I'm de-lurking because this is the issue that has revitalised my radical feminism.
Growing up I had a very 'live and let live' attitude to transgenderism, or transsexualism as it was then known. I believed it was harmless, none of anyone's business and opposed by repressed, small-minded people. Transgenderism was either far less visible or far less common back then and it was only upon leaving university that I really got to know someone who was M2T and had my moment of epiphany. He was basically a gay man who had grown-up in a horrifically homophobic family (his brothers were gay-bashers) and had obviously internalised at a young age that it was better to be straight and safe than gay and victimised. His idea of what constituted living as a woman was a sexist man's idea of womanhood and, although a generally kind and considerate person, he still retained his male socialisation, particularly when dealing with women. I realised that no-one could become a woman because they 'felt like a woman' and, indeed, that women's experiences were so hard-earned the very idea of appropriating them was insulting and damaging. However, although the sexism of transgenderism irked me, I still saw it as an issue that affected a minority of gay men, who were coping with their homosexuality in the best way they could and who had very little interest in impacting the lives of born women.
Cut forward a few years and I read that a man dressed as a woman to spy on women in some toilets that I sometimes used. As I personally know four different women who have been sexually assaulted in public toilets (two as children and two as teenagers) this disturbed me. Researching the issue online I found out that men dressing as women to access women's toilets and changing rooms for predatory purposes is far more common than I had imagined but the concerns women have about transgender access rights are routinely written off as pearl-clutching bigotry and nothing to do with material reality. I was also unnerved about the number of violent, predatory men claiming trangenderism to access women's prisons and the way this was being championed as progress. All the evidence shows that sexual predators target vulnerable women and girls in institutions and yet we're meant to be cheerleaders for this? And then came the Julie Burchill furore ... In the aftermath Roz Kaveney wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian and I made a few rational comments below the line (along the lines of critiquing gender is a fundamental tenet of feminism and transactivists aligning with MRA groups is disturbing) and, firstly, I was attacked with a level of vitriol shocking for even CIF and then all my comments were deleted, along with all other transcritical comments. This was my first experience of the sinister, Orwellian nature of transactivism and I began educating myself on the subject.
Being a radical feminist at the moment feels like being in one of those sci-fi movies where aliens colonise the earth, invading people's bodies, and you are one of the only people who can see what's happening. I still think there are homosexual M2Ts out there who just want a quiet life, but feminism has been taken over by MRAs, sexual fetishists and sexual predators, who want to silence women, claim to speak for us and enter our spaces for predatory reasons. When I hear someone like Paris Lees claiming women enjoy strangers groping them on the bus I get livid, knowing that my nieces are going to face this at some point in their lives and they will find it humiliating and threatening as I did. When I talk to other women about transactivists they still have the traditional idea of gay men with full SRS and are surprised to find out this is not the case. Interestingly when I talk to men they are far less receptive to the idea that someone can change sex and are dead against M2Ts accessing women's toilets or playing for women's sports teams etc. I have noticed, however, that when online debates are framed as 'transactivists vs feminists' men tend to side with transactivism because it is the best stick ever with which to beat us. One can only hope that transactivists carry on with the craziness and force more women to get back in touch with their radicalism, but, so far, I don't hold out much hope for this. It's far easier to be Laurie Penny than it is to be Julie Bindel in this world.