The director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project (they have such a project??) wrote a piece a few weeks ago titled Trans Rights Are Women’s Rights. It’s subtitled “Here’s why the rights of trans people are at the heart of gender justice for all” and illustrated with this adorable photo:

Hur hur, cis-ters, what a hilarious pun, and how impressive for a grown-up, can tie its own shoes organization like the ACLU to use it.

March is Women’s History Month, which means I’m often asked to name the most pressing issue facing women in America. Answers spring to mind, sometimes faster than I can form the words.

She says there are a lot of them, and lists some.

None of these ills, however, is the subject of so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” laws being introduced in a growing list of states including Kansas, Arizona, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Montana. Instead, this legislation would create a legal definition of womanhood based on the capacity to produce ova, or human eggs. This definition of “woman,” which is gerrymandered to exclude trans women and girls, would then apply throughout state law — and could make it impossible for trans people to live openly at work, at school, or anywhere in the states they call home.

It’s not gerrymandering to exclude male people from a definition of women. I too don’t much want Republican legislatures defining women, but I don’t want the ACLU doing it either. That’s where we are now.

The “Women’s Bill of Rights” is only a sliver of the cruel campaign to deny basic rights to trans people currently underway across the country.

What basic rights? It’s not a right to define yourself as something you’re not and force everyone else to agree or at least shut up about disagreeing. That can’t be a right, because you can’t generalize it.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ria Mar doesn’t bother to specify what she means by “basic rights” – which is quite a bizarre omission for a rights organization. What basic rights are being denied to trans people? Please inform.

As feminists, we reject efforts to appropriate the rhetoric of “women’s rights” to inflict life-threatening harm on trans people, men or women.

They’re not feminists. They embrace the rhetoric of “threatening harm” and “deny basic rights” to knock huge holes in women’s existing rights.

Attacking trans people does nothing to address the real problems women face. 

It’s not “attacking trans people” to refuse to agree that men are literally women. One of the real problems women face is indeed the ever-growing pattern of men taking prizes and jobs and organizations for women. That’s a real problem. It’s a violation of women’s rights.

To the contrary, limiting freedom for trans people worsens conditions for all women by re-entrenching the very gender stereotypes that have underpinned centuries of women’s oppression and that the ACLU Women’s Rights Project has worked for more than half a century to dismantle. After all, the very notion that a person should identify with the sex they were assigned at birth for their entire life is a stereotype, as the more than 1.5 million trans people living in the United States attest to every day.

Wut? Can she really believe that? Is Chase Strangio standing over her as she types?

She goes on to pretend that stereotypes about women are the same thing as facts about women.

It’s embarrassing.