“You are reducing women to their reproductive organs.”
This is a deliberate attempt to conflate the two meanings of the word “define,” a) to describe, and b) to limit, in order to imply that merely describing femaleness in humans somehow reduces our humanity.
This is, of course, absurdly misogynistic. There is nothing shameful or reductive about femaleness: every person who ever lived has been “of woman born.” And every woman who ever gave birth or didn’t was fully human, with memberships in other categories such as nationality, race, ethnicity, economic class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and personality type, and as unique as every other human, with personal histories, interests, talents, dreams, desires, doubts, fears, regrets and accomplishments of her very own. Approximately 4 billion of us on planet Earth just now, all female, and all fully human. Including your mom.
And it is, of course, instructive that femaleness is the only human characteristic which fauxgressives insist reduces us by the mere naming of it. They do not, for example, propose to end racism by forbidding black people from calling themselves “black.”
But it is also important to note that while insisting femaleness is either too complex & mysterious to define or too disgusting to name, trans activists insist we call ourselves “cis women,” as differentiated from “trans women.” Which is to say, female ladybrains and male ladybrains. The same goes for “trans men” and “cis men”: Female dudebrains and male dudebrains. Their own categories rely on the difference between male and female, so that differentiation must not be as impossible or oppressive as they claim.
And just in case there is any doubt left:
In many countries around the world, women have gone from being treated as property to being treated as full citizens, without ever having to pretend that we aren’t female. In other countries, women have gone from being full citizens to being treated like chattel, and again, our femaleness was never in question.
Our femaleness has never been the problem. Men’s desire to maintain access to and control over our female bodies has always been the problem. If our bodies were so problematic, why would men, including those who claim to be us, be so obsessed with them?
We cannot advocate for the full humanity of female people if femaleness is un-nameable. And that is precisely why trans activists wish to make it so.