Posted by A Twitter thread by @elizamondegreen
I still don’t know what it means to treat someone “like a woman” in settings where sex doesn’t and shouldn’t really matter.
Treating TW as women in settings where sex matters undermines the rights of women and girls.
Treating TW as women in settings where sex *doesn’t* matter means needlessly re-gendering parts of society where feminists have fought for women to simply be treated as human beings.
e.g., @soniasodha writes: “we understand why some women want safeguards for certain single-sex spaces; can you see why in many other circumstances there’s no reason why trans women should be treated differently from those born female?”
This sounds like a tidy compromise: Where sex matters, women can keep single-sex provisions. Where sex doesn’t matter, we can treat some males as though they were female. But what does it mean to treat someone *as though they were female*, in settings where sex doesn’t matter?
Inevitably, sexism or sex-role stereotypes will supply the content of what it means to treat someone *as though they were female* in settings where actually being female or male doesn’t matter.
Besides, what’s supposed to be shared here? What makes TW “women”—identification with sex-role stereotypes, male ideas of what it means to be a woman—is not what makes females women.
Where sex doesn’t matter, it’s better to just treat everyone as human beings.