a different form of "he" for children vs adults, nor for black people vs white people. It is a societal construct and they're allowed to opt out.

> Even worse is how such non-conformance to gender roles has been medicalized, so she may end up taking opposite-sex hormones, having her breasts removed and other cosmetic surgeries to appear as some odd facsimile of a man. Rather than rejecting this malignant, cultish ideology that advocates physical destruction of the self in lieu of bodily acceptance.

This is an extremely disgusting and transphobic thing to say though. I hope you didn't realize how hateful it sounded. Gender-affirming care is widely supported in the medical community as a life-saving intervention. As for whether or not you think it's appropriate for another person to have their body surgically altered, what do you think about tattoos? About facial reconstruction for burn victims? About a mastectomy for cancer? And why do you even care what other people do with their bodies?