20+ years ago I was a straight woman with gay and lesbian friends. I grew up in gay clubs where I made 'club friends' that were transexuals as was deemed then. A couple who'd had surgery and hormones and some who just 'lived presenting as women'.
And other men who were transvestite or cross-dressers. They enjoyed presenting as female. Usually just on the nights they went to the club.
I considered myself a feminist. And in the gay clubs it really wasn't an issue what toilet anyone was using because no-one really cared and no-one was insisting on having a right to be anywhere.
None of the people I knew would ever say they were a woman because they felt like one or had hormones or surgery. They said they were transsexuals or transvestites or cross-dressers.
When the whole GRC/GC/trans/identifying debate began I was someone online who was saying "get a grip transphobes, live and let live, it just won't happen that transsexuals will want to be treated like the sex they're not. And even if they did, you're nuts if you think it'll ever happen that even if they want to be in womens hostels or prisons, no way will it happen.
Well, I was a twat and wrong and what happened was worse than I could have ever imagined.
Some of my transvestite/cross dresser friends and associates who previously said they were men that enjoyed playing women suddenly became seized with the idea they actually were women.
The 'trans movement' over-reached and in doing so caused harm to women and a lot of the 'old-school' transsexuals (as they identified) who never claimed to be women and were thrown under the bus and experiencing abuse that they hadn't before because of the frankly insane rhetoric that took over and needed a supreme court judgment to redress.