Is this crazy talk?
It's not, GratedExposure, for many of us this was a way station on our way to a more resolute position.
It comes from a good place, this notion, but like so many other good intentions, it leads to a decidedly hellish place.
When I first took an interest in this debate, I thought all this talk about female erasure and war on women was hyperbole, OTT, dramatic even. Now I wish it was.
Back then - a scant three years ago - female was an uncontested word in the debate just emerging into the public mainstream discourse. The idea that a fair compromise was enlarging the definition of women to accommodate men claiming womanhood was in full bloom. Usually accompanied by reassuring claims that where the discussion focused on sex, we had the word female to fall back on.
But the foremost trans rights campaigners and queer theorists had already established a new battleground around that very word and sex itself. Most likely because it seemed that the word woman had been successfully claimed by the other side.
Whatever you do in this debate, however you can or will contribute in however many tiny or large ways, you must be aware that the publicly declared end goal of the movement is the complete erasure of sex as a legal concept from all laws, policies and practice worldwide.
They will not stop at the word woman because that is a mere way station for them on their way to erasing sex.
Principle 31 of the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 sets this out in detail. On the legal battlefield, laws like the UK's Gender Recognition Act are a first step in that direction. The introduction of self-declaration of sex through self-id laws and policies is another. The linguistic battlefield includes all references to sex as distinct classes, not just the words woman, man, boy, girl. The endpoint are random groups of people who have random individual features in common - people with a cervix, people with a prostate, people with ovaries, pregnant people, people with testicles, people who produce sperm.
No longer two distinct, mutually exclusive sex classes, male and female, but many disparate groups of people who share one biological feature or function but otherwise have nothing in common. Not interests or needs nor rights and especially not discrimination and oppression.
The end goal of erasing sex as a legal concept leads to abolishing women's sex-based rights. Any compromise like the one you are mulling over leads us on a straight path to that world.