The supposed fear that people believe there is some magic change to your chromosomes the second you chose to identify with a gender is patently absurd. There is obviously no real support for such an idea—it is a straw-man that no one reading the phrase "trans women are women" in good faith and taking even a second to look into what trans people are saying would assume was the intent.
There is no category of women that is entirely identical, where you couldn't distinguish between them.
Some AFAB women can't give birth. Some of them have more androgynous bodies. Some of them are black. Some of them have different levels of estrogen, or grow up in different social circles that impose different expectations about how they should act, or provide different opportunities.
Nobody is saying that AFAB women don't have different experiences than trans women, any more than anyone is saying that Black women don't have different experiences than white women. Womanhood has always been a broad category, and there has never been a point where you could accurately say that there are no distinctions between the subcategories within womanhood.
If TERFs believe there is a fundamental quality that makes them indistinguishable from every other woman, then they are being absurd. Even if you ignore trans women, that world doesn't exist.
To quote myself:
> When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfectly to the world of appearences. But this does not mean we can jettison concepts and ideas altogether. In fact they seem necessary. So the fact that we cannot seem to come up with a perfect criterion for defining "biological woman" does not mean that we can dispense with that category.
So, regardless of whether we can specify criteria by which we can decide whether or not someone is a biological woman, the essential concept of "biological woman" seems to me (and to gender critical feminists) to be indispensible. To me, because it allows us to provide a good (though not perfect) answer to the question "where do babies come from?" and to gender critical feminists because they view the concept as central to their political/philosophical project.
In fact, we can use your method of argument to demolish any category or concept. Take death for instance. How do we define death? By what criteria can we say anything is dead? Take life. By what criteria can we say something is alive? In fact we can't answer these questions perfectly and this is well known. But I don't see any use in getting rid of concepts like life and death which seem central to how we all understand the world. Along the same lines, I don't think we can dispense with "biological woman".
And while all of this may seem "absurd" to you, terms like "AFAB" seems "absurd" to me.
Right. But nobody is asking you to dispense of the category of women, what we're doing is we're agreeing with you that the category is fuzzy and we're saying that genitalia and sex assignment at birth do not clearly designate identity.
Nor are we getting rid of the category of cisgender and/or AFAB women. Trans women are not (and have never claimed to be) biologically identical to AFAB women. If trans women were claiming that they were biologically identical to women, then many of them wouldn't be taking estrogen. They are very aware about their biology :)
But acknowledging the fuzziness of women as a category overall means regularly reassessing our social norms about how women are expected to act and what their bodies are expected to look like. This is especially true in instances where we see people who are sharing a lot of experiences with other women.
Many trans women know what it's like to be catcalled. They know what it's like to be discriminated against at their jobs. Their experiences are not identical to everyone else's, in the same way that women's experiences in these areas are not all identical depending on their backgrounds/bodies/environments. But there is enough overlap that it is useful to group them together under the banner of womanhood. Because there isn't a perfect criterion for "woman", and part of feminism is critically examining biases about what hoops people need to jump through to be considered an "acceptable" woman -- regardless of whether those hoops are set up by men, or by other women.
> To me, because it allows us to provide a fairly good answer to the question "where do babies come from?"
Well, except for infertile women, who are fully woman and fully valid regardless of their ability to have children.
> and to gender critical feminists because they view the concept as cental to their political/philosophical project.
I disagree that trans women mean that these political/philosophical goals can't be achieved. To me, this is just gatekeeping, I don't see a real motivating need for this kind of exclusion. Trans women do not have an agenda to take away women's rights, many of these people are feminists themselves.
> And while this may seem "absurd" to you, terms like "AFAB" seems "absurd" to me.
The absurdity is not that you have different opinions about the definition of a woman, the absurdity is your implication that acknowledging the womanhood of trans women is tantamount to saying that their experiences are completely identical to cisgender, AFAB women, or that it's destroying some kind of sacred bond. That position is absurd because cisgender, AFAB women do not have identical experiences with each other.
You wrote:
> If it means "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women," that seems wrong to me and to the vast majority of people.
That would be an absurd thing for anyone to claim about any attribute of womanhood, and nobody is doing so.
In fact we are being asked this. Which is why trans women are competing with biological women in sports. How is that not dispensing with the category of "biological women"?
You don't seem to realize it but your entire argument is based on undermining the category of "biological women" by showing that it isn't "real". You've typed a lot of words attempting to do that.
> I disagree that trans women mean that these political/philosophical goals can't be achieved. To me, this is just gatekeeping, I don't see a real motivating need for this kind of exclusion. Trans women do not have an agenda to take away women's rights, many of these people are feminists themselves.
All categories are "gatekeeping". To say X is X and not Y is "gatekeeping". This is why "gatekeeping" is such a dumb term.
> The absurdity is not that you have different opinions about the definition of a woman, the absurdity is your implication that acknowledging the womanhood of trans women is tantamount to saying that their experiences are completely identical to cisgender, AFAB women, or that it's destroying some kind of sacred bond. That position is absurd because cisgender, AFAB women do not have identical experiences with each other.
I don't define everything by "experiences" so this is all gibberish to me. But, again, we are being asked to deny the distinction between biological women and trans women. This is very explicit. You're choosing to ignore it because it's inconvenient to your argument.
No one, literally no one, is saying that AFAB and cisgender women do not exist.
> your entire argument is based on undermining the category of "biological women" by showing that it isn't "real".
If your criteria for the category of "biological women" is dependent on having a strict bright line distinction between AFAB/cisgender women and everyone else, then yeah, I am trying to get rid of that bright line, because the bright line doesn't exist and has never existed at any point in history, and it's silly and unscientific to say it exists.
However, if your criteria for "biological women" is not dependent on some kind of mythological bright line, then no, I am not trying to undermine anyone or anything. I'll say it again, no one is claiming that AFAB/cisgender women do not exist as a category, and no one is claiming that they do not have unique experiences within that category. No one wants to get rid of the category of cisgender women.
> In fact we are being asked this. Which is why trans women are competing with biological women in sports. How is that not dispensing with the category of "biological women"?
This is too large of a topic to get into right here and would be too long of an aside, but I do not see strong evidence that trans women are destroying the competitiveness of women's sports, I do see strong evidence that the blowback against trans women risks harming AFAB/cisgender women who naturally have unconventional levels of testosterone or unconventional body types. I'm also a little bit thrown by the idea that forcing trans men to play in women's sports is going to somehow be an improvement over what you're worried about.
This harm to non-conforming cisgender women is not only isolated to sports, by the way. A side-effect of transgender bathroom bills is often an increase in harassment towards masculine cisgender women who face harassment when they use bathrooms that match their birth sex. A general increase in acceptance of gender fluidity and gender expression has been (as far as I can tell) largely beneficial to cisgender non-conforming women.
> I don't define everything by "experiences" so this is all gibberish to me. But, again, we are being asked to deny the distinction between biological women and trans women.
Arbitrary distinctions between women are less important than distinctions that affect their experiences and their fight for their rights. So if your position is that women should abandon shared experiences and solidarity over gender rights in favor of arbitrary biological distinctions, then guilty as charged, I am undermining that effort. Because it's an unhelpful effort that ought to be undermined.
However, outside of the TERF world, I do think that most women consider shared experiences and solidarity with other women to be important, and to be a part of their gender identity.
I don't think anyone is asserting that, at least not the way you say. You're sort of responding to a perceived strawman with another strawman.
What gender critical folks are saying is that the more radical arm of trans-activism (particularly the powerful Self-ID movement) looks at biological sex as superfluous and arbitrary, and thus any spaces, programs, or resources that have been reserved for women up to this point must be made available to men if they so much as declare themselves to be female. Any requirements to "commit" to a transition, in terms of time or physical/hormonal adjustment are attacked as transphobic.
And then there's the language policing that the self-ID'ers want to enact, wherein, for example, biological women would be referred to as "menstruators", and transphobic phrases such as "breastfeeding" would be prohibited.
And in fact, breastfeeding itself is under attack in some TRA circles as an inherently anti-trans behavior, because obviously it cannot be part of the "shared experience" of women and transwomen.
I know there's a lot of space in between the extremes for people who truly were "born in the wrong body" as Mermaids says, but I think it's understandable that many honest and well-intentioned folks perceive the more radical TRA stuff as a misogynistic male colonisation of femininity.
> biological women would be referred to as "menstruators"
> transphobic phrases such as "breastfeeding" would be prohibited.
> breastfeeding itself is under attack in some TRA circles
If you say there's a group of people out there who think this way I can't technically prove to you that group doesn't exist, but I have never personally met a trans person who would agree with those statements. At most, I have seen "menstruators" used as a shorthand for "women who menstruate" specifically in conversations about menstruation, which does not seem to me to be a particularly problematic use of the word.
I'll take you at your word that these people exist and are bothering you, and for whatever it's worth you have my permission/support if you ignore them. But I don't think it's accurate or fair to extrapolate from those people to make statements about what trans activists and trans people themselves believe overall. I am not trying to say that the experiences of cisgender woman are superfluous, and including trans women in feminine spaces or being conscientious of their experiences is not an attempt to erase anyone, it's an attempt to be inclusive.
I'm reminded of Hark, A Vagrant's Straw Feminists comic[0]. There's a pretty big difference between what the majority of trans community members are saying -- "Not all women breastfeed" (which is trivially true, even among cisgender groups of women) -- and "Breastfeeding is transphobic", which is nonsensical. While I totally understand why someone might look at straw trans-rights arguments and worry that this means trans people are "erasing" them, it is still important to understand that trans people by and large are not saying those things, it is a mischaracterization of the overall group.
If you let radicals define how you approach every social movements and how you characterize the people involved in that movement, then there are very few social movements that you won't begin to see as problematic, feminism included.
How on earth did being black make it on that list?! Wtf
I think it's important in feminist circles to understand that the Black community can be affected by sexism in ways that white women might not experience.
You can say the same about things like income. The sexism that a professional in an office job experiences can occasionally differ in subtle ways from the sexism that a blue-collar worker experiences. Not to say one is better or worse, just the way that inequality manifests is often contextually dependent.
No, but I do understand that the way society treats Black women is often different than the way society treats white women, and I understand that being a white woman does not automatically give someone complete insight into the struggles that Black women face.
I am not sure it is true, and utterly sure it does not matter
Kinda like "Black Lives Matter" - obviously they do, but the fact that you have to say it out loud and directly highlights the disparity and systemic injustices faced by people of color.
At least, that's what I think those things mean, someone with a more sophisticated understanding will probably correct me if I'm wrong.
When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfectly to the world of appearences. But this does not mean we can jettison concepts and ideas altogether. In fact they seem necessary. So the fact that we cannot seem to come up with a perfect criterion for defining "biological woman" does not mean that we can dispense with that category.
And that's what's being asked of us. We are told "trans women are women". What does that mean? It if means "there is a category, women, and in that category there are trans women and biological women," that's fine with me. If it means "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women," that seems wrong to me and to the vast majority of people.