Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Result.

Last year a report by the think tank Policy Exchange said NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing same-sex intimate care based not on their biological sex but their self-declared gender identity.

I’m not sure this is the original wording but if “sex” and “gender” are supposed to be different (as genderists are wont to tell us – when it suits them) “same-sex intimate care” could never have been based on “their self-declared gender identity.” It was only the opportunistic conflation of the two that permitted them to do this. The deliberate, ideologically driven suppression of the basic fact that humans can’t change sex is what let them foist this on us in the first place. Just as Ophelia noted about the politicization of climate change on the “And what about toast, and earthworms?” thread, the fact that sex is binary and immutable is not political. It was made political by those who found it an obstacle to their agenda, which was to violate women’s boundaries. Biology was deemed to be “transphobic”, and women who stated the facts were forced on the defensive as institution after institution (bewilderingly) fell into line defending the new “gender-based” definition of “woman” required to normalize the unprecedented invasion of women’s spaces, positions, and resources.

Suddenly, it was to be understood that any supposedly “feminist” organization claiming to speak for, or act on behalf of “all women” were, by the inclusion of that one unnecessary word “all”, now including men in their remit, thereby vitiating their original purpose. “All” didn’t mean they were expanding their mission with regards to race or class, but expanding it with regards to sex itself, but used both race and class as pretext and shield against those women who dared to complain about officially sanctioned male intrusion into previously female single sex facilities. This was (and continues to be) the point behind the invention of “Karen,” the deployment of baseless accusations of racism, classism, White Colonialism, etc. to hide the smuggling of men past justified and prudential safeguarding and gatekeeping that had previously been used to help to bar men from women’s spaces. Under the lie of TWAW, this was deemed “exclusionary” and “discriminatory,” as if any kind of exclusion and discrimination, including that which, up until recently, had kept women safe by keeping men out were now bad things. Without the convenient replacement or conflation of “sex” with “gender identity”, this would not have been possible.

Under this po-faced empty-headedness, “inclusivity” (that is, including men) became more important than protecting women. Those charged with protecting women betrayed them at the drop of a hat, and had the nerve to declare themselves to be Just, and Pure, and Good, speaking from the lofty moral height of the Right Side of History. “Validation” became more important than women’s safety, and women paid the price in prisons, hospitals, shelters, sports, and more. This smug, self-apotheosizing required a corresponding degree of vituperative demonization. It was considered “transphobic” and bigoted (not to mention unpardonably rude) and unkind) to so much as mention the women who were stigmatized, traumatized, injured, or killed in the process. These victims were ignored, swept away, and considered an acceptable price to pay for the needs of the men (and their noisy allies) who had become their real clients.

Long after the inevitable mounting of the numbers of female victims of these heartlessly brutal policies, injury and victimization that feminists had accurately foretold and warned against, women’s concerns were presented by trans advocates as purely hypothetical, shameful, hysterical scaremongering, motivated by nothing but the hateful desire to hurt trans folk. Women, it seems, had no legitimate interest in keeping men out of women’s spaces. But of course, it was never reported this way. This is where the bullshit term “transwomen,” the TWAW mantra, and the unevidenced claims of powerlessness and marginalization (belied by the remarkable speed with which they were able to amass the tremendous amount of political capital they were able to bring to bear in the fulfillment of their unprecedented demands) did so much damage, hiding the fact of male intrusion of women’s spaces, and the characterization of any resistance to this violation as a move by a small, powerful group of bigoted women against “other” women, who were in fact not women of any kind at all, but men.