Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Define “civil liberty“.

It all comes down to the initial claim that trans people actually are the sex they feel they are. Yet too often rebuttals are dismissed with the insistence that these academic, intellectual debates ignore the suffering and needs of real, live people.

Yet we are told that we must prioritise the suffering and needs of some few, real live trans identified males over the suffering and needs of all real, live women and girls. We are told that there is no actual conflict since, because “transwomen are women”, they are all in fact the same group, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot who desrves to be no-platformed or sacked. This is why the definition of “woman” is so vital. To what group of people are you referring when you use the word “woman?” How is that group defined, by feelings or biology? Being able to convince bystanders and others that this is a conflict within feminism rather than a conflict between “feminisms” (or more acurately, between feminism and something that identifies as feminism), allows TRAs to paint GC feminists as evil TERFs and avoids the much needed discussion of the very real conflicts they are so desperate to deny exist and at the same time paper over.

TRAs are currently in an advantageous tactical position given the rapid and widespread institutional capture in government and media they have been able to engineer or take advantage of, but the fact they have to fight material reality itself means that whatever tactical positions they hold now, they will always have to fight to keep them. Reality isn’t going to change, and it’s not going anywhere.