My personal feelings (which RELATE to me bring a woman) are that I feel like a target. Like prey.
Like the other half of an equation that I don't want any part of. Which doesn't make sense. Doesn't balance.
Like this isn't a battle over words. It's a battle over me, and people like me, female.
Like what is being chased down isn't the right to be called a particular word. It's me. Because whatever I call myself becomes the target. Wherever I go is where they will demand entry. It's not just "I'll have whatever she's having', it's "whatever she says she is, I'm that too". The words and the spaces and the rights hold no value in their own right. Emptied of their association with me, with females, they are worthless. No transwoman would want the words, the rights and the spaces, if the billions of women were divorced from them. These rights hold no appeal or value at all, in and of themselves. What makes them desirable is the value and meaning they derive from being related to me and all females.
We are the target. If men cannot be us, they can at least prevent us from running away. Like a butterfly pinned to a board that you can claim you own.
I keep thinking of the fairytale of the Princess and the frog, where she is forced to have the frog eat from her plate and sleep in her bed. It's not enough to give him his own identical plate and identical bed. It wouldn't be enough to sacrifice her own plate and bed and walk away empty handed. There arent enough plates and beds in the world to satisfy him. That isn't what he wants. He wants her. To force her to submit. To have no right to exist independently from him.
I know that fairy tale is supposed to make us feel like the spoiled princess is being forced to honour a promise, learning to share, being cured of her aversion to another of God's creatures.
But it isn't that. It is an obscene kind of punishment and degradation, that strips her of privacy and dignity and autonomy. It's a demonstration to her that she is powerless and impotent and enslaved.