laundryandtaxes:

If you mean generally the argument that what adults do with their body should be up to those adults and that medical decisions should be left to individuals and to medical professionals entrusted with guiding people to reasonable decisions, I think that’s a very solid basis for meaningful allyship, for two groups to work together toward the common goal of bodily autonomy for every adult. If you mean arguments like this

Then I have none of the same positive thoughts, frankly, and I think this is misogynist and that women need to start seeing it and calling it out publicly as such. “Trans sports bans” is an intentionally disparaging phrase for attempts to allow women the chance to show off their athletic performance and abilities via female-only sport, because everyone knows that they broadly cannot do that when competing with members of the opposite sex- regardless of what the IOC says or does, we know that the physical advantages most relevant to sport are related to male puberty, not testosterone levels- and therefore, I think that advocating against the right of women to participate meaningfully in sport only with other women is misogyny. The concept that such attempt are fundamentally about “policing what a female body is” is absurd- knowing that being male is not the same thing as being female isn’t gatekeeping, it’s having useful definitions and concepts, and if anything this language obscures that this has caused real problems for a large number of people with actual DSDs who, it seems, likely need some form of particular accommodation to compete fairly in sport. This is an especially misogynist concept to be throwing around in a time when policing what female bodies are for or can do is quite literally on the table in half the country right now. “Healthcare to youth” is a euphemism for preventing them from undergoing the normal and healthy process that allows them to become adults, potentially locking them into experiencing distress that all of our previously existing numbers say should abate for many of them over time, in what I personally believe to be literal real time medical experimentation. I’ve not seen any state-level attempts to roll back general access for adults to transition-related services, so frankly it is nonsensical and self-centered to be looking at real attacks on women and preemptively comparing them to, I suppose, attacks on other groups in the future (general transition services bans for adults, for instance) or to things that women overwhelmingly seem to support in private, like the existence of female-only sports, or to things that are not at all related even in the sense of basic bodily autonomy, like pediatric medical transition.

Anyone who wants to seem like an ally to women right now who is also spending time publicly pushing the narrative that there is nothing meaningful or even extant about physical sex can honestly keep it, as far as I’m concerned, and save the energy for other things they clearly think are more real problems. Abortion restrictions are about women. The justifications for them all circle back to the idea that women are obligated, by virtue of being female, to create and bear children whether they like it or not. Any obfuscation of this fact is misogynist, and any argument that attempts to make sense of abortion restrictions while refusing the grapple with the existence of femaleness as meaningful and extant (and I’m obviously not claiming that every transgender person does this, it’s just directly implied by the snide comment about sex segregation in sports) will fail to center misogyny in its understanding of what’s being stripped from American women in June.