Elaine Fuchs:
"I think I disagree on a couple of points here:
Broadly, I view feminism as a movement against patriarchal power structures. Women aren't the only group harmed by this, people of all genders suffer from the patriarchy. For example men can be bound to gender roles too, and suffer from toxic expectations of masculinity. I would say in one way or another, everyone is a victim of the patriarchy (or course not all in the same way, or to the same degree).
I think this is a key tenet of intersectional feminism."
I disagree with this. The major criterion the so-called patriarchy uses is based on biological sex or perceived biological sex. Biologically female people have historically been oppressed in laws, in religious tenets, and in everyday life. Pornography cannibalises the biologically female body, the Catholic Church bans biological females from priesthood, and in the past it was biological women who were not allowed in universities or in many occupations and whose inheritance rights and property rights were severely curtailed. The regulations were based on biological sex, i.e., belonging to the sex which typically produces ova during certain life stages. It was biological women who were banned from voting, not trans women, and so on. Even today sex-based oppression on the global level has the largest number of victims.
To me intersectional feminism is crucial, but it stops being feminism if the intersections one analyses don't have the "belonging to the female sex" in it. Then it is some other social justice movement. As an aside, it is astonishing how intersectionality is never demanded from any other social justice movement, only from feminism.
Elaine Fuchs:
"In terms of fighting for women's rights in particular, I think that trans women can and should be allies here because of a great shared purpose. Not every cause in the women's rights umbrella even affects every cisgender woman. Consider the crucial fight for bodily autonomy when it comes to abortion rights. This doesn't directly affect cis women who can't become pregnant, but this shouldn't stop them being included in feminist movements, and it doesn't lessen the word "woman" to include them."
I agree that trans women who are seen as female by others will also experience sexism and misogyny, and in that sense they can share in the same battle. On the rest of your statement: Being biologically female is a necessary condition for someone needing an abortion. It is not a sufficient condition, and no female person is fertile all through their lives.
The 'necessary' part there matters greatly. It is the reason why all young women are viewed as potentially expensive employees, because they look as if they might be capable of pregnancy and so might drop out of labour force temporarily or permanently. In other words, if others see you as biologically female, you are going to be treated as a representative of that group by sexists and misogynists.
If we erase biological sex here and pursue the current gender ideology approach to focusing on sex-based oppression (i.e., where in each separate case we talk about the 'people' experiencing something like menstruation, pregnancy, giving birth and menopause), we will lose sight of the crucial intersectional fact that all those people are, in fact, largely the same group. That is because we are erasing all names for that large group, the one which suffers from sex-based ill-treatment.
We are also going to have tremendous difficulty in addressing rape which is largely done by people who have penises (though only by a minority of them) and now not by the identity group 'men' to people who have vulvas (though not to all of them) and now not to the identity group 'women'.
Elaine Fuchs:
"I think the specific point you were arguing against was that by making activism more specific (for example advocating for "people who can become pregnant", or "people who menstruate") it would detach it from the word "woman" and make it less effective by virtue of not being attached to the victims, namely women (please correct me if I've misinterpreted you). I suppose the issue is that by using "women" here, we're already including too many people (for example women who can't get pregnant, or women who don't menstruate) and excluding some (trans men and non-binary people who can get pregnant and menstruate). The inclusive language is actually more accurately naming the victims. (There are some subtle points about making sure that the language used is inclusive as well as understandable to the most people, but this is probably a case-by-case issue). Having said that, I would personally still include these specific issues under the broad umbrella of women's rights."
What you are saying here follows once we strip the old meaning form the words 'women' and 'girls' and view them as pure abstract gender identities.
But I would argue that the vast majority of people do NOT view their own gender in those terms (though trans people probably do).
Rather, they base their gender ON their biological sex (and not necessarily as an identity but rather as a fact). For all those people, the new usage of turning the female body into a gender-neutral one (but not the male body, for some mysterious reason, as that is still men's body) is extremely invalidating and a form of erasure.
Elaine Fuchs:
"As for your feelings of gender identity (from another post), it's absolutely not my place to argue that you do feel one and I wouldn't dream of that. The flip side is that I think we have to take trans people at their word here, I believe who they say they are, and that transitioning affects their lives in a substantial and positive way."
I feel great agony over this, because it has come about by mixing together two definitional systems:
The old sex-based one and the new identity-based one. We cannot combine them the way that is being done today, because many women would argue that they are women because their bodies re female, but some people who have female bodies argue that they are not women because they do not feel like women.
The concept of inclusiveness in the new gender ideology is then applied to let the latter group's feelings determine what the overall group of female people is called. This excludes the gender definitions of millions of women. One could equally well have argued the reverse, i.e., that the concept of inclusiveness requires that the group of female-bodied people should be called women.
The contradiction in this cannot be solved. It could have been easily solved by creating new terms for gender identity and by leaving the old terms alone as referring to biological sex. But this did not happen.
So now every single female person is told that they are women on some other basis than their biological sex, but nobody is willing to give a definition of this new concept verifiable to others that wouldn't be openly sexists and retrogressive.