@pearsapplesbananas
I am responding directly to you, without reading any of the other comments.
"When I say "I feel like a woman" to somebody, what I mean is:
I wish I was born in a female body. I wish I had a female reproductive system, and that I could carry a child. Every time I look into the mirror, I want to smash my face against it. Every time I look at a "normal" family, my heart sinks, because I will likely never get to have that.
I have sympathy for your pain. However, you do understand that this isn't something that women feel? What you're describing is not what it feels like to be a woman. That sounds like what it feels like to be a man who envies womanhood. That is not a bad thing! Our patriarchal society has taught us that women envying masculinity is natural and normal, but men envying femininity is shameful. It isn't. It is ok. You are OK.
Hormones make me feel less bad. Besides easing my physical dysphoria, they have also important psychological effects (like some women experience with their cycles). They are a tool that helps me deal with my… bad luck at birth.
This is a personal request, please don't compare your hormonal effects to our cycles. They are completely different things. This is important to me because a woman's body is in a constant state of flux, every day of her cycle is different from the last. Women ourselves are only just now starting to comprehend the extent of this because we have been taught to view our body through a male lens, i.e. "just like men, but...". In this case "just like men but with estrogen". A woman's cycle is a totally different thing and being taught that we are similar to men but for a few hormones causes many women to live in shame, pain and misery because we are prevented from understanding how to respond to our unique body and its changing seasons. Your hormones do not fluctuate on a day to day or week to week basis like ours do. Equating our experiences diminishes us both.
It makes me sad to hear you talk about your 'bad luck at birth.' As someone who has suffered through a straight decade of body dysphoria (as I'm sure many of the women here have), please believe me when I say there is nothing wrong with your body. There is nothing wrong with who you are. There is nothing wrong with how you were born. There also isn't anything wrong with wanting to change aspects of your body, and aspects of your appearance, when it's done from a place of self love rather than self loathing. In my experience, you can't hate yourself into a version that you can love. The road doesn't go that way.
But I'm slowly starting to empower myself. Coming out of this endless spiral of self-disgust and self-pity. I might be wrong but, from what I read, it seems like there is a discussion framed as a dichotomy: that giving me a decent chance to life is a direct attack on women's rights. Well, I wouldn't see how, and of course, I wouldn't want it to be.
I don't think anyone here is opposed to you having a decent life. No one here is opposed to you having a glorious and joyful life! What we are opposed to is the idea that you must 'become a woman' to get that. Because you can't. They only way for you to become any sort of woman is to change what 'woman' means so much that it no longer describes or applies to women. Obviously, that would not be not OK and would be an attack on women's rights. I am a woman. You are a transwoman. We are both humans equally deserving of peace, dignity and respect.
I might soliloquize here for a bit on what my view of transwomen are;
Transwomen are men. This is not debatable. They are male humans, members of the sex which produce sperm, which makes them men. That is a cold, inescapable fact.
Transwomen are men who have decided to try to be seen as women, in a patriarchal society that oppresses women in a thousand small and large ways. Transwomen see all the negative consequences of being seen as a woman, or even just as somewhat feminine, and decide to deliberately take it on regardless of the consequences. Even changing their physical bodies to better represent their idea of women. To me, that's something worth celebrating. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all. Heck, if I get to check the box on my next reincarnation of whether I come back as a male or female, I'm not entirely sure I would check female. Transwomen see something so valuable in womanhood that it's worth every sacrifice just to approach it as closely as the can.
Men are really screwed in our patriarchal society. We arbitrarily label half of all human traits as masculine and the other half as feminine, and value the former over the latter. Girls are expected to be feminine, but they're also expected to WANT to be masculine. After all, that's all the 'good' stuff. That's why women aren't shamed (or even noteworthy) for wearing pants or short hair, but men are shamed for wearing dresses and long hair. Because for a man to want the other half of human traits, the feminine stuff, that doesn't square with the whole patriarchal structure. So we demand that men cut out half of their own hearts, that they cut away their 'weak' bits to make themselves stronger (Which makes as much sense as pursuing strength by removing your left arm).
Transwomen are men who so value the parts of themselves deemed feminine that they'd rather cut out the masculine parts instead. Sometimes, even the physical body parts that represent masculinity.
We as a society told these men "You can't be a man and behave like women" and they said "then screw being a man".
That's bloody incredible.
That's beautiful
That's the purest and most emphatic form of goddess worship that I can conceive of.
There's one sticking point which, if we could get over it would unify both sides of this.
Can you, as a transwomen, identify with women, instead of as a woman? Can you associate with femininity and womanhood without claiming it for yourself?
I know that you're unhappy as a man and I truly do empathize with that, as I have been unhappy as a woman in the past. However, the problem was never in me, it was all around me. You are not wrong, you are not the problem. You are fine. You are already whole, as you are. As a male who is feminine, as a male who envies womanhood, and/or as a male who pursues womanhood while knowing it is ultimately unattainable. We are both divine incarnations of the goddess.
Transwomen as a group have been hijacked by "non dysphoric trans lesbians" (straight perverts looking to erode women's boundaries) and by patriarchal power structures (using transwomen to fill women's quotas and avoid having to hire/appoint women to positions of power) for their own purposes. The current state of transgender-ism in politics and society is patriarchal and anti-woman and so women are being forced to oppose it. It doesn't have to be that way, but this one is entirely on transwomen to change their own movement.