We believe in free speech and civil debate. So we will, for instance, allow people to discuss biology and scientific evidence
It is going to be hard, as a parenting website, to NOT allow people to discuss biology and scientific evidence. But the basic problem is terminology once you start to discuss biology, and that does not even have to be in a feminism/trans debate. As someone upthread said, you get into 1984 territory, if it is impossible to state basic biological facts on a parenting website.
Women are the ones who are pregnant, or miscarry, have a live birth or a stillbirth (men experience this as partners/fathers). Women are the ones who breastfeed (men experience this as partners/fathers).
Men produce sperm.
I am not conservative. I accept that children may have two mothers and two fathers or any kind of family set-up; I also don't think that being a mother or a father presupposes any specific parenting role. But the people who push children out of their uteruses (uteri?) are female; that is a biological fact. The people who have male reproductive organs are male. That is also a biological fact. These people are conventionally and historically known as women and men respectively.
A transperson, unless they are female-bodied, cannot grow a baby and breastfeed. A transperson who is male-bodied will father children, in the biological sense, by producing sperm.
If they are female-bodied, they would historically speaking, be amongst the group known as women. Even if a female-bodied person has a hysterectomy or cannot conceive she belongs to the group who would be normally able to conceive, if their reproductive organs were in place and functioning. She would be conventionally a woman.
So, already, when we look at what this website is about (bearing and raising children, for the most part, or trying to do this, or suffering infertility), men and women have had distinct biological roles. And while we may or may not wish to challenge what this means socially, we are not (yet) at the stage where men can give birth and women can produce sperm biologically speaking.
Where am I going with this? I have no idea.
I struggle with the idea that gender equals sex. Rape is a sex-based crime, not a gender-based one. The fact that more women are in poverty because they have children and are out of the workplace is sex and gender-based. It is sex-based because female-bodied people (women) give birth to children, and gender-based because of the social expectation that women will raise children. Identifying as male or female because of an idea in your head rather a sex (what is between your legs) is gender. But the idea of what is male or female comes from societal expectations, so gender goes round in a circle, really; it is discursive/constructed internally or externally and not material reality (sex).
So, to discuss biology and the material reality of being a parent, we need to be able to discuss sex, and understand what sex means.
Thus, a transwoman does not have the reproductive organs, functioning or otherwise, to gestate and deliver children, even if they identify as a woman; and a transman does not have the reproductive organs, functioning or otherwise, to produce sperm, even if they identify as a man. These are incontrovertible biological facts.
So far so good. But then, I think we hit a wall. We need to stop because we cannot say why transwomen do not have the ability to gestate, deliver and breastfeed children. Or more specifically, we cannot use language which would make that clear.