*The thing is, regardless of politicians and of postmodernism’s abdication of “Truth,” most people have a sense of fair play. Just like damn near everyone knows what women are, and they also know that there are enough men who are a threat to girls and women that women have to take care. I bet there’s not one man in the UK who hasn’t, at some time in his life, said to a girl or woman, “Be careful,” and both he and she knew exactly who he was warning her against.
The question isn’t, What is a woman? Because that’s not up for debate — everyone really does know the answer. A woman is the one who gets pregnant, and a man is the one who impregnates. Arguing hypothetical “what if’s” about infertility, menopause, or genetic disorders is just sophistry. Without impossible leaps forward in neurobiology, arguments for brain sex have the exact same validity as 19th century arguments that women’s “wandering” uteri caused hysteria.
People also know there isn’t such a creature as a half-man half-woman. One or the other, that’s it. When Fallon Fox fractured Tamika Brent’s skull, no one had to ask if he was on hormones or if he still had his dick, in order to understand what they were seeing. Everyone knew that regardless of his hormonal state or the configuration of his genitals, they were watching a man bash a woman’s head in.
Julie Bindel had the exact right answer to Jane Fae’s sophistry when she said, “You don’t know you were born!”
The question really is: why on earth should men have the right to decide they’re women? Never once budging from the position that everyone knows what a woman is.*
This is part of the reason why I'm not willing to play along with the softly softly approach. At the moment some part of the public has been conned into thinking that all trans people are part of a group that's more at risk than women as a group. That assumption rests partly on misogyny (always easy to brush women's needs and concerns aside) and partly on the idea that "trans woman" means "dysphoric feminine gay man who's already had his penis removed or intends to do so as soon as possible". I can see why most people feel concern for those particular trans women. Those trans women are now a minority within their own movement, though, and it's vital that we get that information out to the public, because right now when people are asked how they feel about trans access to sex segregated spaces that's who most of them are picturing, and they have no idea that the legal changes being made will also open the doors to Stefonknee and the bloke running female orgasm workshops and Danielle Muscato and that Tara dude who beat up the woman at Speakers Corner a host of other assorted MRAs and fetishists. And most of the media is failing to make the distinction too (or possibly actively trying to suppress that information in the case of The Guardian). So if we want to stop these laws going through then we need to make sure that the public knows exactly what they're signing off on. Which involves letting them know that if the proposed legal framework is adopted, Danielle Muscato has just as much right to access women's sex segregated spaces as the dysphoric feminine gay men that they're picturing.
Talking about fetishism and MRA style politics among trans activists can come across as "mean" and hostile. There's no way to avoid that, because we're telling people something that they may not want to hear and there are a lot of groups/individuals with a vested interest in stopping us from telling people those things. These conversations are going to get ugly. Lots of women are angry that things have gotten to this point in the first place, and that's going to come across in the way they speak about these issues. Women are allowed to be angry.
It's one thing to strategize about how best to present our points in a policy document or a news article, but I really don't think we should be trying to stifle the way women speak to each other on a feminist forum about how they feel about this situation.