Women fought for years, not to pretend they weren't women, but to seek to redress the wrongs done to their sex class because of their biology.
Women and girls are coerced, persecuted and controlled all over the world by the larger, stronger male. Even in our most liberal societies, women remain subject to sex-based violence and assault, still see their reproductive rights challenged and are still threatened with rape and even death by men angry that they're sticking up for their rights.
'Womanhood' is not some quasi-mystical state into which men can identify. Pretending it is makes both studying the harms done to actual women, and enforcing women's rights, impossible. A straight man who likes wearing stockings is not a lesbian. Wanting breasts doesn't make a teenaged boy a girl. Both are male, and giving them access to women's single-sex spaces has caused proven harm to women and girls.
How does taking away single-sex spaces away from vulnerable women advance feminism? How did three men occupying the medal podium at a women's sporting event help female athletes?
You cannot describe what you're too frightened to admit. You cannot defend what you can't define. The last decade has seen a wholesale attack on the rights our foremothers fought for. It continues to astound me that privileged young women who've benefited from those advances all their lives are proudly urging on the dimantling of the protections and spaces that were so hard won, and pretending this is progressive.
“Expert on transphobia” and Uni of Leeds PhD Researcher, Jess O’Thompson is concerned that the Supreme Court ruled only women can get pregnant, that men who say they are women cannot be lesbians, and that defining women as female is a step back for feminism.