You've all been very kind, so I'm going to plunge into my extended thoughts on the subject, and that'll teach you to say nice things on MN!
So we have this recurrent theme of activists claiming that gender-critical women owe their entire philosophical position to jealousy of male transitioners. We are told that transwomen look more like women than we do.
My initial response to this when I first saw it posted (maybe 3 years ago) was something along the lines of "but women are bombarded with lit, angled and airbrushed pictures of the most beautiful women in the world on every magazine cover and billboard. How is a picture of any male transitioner going to even register on the Richter Scale of Capitalistic Corporate Demoralisation of Women?"
Since then, I've seen this idea put forward frequently enough for me to think more deeply about it which is always bad news for everyone in my vicinity - including me - and I think this is Plato's Theory of Forms in the wild. I'm going to supply an extract on Plato now. The full webpage is longer than this, so do click through if the bit I've taken isn't quite making sense.
extract
The Platonic Forms, according to Plato, are just ideas of things that actually exist. They represent what each individual thing is supposed to be like in order for it to be that specific thing. For example, the Form of human shows qualities one must have in order to be human. It is a depiction of the idea of humanness. But no actual human is the perfect representation of the Form human. They are similar, but every human is different, and none are perfectly human.
According to Plato, every object or quality in reality has a Form: dogs, cats, humans, oceans, tables, colors, beauty, love, and courage. Form answers the question "What is that?" Plato went a step further in asking “what is Form itself?” Plato assumed that an object was essentially or "really" a manifestation of the Form and that the phenomena were mere shadows that mimicked the Form. This means that objects in reality are momentary portrayals of the Form under varying circumstances.
The “problem of universals,” or how can one Form in general be many things in particular, was solved by presuming that Form is a distinct singular thing that causes multiple representations of itself in particular objects.
According to Plato’s Theory of Forms, matter is considered particular in itself. For Plato, Forms are more real than any objects that imitate them. Though the Forms are timeless and unchanging, physical manifestations of Forms are in a constant state of change. Where Forms are unqualified perfection, physical objects are qualified and conditioned.
The Forms, according to Plato, are the essences of various objects. Forms are the qualities that an object must have to be considered that type of object. For example, there are countless chairs in the world but the Form of “chairness” is at the core of all chairs. Plato held that the world of Forms is transcendent to our own world, the world of substances, which is the essential basis of reality.
Though no one has ever seen a perfect circle, nor a perfectly straight line, everyone knows what a circle and a straight line are. Plato uses this as evidence that his Forms are real.
Continues: owlcation.com/humanities/An-Introduction-to-Platos-Theory-of-Forms
So Plato believed that we instinctively classified objects and living things, by how closely they hewed to perfect embodiments of their essences, called Forms, that existed outside time and space. I think we were supposed to be born, having already experienced the realm of the essences and its perfect ideal Forms of horses, cats and squares before we were born, but seriously, don't quote me on that. It's a long time since I had the time to read about classical Greek philosophy.
Anyway, this is what trans activists are doing. Where we think of being female as a messy, biological reality, they have a Form of what women should look like. The interior of the human being doesn't matter, it's strictly defined by an observer's assessment. We will call it Womanhood.
Like Plato's Forms, the observer is assumed to be male. Unlike Plato's forms, which were supposed to be eternal and exist outside time and space, the trans activist Form of Womanhood is very much tied to a time and a place. Very much so.
Over time, I have gradually inferred from context that their Form of Womanhood is shaped, nay inseparable, from current Western standards of beauty, i.e. white, young, without visible disabilities, slender but with large breasts, long hair, preferably blonde.
They are enraged that we don't see male transitioners as women, even if they have put themselves through cosmetic surgery in pursuit of the Form of Womanhood, and that we do see women who have never bothered with any of it as women.