People here sometimes talk as if the most hard line GC position is the one that the vast majority of women would want to see instantiated, in terms of political solutions, and my point was I am not convinced that is true.
I can see what you are saying Goose, and I think you're right about most women's views on this, but it doesn't necessarily follow that that should be the stance that feminists take.
There was a survey a while back that showed something like 60-70 per cent of women felt comfortable with a 'transgender woman' using women's facilities. This survey is sometimes used by trans activists to show that most women support 'trans rights'. However, it's very likely that when the women polled read 'transgender woman' they assumed that meant 'transsexual' - they were not picturing a person with an unambiguously male body and almost certainly didn't realise that 'transgender woman' meant literally any man.
So while the trans activists are misrepresenting the survey, it is likely that most women do indeed feel inclined to accept men who have 'gone through all that' ('that' being assumed to be genital surgery and extensive counselling) in women's spaces. Most women feel compassion towards them and see them as fundamentally unthreatening.
That's probably where most 'GC' feminists were at at one stage too. It's the default position on trans for almost all women, I think: 'You have a psychological condition that causes you great distress, you've tried as hard as you can to make yourself look 'female', there are very few of you, who am I to stand in the way of making your life easier'?
The problem is that a lot of these assumptions are based on false, or at least incomplete, premises. You could see this with India Willoughby on CBB - how the female housemates wanted to welcome India as a 'sister', but how almost immediately their words and body language - and India's - revealed the same old male domination-female submission dynamic. Many 'true transsexuals' have the same attitude of entitlement towards women as any sexist man, so the premise that they have become 'like women' is false, and worse, women are forbidden from acknowledging these sexist dynamics, because to do so is framed as a (quite literally) mortal insult to the transsexual male. This kind of bullying framework, in which women are forced to subordinate our instincts and sense to men's desires, is unacceptable and feminists are duty bound to expose this, not collude in it, by pretending there is a fundamental difference between those who've had surgery and those who haven't.
Further, the rhetoric and political activism by transsexuals is what has laid the foundation for everything we are seeing today: 'sex change' (and the extension of this idea to children), mind over body, trans feelings over everyone else's reality, the elimination of female as a legal and social category. As this blog notes:
Transexual activists lobbied for the legal fiction of sex change, and Parliament delivered, despite knowing what re-defining ‘woman’ and ‘female’ to include males would do to women’s rights.
So just because most women currently see transsexualism as harmless, or as a distinct phenomenon to transgenderism, doesn't mean that this view is correct, much less that feminists should reinforce it. Rather, it makes more sense for us to debunk it.