I respect trans people and the struggles they go through, but many women’s issues do not apply to trans women, therefore trans women don’t need to be included in those spaces. Women are oppressed based off of sex and genitals, not identity. Trans women deserve a place in feminism, but we can't pretend like they have the experience needed to understand sex-based oppression. Does that make me a TERF?
Look..... I really don’t want to answer because I know this is likely just bait.
But alright, I’m sure other people that follow me may have this same line of thinking and I’d like to address it for the lurkers while we’re here.
Let me try to TL;DR the answer here, in case you want to stop reading:
Because women’s issues do not have to be the same issues in order to be considered important.
many women’s issues do not apply to trans women, therefore trans women don’t need to be included in those spaces
Many cis women’s issues don’t apply to OTHER cis women either.
Feminism, and the driving force behind it, is not a monolith. No two women will have the exact same issues. The issues of women in Russia and the issues of women in Japan are also different. White women and black women face completely different issues. That doesn’t make one women’s issues less important, nor does it exclude them from the movement.
No one is suggesting every single type of women, ever (and there are many) face the same exact set of problems and all need the same exact space/solution. All kinds of different women face all kinds of different issues.
The thing is... it’s not the issue that we COULD create separate spaces. Trans-only spaces are a thing! Black-women-only spaces are a thing! Lesbian-only spaces are a thing!
The existence of those spaces for minorities is not the issue.
The issue is that some feminisms movements exclude trans women wholesale, often based on outdated stereotypes and incorrect assumptions about their experiences and anatomy. If a cis woman who has never menstruated wants to join a tampon-themed discussion, she will not be crudely expelled from said group based on that. If a woman who has never been sexually assaulted wants to join a conversation about sexual assault, no one will stop her and force her to leave.
Also, trans women and cis women DO face a lot of very common overlapping problems such as sexual harassment, oversexualization, glass ceiling, not being taken seriously by medical professionals, etc, ad nauseam.
“we can't pretend like they have the experience needed to understand sex-based oppression”
When you say this, what you probably mean is ‘oppression of people presumed to be women’.
But in doing so, you are making the assumption that 100% of trans women can be automatically clocked as ‘not real women’ and are therefore somehow magically escaping all this sexism cis people automatically face. (Which - big if true! Very sneaky of them. Trans women, congrats on rolling nat20 on stealth when it comes to being oppressed. Sigh. No, I know that’s not how that works....)
Because no one checks what your genitals look like before they whistle at you from a car. No one asks to see your birth certificate prior to failing not to promote you. Your workplace is not pulling your genome and checking your chromosomes before deciding to dismiss your power harassment claim. If people presume you’re a woman, they treat you like a fuckin’ woman. No ‘sex’ involved.
But again, I am not a woman, nor a trans woman, so it's not really my place to say.
Edit: Please don't harass OP. If necessary, discuss in the comments. If this is making you stressed, block the tags!
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