It is incredible to me how much the Irish anti trans brigade are using the language of 1950s/70s lesbophobia - when the prison lesbian became a dangerous sexual category! Read feminism, understand how oppression works & shifts from one vulnerable group to another over time.

The unmarried mother was a dangerous deviant for decades in Ireland
The lesbian was the lavender menace of early second wave feminism
Working class women’s rights were a threat to middle class women
Women of colour regarded with hostility by white women
Now it’s trans women!

All the above and other non gender normative groups had to lay claim to ‘being women’.
From Sojourner Truth ‘ain’t I a woman’, to deBeauvoir ‘one is not born a women, one becomes one’ to scary lesbians and now, trans women. All are women, all demand full equality and inclusion

Feminism has long rejected biological or genetic determinism and immutable essentialist ideas of woman- we understand ‘woman’ not as a sex category but as a gender category dependent of historical, social, cultural, religious, racial & identity contexts. It’s feminism101!

I’m relatively privileged -cis, white, middle class, academic- but I’ve also often heard & read about how my deviant ‘life style choice’ as a queer woman could harm society, the family, children! Debating my right to exist as my authentic self is something I won’t wish on anyone!

So I will call out the likes of JKR & Suzanne Moore & their supporters, who use their position of privilege & their platform to further harm a vulnerable group - I’ve no time for it.The critiquing of power, those who hold it, and how they can wield it to harm, is also feminism101