Pushing unscientific ideology that "transwomen are women" is transphobia because it erases transwomen as a unique category of human males. Only men can be transwomen and if you were never a male, as current ideology often claims, you were never a transwoman either.

"Born in the wrong body", "wrongly assigned male at birth", "feelings take primacy over observable biological facts" are all linguistic and logical tactics to erase the fact some men feel uncomfortable, even extremely so, with their bodies and masculine social steretypes.

Sort of like how some people feel uncomfortable with their bodies and assigned social roles, so they starve themselves into losing secondary sexual characteristics and body fat. Would you tell them they were "born in the wrong body" and encourage them, even medically aid them?

Erasing transwomen as biological males prevents us from truly understanding why some men feel the need to socialise as women as well as why men feel the compulsion to exclude transwomen from the group they genuinely belong to - it's social cleansing.

Most men who affirm the biological impossibility that "transwomen are women" admit to having no intention of seeing them as sexual partners, unlike the actual women. So the affirmation is self-serving and inconsistant.

Since transwomen don't share female biology - they can never menstruate, go through female puberty, get pregnant, brestfeed, go through menopause - nor do they share female socialisation - they were born and raised as men and often retain their penises - they are excluded again.

Only this time, they are excluded by biology, by facts of life, not by willful social exclusion by others of their kind who they make feel uncomfortable by virtue of their existence. One is possible to change, the other is not.

Erasing the fact that transwomen are male also lets them down on medical level. Not only are they forced to resort to unnecessery medication and surgery that have serious complications and side-effects, in order to "pass as female", their unique male biology is neglected.

While the desperately struggling NHS is allowing transwomen to have smears of cervices they do not have, the proposed laws are aiming to legislate that trying to discuss male health problems with transwomen "can be seen as misgendering or transphobic (and therefore avoided)".

By erasing transwomen as a meaningful social category, we are losing an opportunnity to shed light on a rarely talked about aspect of male violence - men being violent to other men. Being feminine singling men out for the same types of abuses that women struggle with.

Society grapples with the concept of how can normally empathic men be so violent to women. How can they dehumanise another to treat her like a thing. To reduce her to appearance and body parts. Male violence to transwomen is a bridge to understanding patriarchy.

Whether a transwoman fetishises women's oppression, or feels dysphoric about being an effeminate man in patriarchy, they are reacting to the dynamic of male violence toward those who are seen as non-men.

Incidentally, political parties who are affirming the delusion or unscientific belief that "transwomen are women" are already defining women as "non-men", thus widening the category of Other - those deemed unworthy of being the default, fully-fledged human being, aka Men.

Gender self-ID is an ideal law to be abused by all kinds of violent men, unsubstaniatble, self-referential affirmation of the society's belief that oppression of women is coded in male and female biology.

If you can identify out of your birth sex, why aren't you identifying out of your oppression? Cue term cis - labelling people who aren't trans as "biologically predetermined to identify with social stereotypes of masculinity and femininity.

This is legitimising anything from porn, prostitution and rape culture to war, capitalism, colonialism and by extension racism and ableism. Political parties are already allowing people to self-ID as disabled or ethnic minorities.

In one fell swoop, and by erasing both women and transwomen as a meaningful social categories, the society is getting rid of racism, sexism, disabled discrimination.

So why are able bodied white men still overwhelmingly in charge? Why are women and transwomen raped at no reduced rate? Why are wars still waging? Why are governments paying assesors to declare severely disabled people "fit to work" and removing their benefits?

I discussed conflation of sex and gender, as mechanism that contributed to this issue, in this thread: https://twitter.com/lascapigliata8/status/957968082978340864?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Em5%7Ctwgr%5Eemail%7Ctwcon%5E7046%7Ctwterm%5E3