To balance my last response - this, in contrast, is a great post. I'm not saying I agree with it all, but it's really interesting.
To address the essence of it, I think most posters recognise the complexities you suggest we ignore, are empathetic about many trans people's plight, and, in a good proportion of cases, actually began this journey thinking as you do.
Many resent having been forced into a proportionately more "absolutist" position than they may otherwise have taken, had this absolutist war not been waged on women and their rights. The stakes set by the TRAs and their ilk are so very high - nothing less than our redefinition and erasure as a legal, political and social class - that previous pronoun-users and space-sharers have been forced to harden their stance, as they saw inches they give became the proverbial stolen miles.
Your post does also misrepresent the degree to which most posters here are "absolutist", though. Your emotive "mass invasion of women's spaces" is indeed unlikely - read instead the numerous posts about how safeguarding works for an explanation of what we actually think. "You put all trans people together" is also emphatically not the case - the priority for many is protecting trans-identifying children, and their different predicament to, for example, grown male transexuals, AGPs and cross-dressers.
This recognition of complexity, coupled with the trans movement's typical failure to recognise or acknowledge it, is what, rather paradoxically, has driven us to a harder line: as long as all these people are "trans", there is no way to distinguish between them, allowing access to some but not others. And indiscriminate access to all equates to massively increased risks to women and children. So as long as TRAs won't permit nuance, we're forced into a rather more wholesale No.
However, I'd say that there's a fairly strong argument that what you're framing as "absolutist" on our part is, in fact, rather more nuanced, and that what you see as your own nuance is actually rather more absolutist. For example, we've been clear that we're largely welcoming of trans-identifying females in our spaces and other threads include nuanced discussion about how best to accommodate those with differences of sexual development.
Of the three possible approaches to accommodating self-claimed "outliers" resistant to sex-based categories -
- Make female spaces more "inclusive"
- Make male spaces safer and welcoming
- Make third spaces more universal
you seem to be focussing on 1) only, presenting our convincing arguments against it as reductively absolutist. Is this an absolutist approach in itself, perhaps?
None of 1), 2) or 3) are easy. All demand large scale societal change. So, I go back to my arguments of previous posts as regards which is the best to fight for - which is safest, and which meets the interests of the vast majority. That would be 3), above. It's certainly not the easiest, of course - that 1) is seen as the easiest target belies the very reason women need their single-sex spaces: sexist disregard for our safety and dignity. And that 2) is never even proposed belies a tellingly absolutist attitude to male and female gendered roles - the former remain unchallenged and unaffected, with the latter expected to bend over backwards.