What worries me about all this is, who is suffering here, and to whose advantage is all this?
I don't know anyone transsexual well enough for them to have told me much about it. I do worry, though, because I know a lot of people who are quite convinced that surgery is excellent and functional and simple. They believe that - sad though it must be to be 'born into the wrong body', the process is simple. They believe, because we are quite often told this, that there are distinctive, physical and mental qualities that define women or men.
There are, obviously: there are chromosomes and there are hormones and there are reproductive organs. All of these may function to a greater or lesser extent in an individual. For reasons I find dubious, all of these are discounted as definitive of femaleness or maleness. So, they say, there must be something else.
Is it then social or cultural - the experience of having lived as a female or male and been recognized as female or male? No, apparently that will not do either. Why?
Now, if someone believes there is 'something else', some distinctive quality that makes them identify as the opposite sex, I can't really deny their feelings and I'm not sure I'd want to. What worries me is, why are we throwing out all the other ways of defining 'woman' at the same time? Why is it that I am no longer supposed to say, well, I define myself as a woman because I am XX, or because I have a female reproductive system, or because I have lived my whole life labeled as 'female' in a society that cares hugely about this label?
So that's my first problem. I would be told by people I know this is 'cis privilege', that I am a 'cis woman', not a 'woman'. Why on earth would someone who wants to live as the opposite sex thank their activists for spreading terminology that sets the differences in concrete: 'trans woman' and 'cis woman'. Why? I am a cynic, but I can't believe this terminology is anything but stupid. It has no positive implications for anyone.
Anyway. When I've worried about definitions and words, someone will say it's easy to have surgery. But it's not, is it? And who does it help, to spread that lie? I don't have an argument with people doing what they like with their bodies, but it is utterly ridiculous to pretend that, in the current situation, someone who has gender reassignment surgery now has 'a woman's body' or 'a man's body'. I really hope they have a body they find more liveable with, but that's not the only issue.
Is it not problematic to say that something is deemed a successful replacement for a vagina just because it can be penetrated? Isn't saying that that is a vagina immensely disrespectful, not only to people with vaginas but also to the person who has surgery, who is being told this is what they get, this is how to make them feel like a woman?
If I knew someone were MtF transsexual, or FtoM, I would call them 'she' and 'he' respectively - because they're individuals and I think they're caught up in the same sorry mess we all are, and it's not a competition to see who's worst off. If I knew someone who was an orthodox Jew and didn't want to touch me, I wouldn't touch him. Same reasons. I know lots of women who wear coverings and I don't go round snatching them off.
Accepting individuals and accommodating their beliefs, even if I find the underlying premises of those beliefs insulting to me as a feminist, seems basic to me. But that doesn't mean that I don't get to disagree with these premises on a general level. Seeing this debate get shut down time after time (not just on MN), especially by people who seem to want to support a situation that benefits none of us, is misguided and I think this attitude will stop us as a society from making any progress with any side of the issue.