We might be basically in agreement. I think there’s just ambiguity about the word “belief.”
If an employer says “Here, we all believe in environmental sustainability and human rights,” they don’t really care what their employee believes within a pure inner space that is detached from reality. The employer is telling employees how to behave. Don’t invent new procedures that are environmentally wasteful; don’t release customer data that will cause people to be deported. You may ask: May an employee secretly believe, deep inside their own pure inner space, that these values are wrong? And, I guess… yeah, whatever that means? If the employee has organized their life so they actively practice environmental sustainability and human rights in everything they do, including by encouraging others to do it, yet somehow they manage to privately dissent in an undetectable value system that they keep deeply hidden and secret, then…good for them for achieving whatever they’re trying to achieve? Because they are actually doing good in the world while remaining attached to wrong beliefs in a meaningless, inconsequential way?
I think that, if an employer tells someone to “believe” that trans people are the gender they say they are, the employer is really giving a simple instruction for how to treat trans people. It’s shorthand for saying: Look, there aren’t 100 rules for how to treat trans people. Just act as if you believe that they are the gender they say they are, and there’s no problem. To make it easy on yourself, please actually believe it. If the employee has real questions about gender, that’s fine. They can do gender philosophy in their spare time as long as they are not asking their “questions” to outwardly delegitimize other people. Their belief that trans people aren’t “really” their gender becomes a problem when it affects their words and behavior. Which it probably does, rather quickly.
Beliefs about other people’s gender are a bit different from beliefs about gods, angels, Mercury in retrograde, etc. because beliefs about gender inherently affect how one interacts with others.
