I like your writing, but of course I do disagree with some of your points.
The argument is that penises invade a vagina space, but we are not denoted by our parts. Yes, penises have been a tool used to oppress women and it is sensible to say that this is the case. Saying that the problem is the penis assumes that everyone with a penis is exactly the same, and also assumes -- as you said -- there is something intrinsic about males that makes them predatory. There isn't, and the evidence is the other 90% of men alone. Saying that sexual assault is intrinsic to males only oppresses women further, because you are giving an excuse for sexual assault; which there is none.
This also assumes that transgender women and men are the same thing. The most vital part of a transgender person is that they are not part of their asigned gender group. The entire definition of a transgender woman means that you are not a man. Therefore, the group that is less than a percent of the population is different to the group that is just below half. How do we know these are two different groups? Well, we just answered our own question -- if transgender people have a different set of civil rights compared to cisgender people, then surely they are part of a different group.
The TERF viewpoint on that is wrong. Transgender women do not act like men. I know I am intersex which makes me a bit different than the average transgender person but I am AMAB and I don't consider myself to be the same as a man even remotely.
Either way, even if you do consider them the same, that doesn't change the fact that a bathroom sign isn't going to stop a rapist.
To the argument that transgender women are not transgender women because they do not understand the struggle of a woman, or did not grow up a girl, or don't have periods ...
Obviously you have no idea what it is like to be transgender, and probably don't realize this, but
transgender women are 100% more oppressed than cis women. This is objectively true. We don't have civil rights in half the country, even the states with more civil rights still don't have all of them.
Have any women been evicted in the last 10 years because they are a woman? No.
Have any women been denied housing because they are a woman? No.
Have any women been denied nutrition assistance, loans, entry to property, service, a hotel room, or medical treatment because they are a woman? No.
When you go out as a woman, do you get stared at by strangers? No. Do you get laughed at by strangers? No. Do you get random people yelling political bigotism at you when you try to go shopping? No.
Okay, so what about specifically for men?
47% of transgender women experience sexual assault, compared to 1 in 5 women (20%). We are also more likely to experience domestic violence. Men have a pass to treat us like shit and fetishize us because our options are limited and we are outcasts to normal society. As a trans person, you can't just go flirt with someone at a bar.. It is hard to find relationships, and even when you do it is often from fetishizers.
I am part of the group that doesn't like having their penis touched. It is something that makes me uncomfortable. Whenever men hear that, generally they go the other way -- genuinely.
If you put a transgender woman into a prison with a bunch of men, what happens to the transgender woman? The same thing that happens to cisgender women.
If the argument is that a man will pretend to be transgender to assault a woman, we should probably be reminded how little sense that makes. There is nothing stopping someone trying to commit a sexual assault from entering a female space. In fact, men run into female changing rooms and bathrooms to do these kinds of things ALL THE TIME, you just never hear about it because it happens everyday and isn't associated with negative press against a population that is easy to bully.
You know, they used to say that black people couldn't be in the same bathrooms as white people because they would attack and assault the white people.
There is no argument here, they try to cover prejudice with arguments but the arguments disentigrate with any level of logic applied to them. They are transphobic, cut and dry.
Statistics don't lie. This isn't an oppression pissing contest. It shouldn't be any group "is excluded from the equality movement because they don't have our struggles." If you really want to turn it into a pissing contest, we win, game over.
Feminism is an egalitarian movement. Its inception was not about women's rights, and if you think it was then you need to do some research. The movement was spawned as part of the greater civil rights movement, which when feminism joined was about black equality.
We should all be equal. It doesn't matter who experiences what, we should all be equal and we aren't.
My message to TERFs is to grow up -- you're acting like those people who argue that their life has been worse than everyone else's. The transgender community never said we have it worse, but statistically we do -- so why are you complaining that we want representation in a movement for general equality when we are the most statistically oppressed group in the country? We are also a tiny group, less than 1% of the population here in the USA... So the smallest and most oppressed group wants to join a movement for greater equality and you won't let them?
It sounds more to me like they just don't want the smallest and most oppressed group to get their civil rights, because otherwise all of the arguments don't make any sense.
