The ‘argument’ provides the ‘rationale’ to deny trans women access to women’s toilets, and, more generally, to other female spaces such as changing rooms and so on. It purports to shine an objective and dispassionate light on the issue of trans women, but the true focus is not trans women at all. Rowling, for example, professes some level of sympathy for trans people, but throughout her articles she assumes the category ‘women’ which trans women by their very nature stand in opposition to. She writes how, in the current and oppressive climate of ‘trans activism … Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.’[17]The separation here is subtle but immutable; on the one hand there are ‘trans women’ and on the other, there are the women ‘themselves’. If trans women are not genuinely women, by identifying themselves as such they are simply labouring under a delusion.

Source: New York Times August 07, 2024 06:03 UTC