I find that one of the issues around transgenderism is a complete lack of understanding of what it means to be a biological female.
When I hear transgender women speak about their womaness it is always in the most stereotypical terms - the very terms women in the 70s fought to get away from. It’s always “I liked pretty clothes, I liked dolls, I liked makeup etc. that’s how I knew I was really a woman". These have nothing to do with being a woman.
Being a woman is from the minute you were born being told that you were a little bit less than men, it is being told ‘no' more often than ‘yes', it is knowing that your voice will be overpowered if men are around, it is learning very quickly to ‘be good’, it is having the trauma of periods or having the trauma of not having periods, it is trauma of giving birth or the trauma of not giving birth.
When I have been in spaces where transgender women have entered they don’t behave as women, they behave as men, they feel they are owed space, they assert their rights, they don't nurture others as women do, they don't leave space for others as women do.
When my gentle son was three years old he announced he was a girl and his name was Mandy. He refused to answer to his real name and would only wear frilly nighties. This continued for a good two to three years. My ex-husband took him off to a counsellor who blamed me for being a feminist. I didn’t fight my son's demand to be a girl but neither did I reinforce it. I might have gently reminded him he was a boy but he could be a boy who wore nighties if he wanted. My son gradually grew out of wanting to be Mandy but it worries me what would have happened to him had he been born three years ago rather than forty years ago. His experimenting as a three-year-old would today be ingrained in him, he would be labelled transgender and I would be powerless under new laws to question his demands in any way even though he was only three.
As someone who grew up in the seventies and eighties I know only too well what the women before me fought for. I was regularly patted on the bum at work by male colleagues, called ducky or similar, I was paid 1/3 less than males for exactly the same role, I wasn’t promoted because I’d soon leave to have babies anyway. I was expected to leave work and never return if I became pregnant. Men I dated expected sex in return for dinner. I was taught to play dumb so that I didn’t bruise men’s delicate egos.
I support transgender people as transgender people but that is something different from being a woman. It seems to me that those who identify as transgender women are getting their egos bruised and are responding to this in just the same way men before them responded to feminists in the seventies who were labelled as 'men-haters', 'hags who couldn’t get a bloke', or 'ugly bitches'.
Now women are 'TERFs' - it's still name-calling, it’s still silencing the voices of women.
I don't see any of these transgender women showing any respect towards the gender they want to become.