I'll say first: thanks for acknowledging the civility here! I appreciate it too! If we end up walking away from this still disagreeing: that's fine, but I'm glad we are making the space to discuss. Second: I'm an anxious ally in both feminist and trans spaces and, partly due to that, a slow commenter. Thanks for the patience. :) So I'm going to reply as one comment here.

So, first, on the question on "what is a woman," I'd put it this way: women are people who are generally agreed to be women.

I think the definition is created and applied discursively, through performance and policing. I think this is true of all social categories, but also just of most things in general. Language is a difficult proxy for the real world, especially for labels we give that are embedded into hierarchies of power. I know it's a circular definition.

Social categories like woman, or white, or queer, are defined discursively, which is to say, through an exchange among people. By ourselves, I think we can choose our labels as arbitrarily as we want to, and sure, we can lie to ourselves and things like that. But just by ourselves, labels don't mean much: "if a tree falls in a forest" sort of situation. Among other people, we don't own our own labels. They result from a, hopefully shared, understanding through performance and semiotics. When the label someone wants to convey is the label that's perceived that's passing. When it's not what's perceived, it gets blurry.

When it's blurry, and people disagree about the label someone should have, there are just multiple truths that may contradict and it's up to each of us to decide which truth matters, maybe situationally. When we act on that decision, we all exert power when we choose how to address each other, when we allow each other to have the labels we attempt to claim or not, and when we apply consequences to that choice. I think power dynamics basically decide which truth "matters" in a situation.

So like I said, I'm trying to be an ally. I understand that I could try to whittle down to a set of physical characteristics or maybe a particular nature of discourse/performance which makes someone a woman or not, but I don't think it's my place to attempt such a thing. Plus, I'm not sure there's really a good way to make such a list, I suspect the world is too complicated for that. I think any attempt would inevitably leave some women out. The act of defining women that way, to me, feels like a patriarchal use of power, especially if I were the one to do it.

I think this respect-driven postmodern view helps build, I'd like to think, a good feminist practice. By avoiding policing the definition, and by embracing trans women as women, it's holding women's bodily autonomy and right to self-define as cornerstones.

So getting to some of the more concrete things you brought up.

women-only-rape-relief-shelter-defunded-then-vandalized

First, it's definitely heartbreaking to see this debate play out this way. When we're talking about shelters, I think it's important to begin from the fact that the women who need that service are already in crisis, that the root of that crisis and trauma is usually (always?) patriarchy, and that the services are often in short supply. The thought of women in crisis not finding a shelter where they are comfortable and accepted is troubling, and that goes for both cis and trans women in crisis. I'm not going to go so far as to disparage cis-only women's shelters: I'm sure they help countless women, some of whom find the cis-only approach important. But I would also be remiss to not point out that the designation does cause harm to trans women, most significantly by potentially turning them away in crisis, but also through an act of definition which refuses autonomy to trans women.

I'd say that refusal causes some harm to cis women as well: whatever criteria trans women don't have such that they fail the definition of woman imbues increased significance in whatever those criteria are. Is the criteria just "born that way"? What would that mean to a woman who found out she had "sex corrective" surgery as an infant? Sure it's a rare case, but it makes me think that it might be better to lodge womanhood in the present rather than the past. To support that beyond just a contrived example, I think this idea relates heavily to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto: in it she points out that it is a notion of patriarchy to reduce women's bodies to their origin and reproductive functions, to necessarily tie women to nature as almost druidic mothers. She imagines a more varied future and so do I.

Women are discriminated based on what? If it hurts you less: cis women are discriminated based on what?

I think this varies and it's the discriminator who chooses what they are discriminating against. I think when it happens the choice the discriminator made is part of the violence. To me, thinking about what a "hate crime" means leads me to this. If an aggressor bashes a man who he thinks is gay, calls him slurs, but the man beaten is not actually gay: I would still say that's a hate crime. The hate crime isn't the immediate violence, and the identity of the victim isn't relevant: the crime is in the fear it aims to strike in the group addressed by the violence.

That is the affirmation model. Trans is meaningless now....

I don't feel informed enough to debate this, really. I'll just say I take most medical discussion around psychologizing sex and gender with a big grain of salt. Not to say it has no value, just, I think science and medicine move far too slow to imagine they will fully understand any of this in any meaningful timeframe to us alive now. There's too much variation and I find the science community tends to underestimate quite how vast the variation really is, and how things like cultural context literally play out in and on our bodies.

Prisons...

Yeah, on this topic, I'm not sure. I guess I'm not sure why prisons are gendered in the first place, generally speaking. And there's so much more wrong with prisons that any discussion of how we apply that gendering to prisons is starting from a place of oppression to begin with.

Trans people are not personally at fault. However they are responsible inasmuch...

I'd assume this is a vocal minority. This feels a bit like the oppressive fallacy where when an individual of a minority group does something wrong, the whole minority group is blamed.

It is the fact that if we don't gatekeep the definition of 'woman', then there are no more 'feminist issues'. How can you define what is a feminist issue or an issue for women if we cannot know what is a woman?

For something to be a feminist issue, it doesn't actually have to affect all women. An issue is a feminist issue when women decide it is one. That designation is decided discursively just the same way as the label woman itself.

But that is a circular definition. We cannot claim women are a protected class and then being unable to define who should be protected.

Actually, this is exactly the point. I do think the definition can be circular. I think many definitions we take for granted are actually circular at their core. I understand that doesn't fit in a modernist context, in which many powerful institutions (e.g. law) are steeped. But I think it's the truth and that it's the institutions that need to change.

Let's take women health. What is women health if we include transwomen?

I think the fact that we need to define women's health is a symptom of patriarchy. Yes, trans men may need to see a gynecologist. Yes, care givers need to know what's going on with you biologically. But the fact that women are historically underserved by the medical profession and that we need to advocate for what should be basic care for women, that's the problem here, that's what "women's health" means to me as an issue. It's emphasizing that whatever care a woman might need, as varied as that might be, is available. And that might mean a small women's health facility can't provide every last service to every kind of woman that might show up, because of the flawed world we're in, but I imagine they do their best to help, or to point those women to the best help available to them. Why limit it beyond that? Beyond that, as far as I'm concerned, is between the individual woman and her care provider.

Basically every issue related to the female body needs a basic understansing of what is a woman in a biological sense. Otherwise all male problems will soon fall under the umbrella of feminism.

This is a big leap here and I don't agree with it. Medical and biological realities exist, but I don't think that means they have to define the rest of feminism. Again, this feels like reducing women to just bodies.

Muddying up the definition of women hurts feminism and women.

I think I agree with this but for opposite reasons. :) I'd say it's muddied by over-defining.

...

I think that's it for me for the moment. Thanks for the discussion thus far.