here’s my honest answer.

my beliefs about trans women are only the incidental product of my beliefs about feminism. I fundamentally believe that women are oppressed for their sex, not for their femininity. I believe that the society that fosters this sex-based oppression uses compulsory femininity as a method of oppression. I believe that we need distinct terminology to discuss and try to heal the division between the sexes. As a result of this, I believe that efforts to facilitate confusion of these terms hurt and hinder the progress of feminism. If women are oppressed for their gender and not their sex, then no one except people who wanted to be oppressed would identify as women. I think the root of the reason terfs have the reputation they do is that we just refused to change the terminology, which TRAs took as a denial of their cause.

I want to ask you, what is womanhood? what is the common trait that all women have that identifies them as the ones men oppress? what does it mean for someone to “feel like a woman” cis or not? if sex has no bearing on gender, what causes the desire to transition sex? what is it about “feeling like a woman” causes people to want long hair and makeup?

I didn’t start off a terf. I was deeply involved in the TRA movement for a long time, genuinely believing your cause and wholeheartedly agreeing that trans women were women. i encourage you to think critically about what a woman is, about how your definition may be impacted by the sexist culture in which it was formed, about how to effectively protect or even discuss the rights of a group so ill-defined that there is no functional difference in definition between the oppressor class and the oppressed class. I encourage you to think critically about this, even if you don’t admit it aloud.

I support biological females because we share an anatomical trait that has been exploited, abused, and cited as both cause and proof of our ‘inherent inferiority’ to males for millennia, and I believe there should be a designated movement just to support, defend, and liberate people affected by this. I believe that movement is called feminism and those people are called women. that is how I don’t see the place for trans women in that movement. It is a movement for the protection of sex-based human rights for the human sex which has been oppressed for the sex of our bodies. And that’s without even getting into the issue of gender-based activism.

The idea of an inherent ‘woman-brain’ just reaffirms the idea that there is an ephemeral woman-essence that is innate and inborn and is what makes a woman; this is necessarily in conflict with the core tenets of feminism, which has been arguing for over a century now against the misogynistic doctrine of ‘women are just better at housework and nurturing and obsessing over beauty and their hormones make them baby-crazy the way their periods make them unsuitable for leadership,’ insisting that the social constructs and constraints of womanhood are not baked into our second X chromosome. “Feeling like a woman” is no different from feeling like a man. We are neutral fucking mammals. There is no one way women think, there is no one way men think, we are all individuals and the notion that one’s individuality needs to be labelled as a gender in relation to one’s sex just reinforces the ideas that:

(a) there is an expected gendered brain for your sex (i.e., ‘man-gender-brain’ for males, ‘woman-gender-brain’ for females) and that people are born with these gendered brains.

(b) the majority of the population (i.e. the ‘cis’ demographic) does have an innate gender-brain corresponding to their sex; so, claiming the entire population of ‘cis’ women actually do have innate ‘woman-gender-brains’.

© those who do not feel like their gender-brain matches up to what is expected of their sex are oppressed by the ‘cis,’ on the basis that having the expected gendered brain is a privilege; so, claiming that ‘cis’ women are privileged for their supposedly-innate ‘woman-gender-brains’ because that’s what corresponds to their female sex, while simultaneously claiming that female humans who realise they do not have innate ‘woman-gender-brains’ are not women AND that male humans (whose only notion of what a ‘woman-gender-brain’ feels like compared to a ‘man-gender-brain’ is based in conjecture) who feel that their brain is innately gendered ‘woman’ are women and that they are oppressed by ‘cis’ women because their bodies ‘don’t match’ their supposedly innate woman-gender-brain (again reinforcing the association between ‘innate woman-gender-brain’ and ‘female’ by having this demographic as the vocal exception).

(d) that this gender-brain, not the sex with which it is forcibly and artificially associated, is what sexism/misogyny has been based on all along; so, claiming that that supposedly-innate woman-gender-brain (which we can’t detect or coherently define) is the trait for which women were/are paid less, objectified, denied the vote, forcibly married and indentured into housework, genitally mutilated, raped and trafficked and sold en masse, forced to give birth… I could go on.

Can you see now how this is reinforcing the same sexist ideas about gender it claims to be overturning? The very idea of innate gender is sexist. the idea that women either identify with the misogynistic societal notions of what womanhood is or they shed the title ‘woman’ is not progressive or feminist at all. There are three potential definitions of ‘woman’ at this point:

1. anyone who feels like a woman (tautological, meaningless, and functionally useless for feminism; indestinguishable from ‘man’ when likewise defined as ‘anyone who feels like a man’. How can one oppress the other and on what basis? for what trait? how can we legislate when we can’t define whom we’re protecting and from whom?)
2. anyone who identifies with the social associations with womanhood, (e.g., femininity, nurturing, or any of the ever-fluctuating social tropes or expectations of women, any conception of ‘womanhood’ which is opposed to parallel conceptions of ‘manhood’; a definition fundamentally based in misogyny for its assumption that these traits are not only innate, but innately tied to womanhood. it’s bioessentialism without the bio-; it’s just gender essentialism. it’s sexism.)
3. human of the female sex. (womanhood denotes nothing inherent other than sex; no inborn traits, no natural femininity, no innate woman-gender-brain. we are neutral humans the same as men, with the same internal range of individuality, and the only inherent difference between us is our physical sex. useful for activism because it includes everyone oppressed for their sex by–again–simply denoting our sex.)

None of this means I hate/oppose/wish violence on males who engage in “feminine” behaviour or dress. I honestly don’t care what people wear. Some have argued that they are helping to break down the gender barriers assigned to the sexes by engaging in activities that men consider “womanly” and simultaneously “weak” (which, to be clear, are considered weak not because of men’s hatred of femininity, but because of a disdain for the roles they’ve forced us into to uphold the charade of their superiority). however, engaging in activities that men historically limited women to does not make you a woman. The men who claim that enjoying or being intrigued by femininity makes them women are misogynists. The insinuation that being drawn to ‘girly’ ‘feminine’ behaviours/things (the products of a culture bent on keeping girls pretty and vacant) makes them women is misogynistic in itself.