If we want fair play for both women and trans women, then it is time to confront the "trans women are women" mantra head-on, highlight why it is misogynistic and deeply harmful to women, and refuse to tolerate its use.

It has been repeated so many times that it is treated as true, or at least as some unassailably virtuous political axiom like ‘racism is wrong’. But it is a mantra, not a truism, and automatically implies the erasure of women. (long rant: http://realfeminists.com/2018/01/16/confronting-the-mantra/)

It requires women to give up the word/category which defines us as a sex class who have been oppressed on the basis of biology in our sex-caste system. Adult human females are then nameless, and no longer have no specific protections or political representation.

Cui bono? Men, not women, benefit from this, as if sex is invisibilised, so is sexism. Male supremacy is entrenched by the inability to name sexism or obtain legal protections from it.

This is an inevitable consequence of the statement "trans women are women". It means "trans women are members of the set of women". Clearly transwomen, being male, are not adult human females, so the only way for this to be true is as follows:

1. posit something like gender identity (which is pretty much equivalent to a feminine soul) as a property which exists, and
2. assert that this, and not biology, is what makes a person a woman.
Female biology is no longer enough to define one as a woman.

This means that women are coercively assigned a gender identity, although gender stereotypes are the external mechanism of female oppression. This has to be naturalised, otherwise transwomen and women cannot be the same class of person. So women are automatically stereotyped.

Gender identity is also thus automatically and implicitly prioritised over sex as a category by the statement "trans women are women." The statement does not "include" transwomen, it obliterates women as a class. Women can no longer organise on the basis of sex if this is true.

This is the aim of transactivists, to ultimately replace sex with gender identity as a legal category, eg Stephen Whittle (GRA 2004 activist) said in a paper that the goal is that:

(ctd - thread broke) https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/953386587097886720

@threader_app compile