But how do these women hold onto their sense of self in a society that is seeking to redefine their identity and the language they use to describe it?
They can't. But they do not necessarily understand what they are losing.
The purpose of totalitarianism is to obliterate the truth by making it impossible to identify it, name it and define it.
By making people repeat what they know not to be true - how many fingers am I holding Winston - you destroy the spirit and the ability to think of those who comply.
Its not only Orwell who talks about this a lot at length, but also Hannah Arendt when she wrote about Totalitarianism.
I encourage people to read up on Arendt's teaching on this. Not necessarily to read her books but at least find out about the principles she writes about and how it's power is designed to destroy the very concept of 'self'.
Its interesting that Arendt observes that loneliness is a precondition for totalitarian domination, with people who are socially isolated more likely to be attracted to totalitarian ideology and movements. This is similar to cults which are essentially would be totalitarian thinking. So people who don't feel like they belong and want to are drawn to these ideologies. And their goals is not to help people belong, but to actually crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being.
Thus if you destroy the word women and therefore the concept of women, you isolate women from being a collective group. They can't gather. They can't share ideas. They can't create a sense of identify. And this is the purpose.
This destroys collective power. It destroys a shared identity and isolates individuals. Except women saying this don't realise what they are giving up. They think they are joining a collective club and being accepted. The invisibility of what they are surrendering in doing so is sinister. Women don't want to rock the boat and be shunned for not agreeing with TWAW but in doing so they give up their power and identity without realising it. By the time they do, they are isolated because power has made it so they will 'go back to the loneliness' and not have a tribe to below to.
Or that's the idea.
Why do TRAs attack women's gatherings that stress a collective identity of women and the concept of sex so much. I mean it's 'only' a showing of a film to a small room full of women about adult human females?
Because asserting your own identity rather than having it imposed is the point here. They know it because they seek to destroy reality and the concept of self in women and make them subservient.
Arendt says: The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Sex can never be hidden. We all understand it.
The entire point here is about the power to speak this, to express a sense of self which reflects the truth and the power to get others to repeat the lie they know to be false as if it is truth because this is the ultimate expression of helplessness.
It is all about power and control.
Women who can not define themselves on their own terms because men dictate to them that it is 'unkind' to do so are enslaved to the ideology. They do so because they fear they will be isolated, yet the purpose of the language is to isolate them and to prevent them from identifying on their own terms. This matters because you cannot name male violence. You can not identify sexism. You can not demonstrate injustice and lack of representation of women. These all remove power. It's everything from pointing out that mobile phone sizes are designs for male dimensions to the rape of women in prisons by already known sexual predators...