The argument that trans rights and women's rights are in conflict is not an honest one. When the parameters of who counts as a "real woman" are drawn ever more narrowly, the harm does not stop at trans people. Cisgender women of colour, lesbians, disabled women, gender non-conforming women: all of them end up in the firing line. Attacks on trans people endanger everyone who does not fit a particular heteronormative and Eurocentric ideal of womanhood.
Who actually gets hurt when trans people are targeted?
Nadia Whittome put it plainly in a clip for PinkNews: from the abuse directed at women of colour competing in sport to cisgender lesbians being harassed in bathrooms, the people doing the targeting are not especially careful about who they target. The logic of "are you really a woman?" does not stay confined to trans women. It expands. It has always expanded.
I have heard this from so many people over the years. A cisgender lesbian who was followed into a supermarket toilet and told she looked like a man. A Black woman athlete whose testosterone levels were publicly questioned by commentators who had never met her. A butch woman who stopped using public bathrooms altogether because the stares and the comments became unbearable. None of these women are trans. All of them were caught in the crossfire of a campaign that claimed to be protecting them.
So if you are a cis person who has noticed the hostility is already touching your life, or the lives of people you love, you are not imagining it. And you are not alone in wanting to push back.
Why the "conflict" framing is dishonest
The narrative that trans rights and women's rights are competing is one of the most effective rhetorical moves in contemporary culture-war politics, and it is worth understanding why it works before you try to counter it.
It works because it frames inclusion as subtraction. If trans women are included, the argument goes, something is taken from other women. Rights are presented as a fixed resource, a pie, and every slice given to a trans woman is a slice missing from someone else's plate. This is not how rights work, and the people making the argument know it. Rights are not finite. Including trans women in the category of women does not diminish the protections, the dignity, or the safety of anyone else.
What the framing actually does is redirect anxiety. Legitimate concerns about women's safety, about resources, about fairness in sport, about institutional power, are real concerns. But the evidence does not support trans women as the source of those problems, and the loudest voices in this debate are not, on the whole, campaigners with strong records on women's rights more broadly. Ask what they have said about pay equality, about reproductive rights, about violence against women, about race. The answer is often illuminating.
How to push back without burning yourself out
Pushing back on anti-trans hostility when you are cis is a particular kind of work. You are not defending your own identity, so it can feel abstract, or presumptuous, or like you might get it wrong. Here is what I would say to that.
First, you do not need to be an expert on trans experience to name dishonesty when you see it. You do not need to win a philosophical debate about gender theory to say: "The claim that trans women are a threat to women is not supported by the evidence, and it is being used to justify hostility towards a vulnerable group." That is a factual statement. You can stand behind it.
Second, the most powerful thing cis people can often do is make the costs visible. The bathroom harassment of cisgender lesbians is a useful example precisely because it shows the mechanism clearly: when you build a system of surveillance around who looks feminine enough, everyone who does not pass that test gets caught. Pointing that out is not a diversion from trans issues. It is a demonstration of why those issues matter to all of us.
Third, you are allowed to be angry. The people with newspaper columns and loud voices who claim to be standing up for women are not doing that. Saying so directly, with whatever clarity and composure you can muster in the moment, is not aggression. It is honesty.
What about people close to you who have absorbed the hostility?
Sometimes the difficulty is not a stranger or a pundit. It is someone you love, someone who has started using language or repeating talking points that you know are harmful, perhaps without fully realising it. That is harder, and I would not pretend otherwise.
A few things that tend to help. Lead with the personal rather than the political. If you can name someone real, a friend, a colleague, someone they already care about, whose life is made harder by this, that tends to land differently than an abstract argument about rights. People shift when they feel something, not just when they are shown a counter-argument.
Ask them to follow the logic. If the concern is safety in bathrooms, ask: what would a woman who was harassed in a bathroom because she looked too masculine tell you about where the threat is coming from? If the concern is fairness in sport, ask: which specific cases are we talking about, and what does the evidence actually show? Not in a combative way, but in a genuinely curious one. The arguments on the anti-trans side tend not to survive contact with specifics.
And know that you will not always succeed. Some people are not reasoning their way through this position; they are feeling their way through it, and the feeling is partly about something else entirely. You can plant a seed, hold a line, and leave the door open. That is sometimes all that is possible, and it is still worth doing.
The political is personal here
There is a reason this is affecting the cis people around you. Anti-trans hostility does not stay in the corner it was put in. It does not only affect trans people. It shapes how all of us move through public life, how safe it feels to be visibly gay or visibly gender non-conforming, how much energy women of colour spend managing other people's suspicion of their bodies, how welcome disabled women feel in spaces supposedly designed for their protection.
The ever-narrowing parameters Nadia Whittome describes are real. The more rigid the definition of womanhood becomes, the more women it excludes. That is not a side effect. It is the point. And it is why pushing back matters, not just for trans people, but for everyone who has ever been told they are not quite the right kind of woman.
You can say that out loud. You can say it clearly and without apology, to the person at the dinner table, to the comment section, to the colleague who forwarded the article. You do not need permission. The argument is a good one, and it is yours to make.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
This entry was inspired by a clip from Nadia Whittome, featured by PinkNews.