I'm curious - by extension, was there another argument that trans women grow up with male privilege, and that they should be not welcomed as a consequence? I think the argument you mention is probably a useful one but it's an easy leap from that to the decision that trans women are somehow forever tainted by having…

The thing is...what does "considered female" mean?

I had a child and a parent to take care of by the time I was 21, but at that age you don't think as much about your own mortality or disability...plus I was doing everything I could to scrape by. I started doing long-term planning when I went into transition in my mid 20s...I should have planned better but I just…

When you say you haven't had any issues, have you tried to get any coverage that requires individual underwriting (where you have to list all the medical issues in your life on an application and can be declined on that basis)? Individual (not group) disability insurance is the big one here in the USA as underwriting…

It's worth mentioning this, then.

I'd like to add one other thing.

I absolutely agree that you need that information to help them effectively. I just wish that the world was better - maybe it is by now, most of my worst experiences were over a decade ago.

I think it's a systemic problem. I'm not really open about my history except to doctors, and any assumption that I had that they would hold themselves to a higher standard than most was pretty thoroughly shattered early on.

I guess I just wanted to say that my own experience is different. I think of privilege gained by perception (as opposed to the underlying identity) as existing but being conditional - it's subject to revocation. I feel like I get a nice heaping dose of (conditional) cis privilege in my life now and I can absolutely…

I think, well, it depends.

It is an umbrella term, but I've always understood it to mean someone whose gender is different than the one assigned to them at birth based on their sex, excepting intersex people who were (wrongly) assigned a gender at birth.

Power actually works in a less linear way than most people think, in part because it's so hard to store.

Trans women are absolutely women. Trans women who have had surgery are welcome to go. Totally.

Any way I could get followed on Jez? I wrote a reply to this too that's sadly stuck in the gray.

For starters, one classic criticism of trans women is that we're gay men in denial and we transition in order to be "normal" - that we all "turn" heterosexual in order to fit in better.

It sounds like something really nice, it does. I hope we get there someday. That said, when my body was still different there was just no way I could handle it on display...heck I showered in the dark when I was growing up, I couldn't stand to look at myself.

So I've just been thinking about your "unusual bodies" sentence. At first I was thinking that I would probably do a double take if someone who hadn't undergone reassignment were getting changed in the same changing room. It's just not something you come across a whole lot.

What does "physically male/female" mean, though?

Sigh!

Unfortunately, there aren't other trans women stepping in to counter the arguments.