Gender is entirely made-up and I don’t understand why some people are so fixated on it being “true” in the sense of like…are trans women women? Of course they are, insofar as “a woman” can be said to exist in the first place. But people have gotten obsessed with proving objectively that a trans woman is a woman, when the actual core of trans liberation is that anyone forcing their preferred gender on you is fascist. It’s missing the forest for the trees. When all you do is play the “I am [x] really truly deep down just like everyone else” game you’re meeting the transphobes on their level and accepting their premise that “man” and “woman” are distinct, tangible things.
To be clear, it’s not that you CAN’T feel gender is a kinna spiritual force within you, or something to that effect. I think we all do on at least some level. But my point is that trying to rip that spiritual force out of our bodies to dissect it and prove all the haters wrong because look it was here all along is just a waste of time and effort.
The truth of the matter is that the goal is not to get people to see trans women as women, it’s to get them to stop feeling like clothes and pronouns and names and locker rooms should be dictated by what some asshole wrote down on your birth certificate.
I’m really glad people like this post but I wanna add the small addendum that some have reported that they do not have any internal sense of gender and I didn’t mean to erase them or how they feel about their personal experience with gender. It’s cool that it can mean so many different things to everyone.