"Trans people have always been here!"

I mean in biblical times everyone wore a dress.

Yes, the leveraging of historic women who resorted to deception that they were men, such as James Barry and there were two female soldiers in the Civil War iirc, is appalling.

The oppression of these women gets completely erased with this false claim.

These women wanted to do things that, for the era, they could not do without being male so they did what they had to do to have access to opportunities that were closed to them. Yet, activists have completely changed their history to suit the activists political aims of support a claim that there have always been people with transgender identities.

It is just more misogyny for these historic women.

For this statement to be true, they have to twist the experience of the historical homosexual male people too. The ones who were expected to be put into a different group because they were attracted to the same sex or both sex.

This was often because of a homophobic society in that country / region at that time. These people and their oppression have been politically leveraged to prove this statement.

I agree OP, it is the new rallying cry. One TRA said it first and now they're all repeating it because they think it sounds like such a catchy mantra.

The implication is that we meanie women only began to notice transpeople in 2017 or thereabouts. That a manufactured panic started around that time, driven by the far right. Or fundamentalist Christians. Or JKR. Or something.

No. We know men who present as women have been around for a long time in one guise or another. Sorry fellas. You're nothing new and you're nothing special. My gran remembered a few in her spaces, way back when. Some men have always tried to go where they're not wanted. Women stood up to them back then and we're standing up to them now.

Indeed. And they're all what, iirc, Helen Joyce calls "thought-terminating clichés".

They weren’t all trans until Stonewall tried to stay relevant and changed the definition.

Now it doesn’t matter if you’re transsexual, have a raging fetish or a confused and vulnerable teenager, they’re all the same now 🙄

They sure do like their slogans:

Trans rights are human rights!
Trans women are women!
Trans people exist!

Its annoying because it's purpose seems to be to pretend that the protests against the threat to women's rights are just a bunch of spiteful women deciding to sudenly make a fuss about something that's always been the case and never hurt anyone.
There has always been trans people really means "men with trans identities have always used women's toilets, changed in our changing rooms, shared our prison cells and refuges, competed against us in sports, and until some awful women decided to target them, no one was any the wiser, because they were indistinguishable from 'other women' and no one was harmed."
It uses a possible truth, to obscure the lie that we have always lived in a world where any man who feels like it can declare himself a woman, enter any woman's space he chooses and women can get sacked/arrested for hate crime if they protest or refuse to call him she.
There may always have been trans people, but TIM have not always had permission ride rough shod over women's rights. This is a fairly recent thing, and this is the thing that matters, not how far back we can trace the existence of people who may have had a trans identity.

I was in on the scene in the 80s and afterwards. There were the TS people with real dysphoria as they would call it now and the TVs, far more numerous and generally hetero men wanting to dress as women.

There have always been men who wanted to be women, and women who wanted to be men. But I doubt there were many men who thought they really were women, and women who thought they really were men, until society decided that was an acceptable belief to hold.

Really? Where is the evidence for this? I know there were always sex fetishists, including those men who got off on wearing/ stealing women’s underwear. This was strongly disapproved of in the past. But I never heard of men having themselves castrated etc except in rare cases of very severe mental illness.

There might have been, dunno. The distinction between TV and TS is crucial but now overlooked

We GC feminists have never denied that trans identified males exist. However we do deny that they are women.

Yes, it is usually a non-gotcha whuch follows the claim that people are denying/debating trans people's existence. Ummm nope. We know you exist. That doesn't mean we believe you can change sex.

Lots of things have always been here, LBG people, left handed people, people who are bipolar, people who are depressed…
only trans people want to take away another groups rights and freedoms.

There have been people with gender dysphoria, and I feel for them.

This does not affect my opinion that sometimes sex matters.

Around 10 years ago or so, the effort began to totally decouple gender dysphoria as any kind of criteria for being trans, and the focus turned to gender identity as an inner feeling, rather than physical appearance or recognition of women as female people, as the defining factor into what made someone - literally - a woman.

I think TRAs really believe that GC people deny that trans people exist. It's like a straw man:

GC people deny trans people's existence don't they! But guys honestly we've been around forever.

Who cares? You still have to present an argument for gender identity trumping biological sex.

Even the ones they claim have “led the way” like Marsha P Johnson was just a self-proclaimed drag queen. They’re desperate men looking for a justification to exist.

Yep, transexual people have always been about, people with a condition so severe that only extreme body modification brings relief.
Pretty sure there have always been transvestites too.
Somehow, the two got lumped together.