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In any legal system, the ability to effectively apply laws hinges on our capacity to establish clear definitions for the concepts and situations they govern. If someone is to be prosecuted for murder, it's necessary to define what constitutes "murder" - this is referred to as the "elements" of the crime. Quickly googling, in murder, we have: 1. Criminal Act (killing a human), 2. Criminal Intent (purposely, knowingly), 3. Harm (death).
To take another case, if a law declares that certain considerations apply to "married" people, criteria must be set to determine under what conditions two (or more?) people can be considered 'married'.
However, the boring process of defining and categorizing has been thrown into turmoil as we deal with gender identity. I recently encountered an article by a trans writer who strongly objected to the idea that "other people" should be able to "decide" whether a person who self-identifies as trans is "really" trans. The author seemed to believe that denying someone's self-identified gender is offensive in a metaphysical sense, as it amounts to denying the existence of the trans person.
It's fine to not want trans people to feel wrongly identified, but this issue becomes legally significant when there are laws that apply differently to "men" and "women." Concretely, a person convicted of murder may be sent to a different prison, depending on whether that person is categorized as a "man" or a "woman". In these situations, clear definitions and categorizations become necessary to uphold the law. I don't think it serves anyone's interest to simply apply the slogan "trans women are women" in such a case; it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to apply a hierarchy of cases. An example hierarchy might be:
anyone who self-identifies as a woman can be referred to as "she"
almost anyone who self-idenfifies as a woman can use the ladies' restroom
a basic evaluation should be applied to a self-identified woman before she is allowed to play on a woman's sports team
a strict evaluation should apply to a self-identified woman to determine whether she goes to a women-only prison
I'm happy to argue about how strict we ought to be in a given situation, but I'm not happy to accept that there should be no hierarchy of situations at all. We can't take a shortcut on considering the potential harm caused by a false positive vs. a false negative by simply declaring that we will always affirm the dignity of trans people. Furthermore, any system that attempts to identify people as a belonging to "category X" will inevitably produce false positives and false negatives. It is unrealistic and untenable to demand that the false negative rate must be zero (i.e. we must never incorrectly say that a trans woman is not really a woman), especially when being categorized as X has legal ramifications.
I guess this all seems pretty basic, but I don't know that I've seen anyone state the "different situations, different criteria" case, and the alternative seems to be that people are tarred as "transphobes" for suggesting that someone who self-identifies as a trans woman should not be treated as a woman in some specific situation.
A complex taxonomy of who is a woman in what situation satisfies no one and makes everyone's life more difficult. Society should either go full TWAW or stop playing pretend.
That would never be accepted by the trans activists. Trans women are treated like trans women when convenient, and trans women are treated like women when convenient.
Namely, trans women = trans women when people want to amplify any injustice (perceived or otherwise) committed against a trans woman as an injustice committed against all trans women. For example, the murder of a couple months back of Brianna Ghey in the UK (despite the fact that one of the attackers was a trans woman herself, and there is literally nothing to suggest that it was a hate crime, rather than a fight that got out of hand). In this case, if Brianna Ghey was truly a regular woman, I doubt the case would have made headlines. Therefore, it would be very inconvenient for them to treat Ghey as a woman, instead of a trans woman.
Conversely, trans women = women when people want trans women to have access to spaces usually reserved for females, such as sex-segregated restrooms and sports teams. Sure, the discourse might (d)evolve into hurling accusations of transphobia (in which case it's back to trans women = trans women), but nominally, the conversation always starts with a claim that trans women are women in this respect, therefore they should have access to women's bathrooms and be able to get on women's sports teams. And I've never seen the option of a trans-only sports team or bathroom be much popular with the trans activist crowd. (Although, all-gender restrooms seem to be well-liked by them, but that's not trans-only.)
They want to have it both ways, and hate sticking to one side, because that would mean having disadvantages like everyone else.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what leftists (profess to) believe. I think the correct version is that gender is determined solely by self-identification as a man or a woman (or something else entirely), while biological sex is a private issue that should never be the basis for public policy (which I find problematic but they don't). Biological sex only matters for medical treatment and to label people as "cis" and "trans", but nobody should ever treat anyone differently because their sex doesn't match their gender identity.
Consequently "trans" and "women" are orthogonal concepts. It's no different than race: black/white and man/women are independent. Black women are still women.
It is true that the media likes to emphasize different categories to reinforce certain narratives (this is true on both the left and the right). For example, in the mainstream media a black man is black first if he is killed by a cop, but a man first if he kills a woman. But I don't think that implies leftists can't decide whether a black man is a man or not.
The way it works is that the more minority groups the victim is a member of, the more salient the news becomes. Without the trans angle the story could still have made headlines: "Teenage girl murdered" is still pretty salient, definitely more so than "adult man murdered". None of this implies that leftists think that trans women aren't really women, just that they believe trans women are a particularly vulnerable subset of women, just like black women or lesbians.
No, it's always both. Trans women belong in women's rooms because trans women are women, and denying them access implies you think they are not women because of their transgender status, which is transphobic. (Remember: biological sex is not to be mentioned, so it's always "transgender status" even though that itself is a trivial function of sex and gender identity.)
Again, if you have trouble understanding this just substitute race and it makes perfect sense: if you want to bar black men from the men's room, anyone would point out that black men are men and saying that someone doesn't belong in the men's room because they're black is racist. Those aren't separate arguments; they're part of a single argument.
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