EB - Someone who has transitioned and wants to be a woman, I think it's fine to call them a woman. I don't know why you don't want to allow them to make that choice
I realise there's no point in answering EB on this thread, but as this line typifies one of the bad faith arguments that gets flung arount by TRAs a lot I think it's worth providing the counter anyway.
No, Ed. It's not that I don't want to allow "them" to make that choice.
It's that the choice they want to make for themselves forces a new definition of womanhood onto all women whether we want it for ourselves or not.
Because the only way to believe that male people can be called women is if one believes that a woman, which I also am, is a woman not because of her body, with all that entails socially and physically, but because of something in her mind.
And if society belives that, it believes that woman's rights and protections, and indeed women's experiences, needs and political voice, are not shaped by the needs and challenges of the female-bodied half of humanity but by those who feel they have a female mind.
As a female-bodied person, I look at the history of my sex's fight to escape from the legal, social, intellectual, political and cultural margins where male people kept us, and to be recognised as complete, equal and worthwhile humans in our own right. To understand and define ourselves rather than accept the definitions men placed upon us based on what they observed and assumed. To tell our own stories in our own voices, not simply be the characters in narratives written from the outside by men. And I am not prepared to go back to Womanhood being something men decide for us.
So it's not that I don't want to allow them to make a choice for themselves, it's that the choice they want to make for themselves is also a choice they are also making for me, and it is that which I cannot accept.