So to the gish.
(a) many GC activists are explicitly eliminationist in their words
Can you please define what you mean by "eliminationist" here? I realise it's the latest buzzword in TRA circles in the ongoing project to smear female people asking to keep our sex-based rights, protections, opportunities and language as something akin to - well, atrocities which I'm not going to both dignify or minimse by naming in this contxet - , but what do you mean when you use it in this context?
Surely you cannot be suggesting that if female-only sex-based rights, protections, opportunities exist, trans people are eliminated? Surely a trans woman is still a trans women whether or not they ever set foot in a female-only space? Surely your inner identity as a woman is not dependant on whether or not you are currently being allowed to perform as a member of the opposite sex? I'm certainly still female whether or not I have access to female-only language, resources or protections. I don't need these things to be female. I am female anyway. So without them I am still female, I just have less protection against the risks and challenges that come with being female in this society. Which is, of course, the whole point of why we want to keep them.
And as I'm sure you well know, "GC" is not a catch all term for people saying no to trans expansionism. It means critcism and rejection of gender roles as a whole. Yes trans gender roles, being gender roles, come under that but it's not the trans that is the issue, it's the gender. There are groups who disagree with trans genderism for other reasons but they are not gender critical, they are gender confirminst. They would reject gender critical analysis and likely see GC feminists as just a big an issue as they see transgender people. You appear to be, entirely accidentally I'm sure, getting these groups mixed up.
Which is a real shame since we should be allies here. It is so sad that the loudest voices in your movement are bullheadishly pushing this project of appropriating female-only resources for male people as a sort of backdoor route to trans support. It is really alienating so many people who would otherwise have been your allies. It would be so much more productive to support trans people directly by creating new physical and cultural spaces and acceptance for gender non conforming people.
So, given that you seem to be using both "elminationist" and "GC" incorrectly, I think unless you can give actual examples here I'm going to have reject this argument. On the plus side, if you were under the impresison it was true and not just throwing mud in bad faith, I am very happy to reassure you that it is not. You are perfectly safe from GC Feminists, we just do not accept the ideological gender based definitions and boundary redrawing that your movement demands to apply to female people's lives.
(b) most GCs in my experience use ancient homophobic tropes and laughably bad pseudoscience to imply that trans women are a sexual threat whilst gleefully ignoring that the vast majority of us take medications that are used as chemical castration agents (i.e. testosterone blockers). This is a common tactic used by hate groups throughout history (Irish people in the US, Black people, gay men and lesbians etc etc) during moral panics.
With the gentlest of rebukes, while you may not be a sexual threat, the verified and documented, even self documented, existence of men with fetishes around the performance of womanhood is a fact. So I ask you to try to think about this not just from your own perspective as one trans woman who would never do this, but from the perspective of women who may encounter many different trans women. Because if your project to invalidate female privacy and right to boundaries around our bodies suceeds we will have to deal with the full range of trans identifying men colonising our spaces and taking roles that give them access to our bodies. And believe you me, as a female person I can tell you that the men we least want to be in those spaces and roles are the ones who will be the fastest and keenest to be there. These men may not be you, but in your rush to claim what you want you are leaving the door open to a whole load of pain for women. Female people are, sadly, all too familiar with male people dismissing our experiences with men because they personally are not a threat - please don't be that person.
(Also, I think you are getting your slurs in a muddle here - how on earth do "homophobic tropes" get used to "imply that trans women are a sexual threat to women"? You'll have to show your workings on that one!)
But all that aside, we don't only differentiate between men and women where men may be a sexual threat, otherwise we would be splitting spaces by "virile men" and "everybody else" (although I suspect that may be a little close to the truth of how you at least do see the world?)
Female people exist. We have risk and challenges that male people do not. Yes, sometime that is a direct sexual threat, but there is so much that we have to deal with that comes to us because of the ages of sexism behind society's gender constructs and it is not fair on us to hand wave that away because it's in your way.
(c) many GC activists have espoused that trans people should have fundamental rights removed
No, GC activists believe trans people should not acquire additional rights and cross sex rights. Because what trans people want for themselves and believe about themselves has to be balanced against how those demands impact other people's rights.
Trans people have been using cross-sex hormones for most of a century and the evidence for any harm is scant and usually related to synthetics, which barely any trans people use anyway.
I wasn't just referring to hormones. The side effects of surgery are bad, especially for female people. But yes, the hormones do have side effects as well - elevated stroke risk for a start.
It's notable that I never hear GC activists express concern about the use of synthetics with younger cisgender women (where they are still used a LOT) via BC. Neither did I hear GC activists talk about the vaginal mesh scandal and rarely the issues with poor hormonal care for women going thru menopause.
With respect, you have no idea what GC women may also be working on because you have no idea who is or is not GC unless they are specifically speaking on that topic. Menopause care - hell yes it gets talked about! I think you may need to widen your filters. And the use of blockers in the short term to block puberty is very different to long term use and cross sex hormones.
But did it ever occur to you the reason you don't see as much online discourse about these things is that no one is trying to gaslight us that they are ok, or use them as a Trojan horse to undermine the moral case for female people to have sex-based rights, protections, and opportunities to counteract the sex-baswd risks and challanges we face ?
Trans people have been medically transitioning for most of a century, we're hardly a secret and the 'norm' is to accept that trans people move to their acquired sex. You can see such 'woke' publications such as the Sun and Daily Star in decades past seamlessly respecting trans people's names, pronouns and gender. Nobody (including trans people) said that trans men were exactly like men or that trans women were exactly like women, but that they were close enough and that was fine.
Ok, now I know you are not arguing in good faith. The language used by the press does not reflect a natural grassroots acceptance at all, it was a top down imposition by IPSO after backroom, secret lobbying (remember that? you are against it I believe?) by groups like Press for Change.
Now I will agree the "norm", or at least the aspiration, was to accept trans people as sort of honory members of the opposite sex, in the belief that there were very few, a Hayley Cropper or a Mrs Madrigal who was a gay man before transitioning, who definitely had surgery, and who genuinely empathised with and respected the people of the sex they wished to be accepted as. And crucially, acceptance was a privilege extended to them by the group they were imposing on, not a right to be demanded regardless of how it impacted and demeaned the original group.
Perhaps that was true, perhaps it was always an illusion. Whatever it was, it's gone. After terfisaslur.com and Isla Bryson and piss protests and trans women in women's sports and so many angry shouting men drowing out women's voices, women know too much now to trust in the good faith of trans women any more.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Trans women are now going to have to justify their demands with more than just #BeKind. You need to make the case not just that you don't want to be with the other men, but why it is justified to treat you like you are female when you are not. You need to make that case why it is so imortant to do this that is is reasonable for all female people to lose their sex-specific language, rights, even voice in order to acomodate it.
It is 'gender critical' (I wish it critiqued gender) ideology that is new, based on the unscientific and reductionistic mantra of 'sex is immutable' and contradicting most biologists' understanding of 'sex'. Obviously GC ideology comes from TERFism, but is pretty unrecognisable now from that.
sigh. And we come back to this stupidity.
I'm sorry to be harsh but I am so sick of this.
Female people exist.
You can drag any number of rare DSDs out of the medical books to tell me "its not that simple". You can even argue that society should have additional social sex classes for them beyond the scientific binary. None of that changes the fact that give or take 50% of the population are recognised as female the day they are born and continue to be so throughout their lives.
We know what sex we are. And the people we encounter in our lives generally also know what sex we are, and that has direct consequences for us, and it is not fair to pretend that this is not true or that edge cases make it all sooooooo complicated we can't possibly have single sex protections that may not be 100% scientifically accurate but are 99% effective and sure as hell work well enough to be much much much better than having none at all.
I say this as I don't believe that GC ideology is anything more than a fancy label for a moral panic - TERFism was a thing..a very strange thing that most sane ppl would recoil in horror from, but GCism is just a mask for the lizard brain disgust that you and many people have about queer people...I know it well, I've seen it my whole life.
The thing is, I know myself. So I know this is not true of me. And since you do not know me to make these claims to me, I can only conclude you are not talking to me at all here, but playing to the gallery, trying to invoke some imaginary evil to allow you to dismiss women's objections to your colonisation,
So I will also play to that gallery and say loud and clear that it is disgusting that you are attempting to claim that the only reason female people, who have through history been abused, marginalised, sexualised, exploited, belittled, talked over, owned by male people, could ever have to want physical and cultural spaces away from male people, want even the language to differentiate ourselves from male people and to speak of fenale specific experiences, is because we - checks notes - have a "lizard brain disgust about queer people".
Yeah mate, that's the only possible reason. Sure.
GCs show rarely show concern for women except when it comes to trans people - in my (queer) community there was far more talk and celebration over the recent decriminalisation of abortion amendment(s) than in all the GC spaces I know. Hell, you only have to look at these forums where the anti-trans forum is constantly abuzz whilst the feminism chat forum is, well, pretty dead..and even when something does appear, it often turns into 'about the trans'.
And again, you have no idea who is GC and what they are doing when they are not talking about issues that concern you. My practical feminism is done out in the community, supporting, mentoring and protecting women. And despite TRAs wanting to keep drag the debate to toilets, I really, really care that the support I give to women - that I feel able to give to women exactly because of our common experiences of sex-based risks and discrimintaion and socialisation - can continue to be given on the basis of our shared sex.
And for what it's worth, on the abortion topic, I have consciously stepped out of online discource because I am very worried that the UK, where for decades abortion rights were in practice a done deal, has imported from the US the idea that these are someting to be reopened and redebated. Yes I'm glad the decision went the way it did, but I believe the tribalism of the radicalised online Left and their desparate urge to find someone to fight is going to backfire very badly by opening the door to the real hard right. Not the boogymen you pretend to see behind gender critical feminists but the real ones who would love to stoke up the same divisions in the UK that they have in the US.
Furthermore, with the recent removal of protections from trans people (don't gaslight me, even Cunningham acknowledged it) - there was literally no mention of the effects on cisgender women in GC spaces - something that many (non GC) woman have expressed concerns about.
This is why we call you 'anti-trans' activists - just like the women in years past who would spread panic about predatory lesbians in changing rooms, it's never about protecting women, womanhood or 'sex-based rights', it's about that seething hate of difference.
You are fearing something of your own creation, the projection of your own fears onto anyone who says no to you.
I am me. I know these things are not true of me.
I don't hate different people. Most of my friends are weirdos. I don't hate male people, trans woman or otherwise. I don't hate anyone. I certainly don't hate people because of who they are, only ever what they do, and someone would have to hurt me or mine very very badly for me to hate them.
For me It is about women maintaining their sex-based rights.
I get that you need that not to be true. I get that you need to invent all the reasons in the world why that cannot be true, but nevertheless, it is.
Because Bee, disagreement is not hate. I don't hate you, I just think you are wrong.
I just believe female people have very good reasons to have female-only spaces, protections, opportunities and language.
And trans women, even the loveliest of trans women, are not female. Outside their own head, in the reality of the women they wish to impose themselves on, they are no closer to being female than any other man and none of your self centered arguments have given any good reason that women should pretend they are.