Classifying a small group of men changes the definition of what a woman is.
The inclusion of a group of male people means a woman is no longer a female person.
So what is a woman? Someone who wears dresses and likes the colour pink? Does that mean that women who don't wear dresses or like the colour pink are no longer women? No one can tell us.
And what is the word for "female people"? Even now many people, from India Willoughby to Stella Creasy, are saying that trans women are female. So what words do we now have for biological sex in humans? What word do we now have for members of the childbearing sex?
Because our oppression stems from the fact that we are members of the childbearing sex. Let's be very clear about that. The way we have consistently been marginalised and relegated to lower levels in the workforce is because we are the ones who get pregnant and have babies and then do the lion's share of the childcare. The reason women of a certain age often find ourselves discriminated against in employment is because employers don't want to run the risk of us having a year off work and then another year off two years later, and they believe that we will be ineffective and unmotivated if and when we come back. This is the reason why the medical profession, like almost all other professions, is male dominated at the higher levels. And because the medical profession is male dominated, medical research tends to focus heavily on men's health issues and use male bodies as the default for research, at the expense of women. The fact that we are the childbearing sex is the reason why contraception is by and large our responsibility and why we have to accept long term use of synthetic hormones or foreign objects in our uteruses in order to avoid pregnancy. It's the reason why it is often difficult or even impossible to access abortions. I suspect that the reason girls in many countries around the world undergo FGM is to ensure that they never experience sexual pleasure and so have no reason to cheat on their husbands, making it a safer bet that any children they bear are their husbands' legitimate children. And I suspect that the reason why use of proper pain relief in childbirth is so frowned upon has got fuck all to do with epidurals causing complications and actually has its roots in the Bible, which tells us that pain in childbirth is women's punishment for Eve eating the apple.
What do trans women know of any of this?
Nothing. There is nothing about their lived experience which is relevant to our experience as women, and vice versa.
I think we need a word for the group of people affected by these issues. We are a distinct category of people with our own specific issues. Our sex is the basis on which we have been oppressed throughout human history. We cannot effectively fight for our own rights unless we are allowed to name ourselves and focus our activism on issues which actually affect us, rather than being force teamed with a group of people whose issues are completely different to our own and who only divert time and attention from our issues onto their own.
But trans activists, and most of the political establishment including Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP and the Greens, appear to think that not only do we not need a word for ourselves, we should not be allowed to have one even if we want one, and we certainly shouldn't be allowed to organise ourselves or campaign on that basis or have any single sex spaces or sports. (Yes I know that Keir Starmer has claimed in the last couple of days that he has always been clear that we should have those things, but that is a bare faced lie.)
So yeah, the belief that trans women are women, which is based on literally nothing more than a small group of male people claiming that their own subjective feelings about themselves are what it feels like to be a woman, takes a huge amount away from women. It takes everything away from us, starting with the ability to clearly describe ourselves and fight for our own rights.
I'm amazed that more people can't see this.