Putting my head above the parapet...sorry but it's a long one...
I've been thinking a lot about how, should I be put on the spot (for example at work), I can articulate my position on gender without standing on the "TERF" landmine and making any further discussion impossible.
And I am concerned that if the word Woman is redefined I won't honestly be able to identify as one any more, which could exclude me from anti-sexism opportunities and protections.
And I've also been thinking about how GC and Reactionary Right voices are superficially aligned on gender but actually coming from totally incompatible positions, and I do not want to express myself in a way that someone in that Reactionary Right could take as validation.
While clearly there is an irreconcilable difference between believing all gender identities are real and believing no gender identities are real, fundamental to both is the insight that most of the stuff traditionally bundled up as Man or Woman is nothing to do with biological sex and everything to do with society and socialisation. That puts me in the second camp much closer to the Genderists* in the first than to those who don't believe TWAW because they DO believe the traditionally Male and Female stuff is biologically driven.
So, let's for the sake of argument accept that TWAW and TMAM. Let's accept people genuinely have a gender identity that is innate to them and should be accepted not challenged.
Irrespective of their gender identity, people who are female have specific needs arising from the challenges and capabilities of a female body in our society which people who are male don't have. (And vice versa of course, but this post is about females).
Things that are needed by females include: period- and incontinence- friendly toilet setup, maternity support including non-career-impacting breaks, female sports, tooling and product designs that safely fit the female body.
Things that females shouldn't need but in our current society they do: physical protection from aggressive males, social protection from entitled males, access childcare, support for caring for dependants, educational and career opportunities to address the disadvantages of female socialisation and social expectations others have of females.
Taking this perspective, most of the laws, services, protections and opportunities for "Women" are actually aimed at Females because they are not needed by or of use to Males. But the time they were written/established, "Woman" and "(Adult human) Female" were synonymous and Woman was the more conventional term, so they were defined as Women-only rather than Female-only.
Feminism, understanding that the concept of Woman is both biological and cultural and that Women's oppression rests on the cultural constructs that have been built around our biology, has focused on mitigating, challenging, disproving and eventually dissolving these cultural constructs. That focus puts us in direct conflict with those who believe TWAW because the only way TW can be completely Women is to make the definition of Woman entirely non-biological.
Perhaps however, a faster route to where we want to be is to accept the concept of Woman is too tainted with cultural baggage to ever undo, and actually align with the genderists (with whom we share that fundamental insight that feminine is separate from female) by giving them the word Woman for the cultural construct, thereby gaining from their fight to decouple culture and biology, while the Feminist effort focuses on empowering individuals of the Female sex under the banner of Female whatever their gender identity (or lack of). Female then is not an opposition to any trans identities but exists alongside them, including Females of any gender and excluding only Males, of any gender.
So I realise I could actually be comfortable with saying is "TW are Women", as long as I can caveat with "but in practical terms I can't agree with TW being treated as Women in all things until we've gone back, worked out which spaces, protections and opportunities currently defined as Women only were really intended to be Female-only, and redefined them as such. Then everything that remains as Women-only is absolutely open to TW, and the Female-supporting items are open to any Female including TM, non-binary females and any other gender identity."
I realise this is pretty much just arguing for single sex spaces, but I think it's helpful to reframe this debate with an acknowledgement that the word Woman has historically conflated the cultural and the biological, the biological aspects of Woman cannot be available to TW, to truly allow TW to be Women we need to separate the two, and that separation is something that's also core to most feminism.
To be clear, this isn't "oh ok then, TW can be Women if they want, all we Real Girls will just leave that room and go into the one marked Female". This is about recognising that both those who promote or support Trans causes and those who reject gender entirely will be helped by having separate, explicit social and legal concepts for being biologically female and for socially identifying as feminine.
If the Genderists are right, the social gender Woman will continue to exist and be meaningful. If the GC are right, it will eventually become irrelevant because without the cultural "engine" of biological sex to drive gendered socialisation of children, grouping unrelated preferences and behaviours into gender buckets just peters out. Either way, Females continue to get the services, protection and support their sex requires.
(* -ist as in Theist not -ist as in racist )