Although on the one hand I was glad that the feminist analysis of gender was presented at the hearings, overall I agree with Lass that Hilla Kerner's and Meghan Murphy's testimonies are unlikely to change the minds of any of the senators. Lass is right: an argument such as that pursued by Shapiro or Carlson, which exposes the inherent absurdities of the whole notion of 'gender identity', would probably have been more effective (maybe even devastatingly effective).
As Theryn Meyer pointed out (and Murphy and Kerner also mentioned but only in passing), 'gender identity' is impossibly vague and legally incoherent, and politicians should be called to account for their attempts to create a protected category that has no objective, definable characteristics. While Murphy made an admirable case for the feminist analysis of gender, the sad truth is that most people don't care. Most people don't really believe that women are an oppressed class of persons (whereas everyone seemingly accepts at face value that any man who claims to be a woman is horribly oppressed), so it is very difficult to get them to care about the ways that gender hurts women, or to see any harm in allowing men to appropriate the category of 'woman'.
The other big problem that the feminists faced and which is, I think, the central problem for everyone who is attempting to put the brakes on anti-woman gender identity legislation, is that the senators were clearly operating on the belief that 'transwoman' means transsexual, i.e., an ultra-feminine, likely gay man who has undergone full transition with surgery and who passes as a woman reasonably well - someone like Theryn Meyer, in other words. As anyone who is familiar with the current state of the trans movement knows, most of the males who identify as transwomen are heterosexual, non-passing men who intend to keep and use their penises - but so few of their supporters seem to realise that! That's why bringing up Stefonknee or Danielle Muscato would probably have been much more effective than attempting to explain patriarchy theory in five minutes.
And that is one of the peculiar ironies of this whole gender identity madness: the trans movement is advancing its agenda by using old-school transsexuals as political cover, while at the same time the legislation they push is explicitly designed to obliterate the meaning of transsexual, and is instead intended to allow any man, at any or no stage of transition, to claim a 'female identity', and make it illegal for anyone to question him or deny him access to female spaces or programs on the basis of his self-declaration. In other words, like all legislation that protects the sexist and nonsensical category of 'gender identity', it essentially abolishes sex as a legal category, rendering any sex-based protections for women moot. I really wish someone had made that point, instead of arguing about the oppressions faced by 'female-born women' vs 'transwomen', and who has it worse. Most people will always believe that trans males have it much, much worse, because most people think sexism is just women whining about nothing anyway.