LGBTQ+

I think you run into problems with this when we know now that gender identity is biological and genetic - there is at least a biological and fixed component to gender, such that you can't just take a cis man and make them into a woman (as David Reimer's case proved: after a botched circumcision he was surgically made into a girl and then raised from birth as a girl, but despite that he had a persistent male gender identity and eventually transitioned to male as a teenager). This is why conversion therapy doesn't work, you can't change someone's gender identity (or their "subconscious sex").

When you start to think of someone's gender based primarily on gender identity, we can see a way of viewing someone as a woman who doesn't appear enough as a woman to be accepted socially as a woman - i.e. who appears to be a man and lives socially as a man, but who "on the inside" is a woman.

This is the case with trans people, where their gender identity conflicts with biological and social components of their sex and gender. (This is also the case with some intersex individuals, who for various reasons might similarly struggle; a large percentage of intersex people are also trans.)

Medical transition might lead to that person having a body more aligned with their gender identity, and might lead them to be accepted socially as their gender, but when we are talking about personal identity and questions of whether someone is innately a woman, the science is pretty clear that the identity is more about their brain than the rest of their body, and ever since there were autopsies of the brains of trans women that found they have structures correlated with gender identity that match cis female brains and not cis male brains, the evidence has pointed to accepting that trans women are a kind of woman (at least on the inside) even if they don't transition medically or socially.

When we say trans women are women, we mean they have a female gender identity, and in that sense they are women regardless of the body or social role they inhabit.

Furthermore, these anti-trans individuals promote debunked pseudo-science theories about trans people, they are not just evil but they also hold little regard for truth or science.

Steven Pinker even wrote a blurb for Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen which promotes the debunked theory of autogynephilia (the false belief that trans women are just men who transition to live as women for erotic pleasure).

Here are a list of articles that go into the details of why this theory is wrong:

https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/autogynephilia-junk-science-and-pseudoscience

If you've never heard of autogynephilia or are unfamiliar with the debates, a good starting place is here.

Here are some decent overviews on the science of sex & gender in video format:

• Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says by Julia Serano
• Robert Sapolsky: Brain Gender
• Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality: Prof. Robert Sapolsky
• Sex and Sensibility by Forrest Valkai

If you feel like reading actual studies and technical documentation on this topic, here are some relevant citations: