The AIBU thread took a very bizarre turn overnight with accusations that half of us weren't mothers at all then a weird period of "calm down dear, no-one's going to take your mother's day cards off the shelves of Waitrose", leading me to post the following (apols for cutting and pasting, but it kind of occurred to me in the small hours of the morning that this wasn't weird random non-sequiturs, there had to be a purpose to the arguing style).
When I see a really bizarre derail or non-sequitur going on, I always wonder "what work is it doing in someone's argument?"
So last night's derail of "at least half of you aren't even mothers" - what did the poster feel they were achieving with that completely nonsensical assertion? That we're in fact spinster flower arrangers at the local fundamentalist church, inflamed by the Daily Mail? Or right wing trolls funded by American Evangelicals? Or Russian bots in a troll farm in St Petersburgh?
I presume the point of the exercise was this - it's a fundamental tenet of the new puritan orthodoxy that you cannot question people's lived experience. So when you have a large group of people (mothers, in this instance) saying "respect our lived experience and call us women, because us being women has a profound practical and political impact on the barriers and discrimination we face in everyday life" what - within your own world view that people's assertions about their own lived experience must not be challenged - is left to you as an arguing position? Presumably only an assertion of "You're not really mothers at all, you're pretending to be for evil reasons."
Or I guess the other strategy left to you is to deflect. Hence the frankly bizarre side-track into mother's day cards.
"Okay so you can't talk about how women's biology is weaponised against them systematically by a male dominated system - you can talk about individual disembodied body parts and bodily functions - menstruators, birthing persons, people with cervixes - but you must not connect the dots and say 'all this shit is happening to the same group of people - women, because historically women have always been treated as second class human beings.' But don't worry, No one's going to take away your mother's day cards... Now calm down dear."
I suppose my TLDR version of this is - when someone's talking shit, don't assume that it's because they're stupid (though they may well be) - ask what work the shit is doing in their rhetorical position.
In this instance it's about denying that woman and mother are not just fluffy self-descriptions, they have profound practical, political and economic consequences for women. Consequences which you can't identify your way out of by saying you're a transman, and consequences which don't bludgeon you over the head if you're a transwoman.