Gender ideology is full of internal contradictions.
If you say trans women are males who identify as women, some will say that’s transphobic because they don’t “identify AS women” they ARE women.
But then if you ask them what they mean by “woman” they’ll usually either state some sexist stereotype (e.g. “I’m sensitive and like feminine things”) or they’ll give a circular definition and say “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman,” in which case they now can’t explain what’s transphobic about saying trans women are males who identify as women.
But then they might say, “well, I’m on HRT and therefore I’m really female not male.” Besides being patently empirically false, this leads to another contradiction because it’s a tenet of modern gender theory that a dysphoric pre-HRT trans woman is just as much a woman as a dysphoric post-HRT trans woman.
So now it can’t be anything uniquely physiological that defines being a trans woman because males pre-HRT and “females” post-HRT are equally valid as women, which is only explainable on the circular identity model.
Except they want to have their cake and eat it too because they want the intersex brain theory to be true such that it’s having a “female brain” that makes them a woman, which defies the original claim that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, as opposed to a woman is someone with a certain physical brain structure.
After all, if the brain can determine gender, since the brain is just a physical organ, it sets a precedent for other body parts logically being capable of determining gender as well (e.g. your reproductive system). So that’s too reductive.
Gender ideology can’t decide whether being trans is a subjective experience or a medical condition. It can’t decide if it’s a social construction or reducible to your brain. It can’t decide if it’s an identity or a performative social aesthetic.
Gender ideology wants to have its cake and eat it too. But as soon as it takes a logical stand on one of these conceptions it risks saying a trans person who doesn’t meet the criteria might be “invalid,” so it always retreats to pure identity and subjectivity when challenged.
But if it’s pure identity then it has no philosophical grounds to say it’s transphobic to say trans women are just males who identify as women.
At this point, all gender ideology can do is say that this whole line of questioning is transphobic and serving the interests of hegemonic cis sexism and that we ought to just shut up and accept whatever trans people say even if its philosophically contradictory because challenging the underlying ideology is always harmful to an oppressed group and that’s always the important part.
Any philosophical criticism gets accused of being transphobic and violent hate speech and that we should just shut up and listen to trans people.
At the end of the day, we are left confused and befuddled about what basic words like “male” or “female” actually mean and we are left in a twisted morass of postmodern subjectivity.
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