First off, I should note that I am cisgender (they put "female" on my birth certificate and I'm completely fine with that), so I may have got some things specifically about trans women's experience wrong, and I'm happy to make edits if . Secondly, the overarching theme of the argument is that trans women are women, but I hope that going into more detail about experiences of sexism will help to clarify this.
There's currently a fundraiser going round with the aim of keeping trans women out of all-woman shortlists and women's officer positions in the Labour Party on the grounds that they don't experience sex discrimination. I'm not going to link to it and I would ask people not to link to it in the comments, please, since I'm not going to funnel people to a fundraiser I disagree with.
Trans women do experience sexism, and many have firsthand knowledge of just how differently men and women (or people who are perceived to be men/women) are treated. While there are some forms of sex (/gender) discrimination in childhood that many trans women don't experience, I never experienced most of them either! I grew up in a feminist household and went to an all-girls school run by feminists, and was never discouraged from science, told to be quiet, or told that my only worth was in my appearance. And I have no experience with childbearing & child care, which I'm sure you'll all agree is a major factor in women's political involvement. And yet I am welcome in women's positions and all-women's shortlists.
Some may argue that someone who has only recently started to experience sexism firsthand may not be right for e.g. a women's officer role, but quite frankly this also applies to certain people who might be applying for LGBT-only positions. We can't ban bi people with opposite-sex partners and supportive families from those positions, even if we may not have lots of firsthand experience with homophobia, and any suggestion to do that would be treated as ridiculous. Banning all trans women from being counted as women by the Labour party is far too harsh a measure to counter this unlikely and mild problem.
Could an unscrupulous man sneak in to a woman's position if we allow self-identification? He could try, certainly, just as right now a straight cis (non-trans) person could try to infiltrate an LGBT position by claiming to be bi. But firstly, he'd be opening himself up to being treated as a masculine trans woman, which is not a fun time, and secondly, I'm fairly sure most selection committees and voters would be smart enough to filter him out. There is a grey area here - if you're a feminine non-binary (neither male nor female) person with "male" on your passport, when do you count as a woman for equality purposes? But as with all grey areas, the approach should be to deal with these on a case-by-case basis, not draw the line in completely the wrong place just in case someone accidentally gets over it when they shouldn't have.
It also strikes me as patently ridiculous that one friend, who has a bushy beard and recently-installed penis, would be classified as a "woman" by this metric, whereas another who has a classically female hormone profile and hasn't been mistaken for a man in 5 years, would not.
Please do let me know if I'm mistaken about anything I haven't personally experienced, or if there's something I haven't addressed.
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