It’s amusing to find that I quoted “Veronica Ivy” aka Rhys McKinnon just six weeks ago saying:

Trans women are women. Trans women are female. Our sport’s governing body (cycling’s Union Cycliste Internationale, the one that banned Armstrong for life) says I’m female. My U.S. and Canadian identification documents say I’m female, including my birth certificate. My medical records all list me as female. So officials in sports, government and medicine all consider me, a trans woman, to be female. The people who disagree are just wrong.

How times change.

It’s such a bizarre thing for him to say, anyway, as Francis Boyle pointed out in the first comment. “All these people and institutions say I’m a woman therefore I am one.” As if he believed in literal word-magic, like the anointment of royalty. The UCI said he was female, so he was female. He’s never heard of lying? He’s never heard of error? But his academic field (when he had one) was philosophy.

Plus he knows we know that lots of people and institutions say it – we know they repeat the lie – we know it all too well. We know that, and it’s what we object to so intensely. We object to the magical thinking, we object to the insult to our intelligence as well as our rights, we object to the infantile idea that fantasy=reality. We object to being forced to play Let’s Pretend with a lot of hulking males who hate us. Rhys McKinnon is high up on that list.