when you have dealt with trans activist argumentation as long as i have, you start noticing that there is a strategy they use every time, a set of six arguments they have established to deflect, dismiss and dodge all and any serious conversations about transness, gender or trans activism in general (and its inherent incompatibility with feminism, gay rights activism, modern science and liberal leftism).
those arguments are hard to fight against in and of themselves because their only purpose is to shut you up, and that is why they are also used by trans allies who do not have the slightest clue what they are even standing up for. but that is also why it is important for you to not waste any time trying to challenge these arguments.
instead, you should try to see them for what they are as a collective - mirrors and smoke to cover up the fact that there is nothing of substance in trans theory. that it is an incoherent set of contradictory ideas that cannot be proven and that which do not stand any critical examination.
here are the six classical arguments that trans activists and especially their well-meaning allies repeatedly use to silence you, picking whichever is most relevant to the discussion at hand:
"maybe you don't know what gender means because you're not trans and have never had issues with your gender identity!" usually as a response to you doubting that gender is a meaningful concept to begin with. it is impossible to know whether this could be true, which is why it's an non-falsifiable claim. what you need to do is not claim you know how trans people feel but pay attention to how gender is being practiced: through behaviors that are entirely reliant on social expectations, social traditions and cultural beliefs, playing by the rules that were already there, despite trans people claiming they are doing something completely different and revolutionary. their behaviors would not make sense in a world where women and men weren't expected to perform a certain role to be seen as acceptable.
"maybe you don't know what it feels like to be a woman because you're not a woman but some kind of agender! look at all those cis women around you, they affirm their gender when they do those feminine performances and that makes them happier!" as a response to you explaining how you don't feel like a woman yourself so you don't understand how a random man could feel that either. it is a similar argument than the first one, non-falsifiable because there is no way you could interview every woman and man in existence and then objectively find out how social expectations are influencing their way of thinking. what trans activists don't tell you is that they can't do that either. if everything is based on subjective self-identification and nothing else, there is no reason to even use the category "woman" to group people to begin with, because there is no reason to assume people's subjective feelings about something quite abstract are even similar enough to be called the same experience. yet they keep using the word woman and tell you it's very important.
"trans clinics follow guidelines that are established by experts. i think they know more than you about what's good for the patients." this is a classic appeal to authority, where your view does not hold any weight regardless of how you are approaching the topic (from a standpoint that does not question the existing data as much as it questions basic ethics, or the needs of other marginalized groups that are in conflict with trans activism). there actually is no scientific consensus and multiple reports have already been made about the extremely poorly made research trans activists have produced, but this is quite difficult to demonstrate to someone who hasn't read many scientific studies to begin with. instead, you should pay attention to how it's always someone else who knows better - an unknown entity somewhere out there! even the experts quote each other, appealing to the existing traditions and methods, saying they simply can't be wrong because they have already been in use... too many times. this same argument might also be followed by the classic "do you even understand advanced biology? and that intersex people exist?" which... they definitely do not understand anything about themselves, but they again trust that you know even less.
"don't you see how much trans people are suffering? they commit suicides everyday, they are murdered by transphobes by en masse, they are denied basic healthcare! why can't you just be kind and understanding to them so they won't feel even worse?" this is an appeal to empathy and is usually used against other liberal leftists in particular. nobody wants to seem cruel or indifferent to human suffering, especially if they already consider themselves as someone who stands up for the oppressed (as liberal leftists do), so it's very clever to frame any and every question and critique as something that literally drives trans people to kill themselves. of course, no other social justice movement acts like this in response to criticism regardless of what kind of life-threatening environments they live in. no, it's much more common among abusive men who do not want to face any consequences for their behavior and don't want their girlfriends or wives to leave them.
"what's it to you anyway? who are you to care so much about this issue to begin with? can't you leave trans people alone?" in other words: if you're not a doctor at a gender clinic or a parent to a trans child (or something similar), you can't have any concerns about trans people without looking suspiciously obsessive. it is, of course, yet another attempt to manipulate, usually after a long conversation where they haven't managed to derail you in any other way. so it is your motive that gets attacked next. being honest about your motive, whether it is a feminist one, a personal experience (you yourself have had dysphoria) or an actual understanding of what has and has not been proven by scientists does not usually lead to good results, because again, the focus should not be on you but them. they have the burden of proof. it should not matter why you are asking something if the question is good.
"you are a fucking transphobe, nazi and a bigot! i am going to block you, report you, doxx you, tell your boss, call the police, flag you, force you to step down from your platform, send you death and rape threats, ask your friends and family members to ostracize you, shame you publicly!" surprisingly, this isn't used as a last resort as often as it is immediately thrown at you after the first sign that you don't just take their word as gospel, without any reservations. that trans women aren't women just because they said so. but it is of course the spot where they cut all connections with you like a properly trained member of a cult. this is also the most effective tactic, of course, because not only does it put you in harm's way, it also warns everybody else around you to not follow in your footsteps. social ostracization and violence, even just the threat of it, worked against women for thousands of years under patriarchy, even though the justification of why patriarchy should keep existing never made an ounce of sense either. and if you have been deemed a witch, everything you do or say is just further proof that you are one, so good luck trying to get out.
now again, there is no point in trying to fight these arguments with something that counters them, because the only reason they are used is to place blame, doubt and suspicion on you. who are you to talk like this? who gave you the permission to open your mouth?
what is missing is the actual conversation where they explain what gender and transness means. why it is justifiable for the whole society to adapt to these concepts and build laws and policies around them regardless of how many other people's rights are compromised, why gender is a better descriptor of human beings than sex, how trans people actually want to be perceived and what that says about their beliefs about how society and different genders work, why the apparent "complexity of sex" would lead to a need to let people self-identify, why we should let children transition, why there are no longitudinal studies about trans health, why clinics stop following their patients so shortly after they release them, why it should matter legally that a man "identifies as a woman" if he's allowed to lead the kind of lifestyle he wants anyway, why we are not acknowledging the experiences of detransitioners, what it is that trans people think they get from the other set of pronouns and names they think they can't get from the original ones, what is the evolutionary necessity that produces a gender identity and why it could get mixed in your brains, why we don't change sexes on our own then, why we must pretend to perceive non-passing trans people as their preferred gender too despite gender being recognized as a socially constructed class, why a gay person should open up to the possibility of dating a trans person they are not attracted to, and so on and so forth.
i am not saying these six arguments are inherently useless or that i wouldn't resort to similar comments myself sometimes, when trying to argue something else. i would indeed ask a homophobe why it matters to them personally if a gay couple somewhere out there gets married. but i am saying that these and their copious variations are used so often among trans activists it is genuinely hard to find anything else. they are used as both single statements and responses to an argument, and while trans people do not need to build a whole case to defend their own choices as individuals, you have to start wondering what is going on when even the so-called experts and doctors can't be bothered to go deeper than this.
yes, sometimes they offer you some few flippant "well everything is a social construct, can you define a chair lol" and " ´a big number of trans people do report on being happy right after transitioning so there" and maybe a "did you know that clownfish can change their sex at will?" but even that is exceedingly rare. maybe because they know those can be questioned and debunked more effectively than you could shake off the label "terf" once they have decided to call you one.
but do pay attention to it, nonetheless. it means something when this is the only level of engagement trans activists will have with anybody. don't let it fool you into thinking there's more that they are not saying. they would have said it already, if there was.
other social justice movements fought hard to be listened to, and they had to build a massive case of evidence, proof, statistics, philosophical argumentation and research to defend themselves with - empty threats and appeals would have never been enough. but trans activism has succeeded greatly without doing anything else. their studies are haphazard and easily debunked (we found something in the brains of a dead trans woman who had already eaten cross-sex hormones for years), their argumentation is weak and full of logical flaws (e.g. connecting intersex conditions and gender identities even though those have nothing to do with each other) and their diagnostic criteria is full of old-fashioned, misogynistic tropes ("tick the box if you played with the toys of the opposite sex as a child!").
so maybe they don't openly admit they are patriarchal, but only patriarchy has acted like this, with this little evidence, with this much confidence, with this much unnecessary aggression.
