Evan Urquhart

You can check out the debates over this question at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—which cites Haslanger, Fausto-Sterling, and Jaggar on this topic (and plz do focus on the claims about the cultural construction of sex characteristics). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#SexClaSolMatBio …

One reason that terfs are so frequently accused of racism is that the idea that the female body naturally incurs oppression is capacitated by claims about intrinsic traits of racial groups.

At the very least, one could ask why femaleness *alone* is a source of oppression, if other oppressions are not intrinsic.

Lesbian feminism, queer feminism, and trans feminism have long argued that the reduction of the female body *to* reproductive capacity is an effect of patriarchal repression, not a cause of it. It is that logic that terfism seeks to repudiate.

The lived reality of misogyny is a condition that trans women share with cis women, and it has as much to do with a fantasy of sexual receptivity as one of reproductive capacity. Yes, it’s something I experience—here, on Twitter, even from terfs, even (truly) before transition.

This is not to say that reproductive healthcare isn’t a trans feminist issue! I realize that some ppl think trans women are trying to deprioritize traditional feminist issue, but the opposite is true: terf groups like WoLF are cycling out reproductive care to attack trans women.

Terfs apparently believe that women’s bodies inevitably and naturally incur oppression. Trans feminists believe that patriarchy’s oppression of women partly takes the form of defining women’s bodies as intrinsically weak. I do not believe terfs are good feminists.

Oh, and the etymology of “feminism,” from the Latin “femina,” meaning “woman,” has nothing to do with gamete motility or chromosomes, or whatever latest superstition the terfs are settling on. It means woman. Social category.