Lisa–as usual–has already devoted many paragraphs to responding to this post, but I’m adding my contribution here, because I read this comment and sorta went, “Hm.”
Here is my position in a nutshell:
1. Transwomen are people (yep! “people”) that have made some sort of *change* to be considered (trans) “women”
2. To have transitioned is to have supported the message that links what our bodies are to how we express them. That, to me, is gender. (That those expressions, however, oftentimes have binary influence-influence not carbon copy- is no accident.)
3. I don’t want body parts “expressible” (maybe you do? or don’t care either way)
To “express” womanhood/being a “woman” is to further define/perpetuate how those with the status of “woman” under Status Quo Norms should act or behave and, thusly, what people expect from them (for obvious reasons, you didn’t become trans to be considered translisa). Any positive re-enforcement of this, afaic, is problematic and oppressive.4. I recognize that my latter points are not appreciated by transpersons so I’m not going to go out of my way (across seas, lots of expense) to say those things to transpersons who already have a hard enough time with conservative values. Contrary to typical conflation radfems are not conservatives–our positions are wholly different and you are smart enough to discern.
5. All I would like, wrt to trans exclusive spaces, are enough places I may go, in one lifetime, on one hand, that allow me to speak comfortably about the points presented above.
6. I will always question the motives of trans who can in one breath call me transphobic (or bigot, or fundamentalist) and then ask “So can I come?”
This argument–“Trans have surgery because they want to be women, so they reify gender categories!” is very common one.
I think it’s twisted around a little. It’s sort of like saying that lesbians sleep with women because they want to be lesbians. They are called lesbians because they want to sleep with women.
Transsexual women, broadly speaking, feel discomfort with their assigned genders. Most of them talk about their bodies, while others talk about presentation cues and behaviors and all sorts of other fraught things. When speaking for the aggregate, it is–as the same commenter later says–typical to speak vaguely, because people have different specific ideas about all of this. But it’s not a political discontent; it’s discontent with a politicized state. They change, and do so in a society–theirs, ours–that politicizes that change and attaches many different meanings to it.
They say they are women because what they are is women. Transition changes their lives in a way that we all describe as a sex change: movement from one recognized category into a different one, from “man” to “woman.” Sorta like “straight” and “lesbian.” Saying that they are not women is objectionable because it ignores the dimensions of their lives and the social reality they deal with, not because trans politics posits some essential quality of sex–a magical metaphysical vagina?–that transwomen possess or attain once they have surgery.