British Cycling being embarassing, obsequious idiots ...

When it comes to female-only spaces and language, the relevant comparator for other -isms isn't cis==white/hetro/abled/young, trans==black/gay/disabled/old, it's male==white/hetro/abled/young, female==black/gay/disabled/old.

Unlike Male people excluding female or White people excluding Black, Female people didn't need spaces / rights / opportunities reserved for female people to maintain power and entitlement, they needed, and still need, them as a refuge from Male power and entitlement.

That's the power dynamic that female-only spaces exist for.

And in case there's any doubt, I would 100% support (and indeed actively do support) Black people saying they need a space away from white, or opportunities created for Black people, to mitigate the challenges of being Black in a racist society. And the same for gay, disabled, trans and old people (and actually, young people), and any subsets in those groups or other groups that feel they need to define themselves separately to deal with the challenges they face by being not society's default human. Marginalised people have a moral right to physical and mental space away from the powers that marginalise them, and to be allowed to define themselves and speak of their own lives in their own voices.

Maybe you move in circles where this doesn't happen any more, but I promise you for me and many, probably most, other women, being female in this world is like carrying a weight around all day. Female-only spaces, places without males taking up our space, resources and attention, are the respite that allows us to heal and find ourselves.

But if we can't talk about the impact of sex in the context of gender (because notwithstanding that sex may be biologically complicated in the details, the physical and social consequences of sex for the roughly 50% of humans that do meet the criteria to be correctly recognised as female the day they are born are certainly fucking real) then this disappears from the picture. And that's just --- sexism on steroids.

You mentioned Intersectionality. You assumed I wouldn't know what it was. I was doing womens/gender studies back in the 90s. Yes I know about intersectionality. Back then it wasn't "who can pile the highest intersectional pile", it was about understanding that intersecting axis of oppression change the shape of oppression - that women experience different aspects of sexism based on factors like race, class and so on. Back then we saw gender as another axis of social control, cultural myths pretending to be "natural" (yep, pretty sure I even read some Judith Butler as well). We saw gender as a tool of the Patriarchy, something we needed to challenge and demolish in order to free both men and women from constraining stereotypes and myths. Our aim was to be without gender, just people with different bodies. If someone had told me then that 30 years later we'd be told that it's the gender, not the bodies, that is real, that people would start thinking they had to change their body to match their gender and that this would be called Progressive - well honestly I think I'd have blamed last night's acid.

So to talk about Intersectionality without including sex, the deepest, probably oldest, most universal axis of oppression, the one the runs like a faultline through our history and through all our social structures from our most private domestic lives to our heads of state, the one that we are unwittingly complicit in before we are even born because of what our gestation and care means for our female parent in a sexist society - to think you can reoplace that axis with gender identity and it doesn't even fucking matter - that's just a sick joke.

You talk about the real problem being the Patriarchy. I agree. You think saying a trans woman is male is transphobia. I disagree. I think society can neither challenge the Patriarchy NOR fully accept trans people UNTIL we can honestly talk about the significance of sex. Trans women ARE male. It's kind of the fundamental defining feature, otherwise they'd be cis women. Owning that is in itself is a huge fuck you to Patriarchy. Denying it is not only letting that big toxic lump patriarchy labelled "Maleness" to continue to exist unchallenged, it's actively perpetuating the Patriarchal power structure of male people believing they have the right to define, speak for and utilise female people.

As I said in my original post, yes, trans people exist, but Female people also exist (some of whom are also trans, of course).

We share many challenges. We could have a fantastic dialogue between trans people and female people about the way male-shaped culture shapes us and how to escape that and make it better for all of us. But we cannot do that when male people who believe they are the same as us appropriate our cultural and physical spaces, our political voice and even our own name, because you do not even allow us the words we need to describe what it is to be us and not you.

Because even if you don't believe our sex is innately significant, living as female in culture shaped by and for male people makes it significant, and we need the rights and language to talk about that.