Step one: believe in facts
No, see, this is one reason I won’t just close my eyes and “be kind.”
No. “Birth sex” and “actual sex” are not opposite, they’re the same thing, which can most easily be named with simply “sex.” Your sex is your sex is your sex. You can’t change it, any more than you can change your species. Some things you can change, some you can’t. Deal with it.
It’s not “ideology” to refuse to pretend that sex is optional and switchable. What’s ideology is to make up a whole new pretend-science in which sex is as optional and switchable as what shirt you put on.
It’s pretty rich for the bossy bratty ideologues of the trans religion to accuse the rest of us as “enforcing” anything – we don’t enforce the fact that sex is not optional, it’s just reality that does that.
Oh and also? Trans women shouldn’t be using women’s services, because trans women are not women.
“Trans women use women’s services”: I was just reading about a health services student in OB/GYN who spent 20% of her education time on “transwomen”, 0% on postmenopausal women, when the clinical ratio in her rounds was 0% trans, 55% postmenopausal women. She was told never to refuse to give a TIM a pap smear. “Women’s services”, sure.
Oh, but Sackbut, didn’t you know postmenopausal women aren’t really women? Because reasons. Besides, we are all Karens and TERFs, so why should we be entitled to utilize women’s services, which should be centered on trans, anyway, because everything in the world should center on trans.
I dispute the idea that trans people will always lie on the census, there’s a certain social pressure when filling out surveys like that. Hell, I’m pretty sure there’s illegal immigrants that wouldn’t lie to the census and they’ve got more pressing incentive than validation.
No, TRAs accuse the TERFS of throwing menopausal women under the bus. Their argument is that we’re saying sex has to do with reproduction. Thus, we reduce women to their ability to have children. Since menopausal women can no longer have children, that means that TERFS don’t believe they’re women. Just like they don’t believe Transwomen are women.
I have actually watched a discussion among TRAs in which this point was made, and nobody in the group said “no, they don’t believe menopausal women aren’t women.” Some of them think we do believe that. Others think it’s the obvious flaw in our thinking, and what our arguments naturally lead to.
Yes, they definitely say that. But they themselves tend to dismiss women my age as “Karen’s” and “TERFs”. Like transmen, we are useful tools for them to use to make themselves feel “progressive” and try to paint us as “Nazis”, but they don’t actually mean it. After all, they are the ones who create words like “uterus havers” and “menstruators” to describe people who were born women. So like everything else with TRAs, I suspect them of saying whatever the hell they think is useful at the moment.
Rad Fems have done a hell of a lot more for older women than any TRA ever did, or ever will. We are an afterthought, just useful like black women and disabled women and…well, all women who are not transwomen (which frankly is all women, since transwomen are not women).
Trans women use things reserved for women, therefore they are women. This is what passes for logic amongst TRAs.
Well, if TRAs want TW counted as women because they are to use women’s services, then we’re going to need another count of all the women who can no longer use women’s services because there’s men in them.
Arcadia, they would probably term that the “Karen Count”.
Since “Karen” is shorthand for “bigoted middle aged white lady”, that’s going to be really weird for a lot of Muslim, Jewish, and women of colour.