The problem is that there isn’t really a middle ground left.
We were in that middle ground, such as it was, a few years back. It was accepted that “transwomen are women” was a polite fiction, if it was said at all.
Transwomen were understood to be men with a medical condition, who needed to take on a more woman-like appearance to alleviate a mental health problem and it was understood it was helpful if they could discretely use women’s spaces. They were broadly tolerated, even if that meant a few women could no longer use those spaces and had to exclude themselves. It was held that the benefits for those few men outweighed the discomfort some women experienced.
That was a middle ground. We have moved a long way away from it and I don’t think we can go back now.
Then back in 2015, Stonewall announced they were moving over to fighting for trans rights and stated that one of their aims was the removal of the single sex exemptions from the Equality Act. At this point, it should have been obvious to all that there was a clash of rights, but that was denied and no debate was employed as a tactic, with women who pointed it out being threatened and harassed and worse.
Stonewall stopped admitting that was their aim and instead, started on a massive project to undermine the single sex exemptions by implying that the terms women and sex in the EA did not refer to women and sex, but to “the group of people who identified as women” and “gender identity”.
Stonewall had a lot of power and provided so-called diversity and equality advice that suggested companies, police forces, the civil service and many other bodies should “get ahead of the law” and treat the EA as if those terms sex and women referred to “self-identified sex/women”, rather than actual sex/women.
This was so broadly adopted and the EA was so undermined, that women that were realising their rights were being removed started pushing back.
We gained ground because it was true that our rights were being undermined. And now the Supreme Court has confirmed the version of the EA Stonewall we’re pushing was not the law and those companies using it are, in fact, not acting within the law.
So what you are seeing is not a removal of trans rights. It’s the readjustment from a deliberately misleading campaign process, carried out in the name of trans rights.
What you see here on this board are thousands of women, many of whom were polite, but were abused nonetheless, who are now are hugely relieved as they can see their rights were being eroded and felt powerless, but have finally received justice.
So unless your transwomen friends wanted women’s rights and access to women’s spaces, they have lost nothing at all.
And if they did want women’s rights, because they don’t really see women as being important enough to have their own rights, then they are going to have to adjust that opinion, then reassess and start again to carve out their own spaces in society in a way that doesn’t undermine women’s rights.