Miskirsky: You say, 'I'm sure you didnt mean offence, but I and many others in the community take issue with the use of the phrase 'trans debate'. There is no debate, I exist and my identity as a woman is recognised and protected under law.'
I disagree. There is a debate. First, a many-sided one about hard-won women's rights and women's spaces; about gay and lesbian and bisexual identities (very roughly: men who like men's bodies but are definitely men, women who like women's bodies but are definitely women, and people who like both); and generally about the relation between sex and gender. There are biological differences between men and women that go beyond external appearance; that is why there is a debate about women's sports in particular. There is a further debate in psychology and neuroscience about how far what we generally consider to be "masculine" or "feminine" behaviour is firm-wired into men or women even from before birth, from when testes develop in some week 7 fetuses, thanks to the Y chromosome. Historians and anthropologists can easily provide evidence that at least some such behaviours are malleable and culture-specific; developmental psychologists will offer evidence that male babies and female babies are already doing things differently; evolutionary psychology, if you think that's a Thing, will ask how males and females tried to game the system in their favour.
These are all questions that bear on the debate—and this is really what I mean by "the trans debate"—whether trans women are women and trans men are men. This is not about whether you exist. It's about whether I exist. If it's not being XX that makes me a woman, and it's not having these instead of those appendages or internal organs, then what makes me a woman? If it's behaviour and appearance that is male or female by convention, I'd like to know which conventions we are going to abide by, and why; I would probably fail on some counts. If it's some feeling that I have, some privileged access I was born with, then I will fail, because I have no such feeling. My awareness that I am female is something I have acquired through lived experience, just like my awareness that I am not conventionally feminine in some ways.
It's not that I questioned whether I was a woman at some point on this journey. I put my panties on both legs at a time. I used to have periods and period pain and I had treatment for pre-cancerous changes of the cervix. I go for mammograms. I used to get whistled at walking past building sites. Now I'm on HRT and worrying about hair thinning and wrinkles.
But I never wanted kids, right from when I knew it was an option. (People said sagely, 'Oh, you'll change your mind when you meet the right man!', and I would think, 'Well, no, actually, I won't', and I didn't.) I'm not good with kids either. And I was once told by a distinguished feminist, after some searching but I thought fair questioning of a candidate for an early-academic career post at the institution we both taught at, that I had been 'too harsh and too aggressive, too masculine'. I was stunned. (The recent debate in philosophy has opened my eyes to problems I didn't suffer from, perhaps because I was so "masculine"; I don't really know.) But if I felt discomfort over these things, it was not because I felt like a man trapped in a woman's body: it was because I was being judged by standards that had force and merit by statistical regularity at best and mere convention at worst.
I've gone on far too long, sorry.
One last point: you talk about 'presenting as femme'. May I ask what this means? This is a genuine question, not an arch or sarcastic one. Is the opposite still 'butch', as it was in my distant youth? (I don't even know if lesbians still talk this way about themselves as they did back then.)