Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Web of confusion.

You’ve just announced that you think of girl-being as a matter of self-identifying rather than fact or body, so you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls, you center the experiences of people who tell you they think of themselves as women or girls.

You can’t do both. You can’t insist that being female is a matter of “identifying as” and still pretend you center the experience of female people.

I’ll bet the TiMs attending would be some pissed off it it ended up being all TiMs and only TiMs in attendence. I think that’s why they insist on having it both ways. They need women and girls there to validate them, to show everyone they’re just “one of the girls.” They can’t do that if it’s a total TiM sausage fest. Then they’d be being ghettoized, and they’d have to find some group with actual validating females in it so they could join. Again. Any exclusively TiM accomodation (which you’d think they’d be happy with) denies them the validation that sharing exropriating women’s facilities and resources they crave. A sporting event made up entirely of TiMs would be a complete failure. They’d just be competing against other cheats. Where’s the fun (or validation) in that?

As much as they’d hate to admit it, they need women present. Women are the secret ingedient that they can’t do without because TiMs can’t validate each other. It doesn’t work that way. How many “trans lesbians” date other “trans lesbians”? The “cotton ceiling” doesn’t refer to TiMs. Why is that? Without actual lesbians in the mix, any TiM is just a heterosexual male, and they know it. It’s really quite a bind they’ve put themselves into, and they’re doing their damnedest to use women to get themselves out of it. But there’s no resolving this inherent contradiction, especially when gatekeeping women “withhold” the validation that TiMs so desperately need. Why can’t women just shut up and be kind?

It’s just like the attempted hostile takeover of the word “woman.” Changing the meaning of the word “woman” so that it includes men destroys the meaning they’re so desperate to latch onto. If women abandoned the word and took up a new one for themselves, TiMs would come around to appropriate that new word too. They can’t be their “true selves” without women being forced to accept them as women. It’s like TiMs are trying to extract some sort of stamp of authenticity from the women they’re forcing themselves on. It’s sick and twisted. Just as TiMs reject third spaces for toilet facilities, open categories in sports, trans exclusive rape crisis accomodations and counselling, they demand access to women’s spaces and, ironically, women’s approval. Anything else marks them out as not being women, which of course, they’re not. I can’t but imagine that helplessness in the face of this insurmountable contradiction must fuel some of their anger.

Women who refuse to submit quietly underline the fundamental untruth and delusion behind gender ideology and its demands. Without women, any gathering of TiMs is just a bunch of guys in dresses. Women are the needed, forced audience. It’s no fun if you’re not transgressing anything or anyone. Who do you lord it over and demand “centering” from if not women? Being given your own facilities robs you of the validation that using women’s facilities supplies you with. Third spaces will never be acceptable because they’re transphobic, cutting you off from the women’s spaces you need and deserve. If women pack up their tent and leave, you will follow them, because like it or not, you need them. Women are the fact that won’t go away, and that you can’t let escape.