Trans women are women. The resistance to recognising that is not new, and it is not neutral. It follows a pattern that has been used before, against other groups of women, to police who gets to count. Angela Y Davis made this point with characteristic precision: historically, Black women were excluded from the category of "real women" because they were too outspoken, too angry, not submissive enough. The standard was never biological. It was political.
Who gets to define "woman"?
Gender, and especially the rigid binary structure we are often asked to treat as natural and fixed, is socially constructed. That is not a fringe position; it is mainstream across anthropology, sociology, and gender studies. What counts as "woman" has always been shaped by the dominant culture, and that culture has consistently used the definition to exclude the people it finds inconvenient.
Think about what that has meant across history. Black women in the United States were told they did not meet the standard of womanhood because they were too strong, too loud, too resistant to the roles that white femininity demanded. Working-class women were told the same. So were women who were too educated, too sexual, not sexual enough, too disabled, too old, or too unconventional in how they presented themselves. The goalposts were never fixed. They moved to keep certain women out.
Trans women are the latest group to face that same exclusion, dressed up in new language. The argument has shifted from "not submissive enough" to "not biological enough", but the structure is identical: a definition of womanhood that happens, conveniently, to exclude the women we have already decided do not belong.
The Angela Y Davis argument
Angela Y Davis has spent decades asking us to notice whose bodies are treated as the legitimate site of rights, and whose are not. Her work on race, gender, and power makes this point unavoidable: the exclusion of Black women from the category of "real women" was not a mistake or an oversight. It was a function of a system that needed certain women to remain outside, available for labour, punishment, and erasure without the social cost that came with harming a "real" woman.
When I look at the current arguments for excluding trans women, I see the same logic at work. Trans women are told they are not real women because of chromosomes, or gonads, or what was written on a birth certificate decades ago. But those criteria were not chosen because they accurately capture what a woman is. They were chosen because they produce the desired result: exclusion. The science is being recruited to justify a conclusion that was already reached.
Davis would ask, and I am asking with her: we recognised this pattern when it was used against Black women. We recognised it when it was used against disabled women, against intersex women, against women who did not conform to a narrow feminine ideal. Why are we allowing it again?
What happens when a group of women is excluded
Exclusion from the category of "woman" is never just a philosophical disagreement. It has consequences. When Black women were not recognised as real women, they were denied the legal protections, the social support, and the moral consideration that womanhood was supposed to confer. They were more vulnerable to violence, to exploitation, to erasure, and to being told that their suffering did not count in the same way.
Trans women face exactly that now. When the law, or a policy, or a medical institution treats trans women as something other than women, the practical result is that trans women become easier to harm. They are excluded from services designed to protect women. They are more exposed to violence. Their healthcare needs are dismissed or denied. Their identities are treated as a claim requiring scepticism rather than a reality requiring respect.
Exclusion protects no one. It simply determines who bears the cost.
The binary was never a fact of nature
One of the most persistent myths in these arguments is that the male/female binary is a straightforward biological fact, and that trans women are asking for an exception to that fact. They are not. What they are asking for, what the evidence supports, and what basic human dignity requires, is recognition that the binary itself is a simplified model of a much more complex reality.
Sex characteristics exist on a spectrum. Chromosomes do not always align with gonads, gonads do not always align with hormone profiles, and none of those things determine how a person experiences their own gender. Intersex people exist in significant numbers and have always existed. People whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth exist in every culture and every recorded period of history. The binary is a useful administrative shorthand that breaks down at the edges, and trans people live at those edges.
Recognising trans women as women does not require dismantling biology. It requires acknowledging that biology was never as simple as the exclusionists need it to be.
The history is the argument
The reason Angela Y Davis matters here is not that her name adds authority. It is that her analysis reveals the mechanism. Exclusion from the category of womanhood has always been a power move, not a factual determination. The criteria shift to match the politics. The people being excluded change, but the shape of the argument does not.
We got it wrong about Black women. We got it wrong about disabled women. We got it wrong every time we allowed "woman" to be weaponised as a gatekeeping term rather than a description of human beings living their lives. The question now is whether we notice the pattern in time, or whether we repeat it.
Trans women are women. That is not a demand. It is an observation that the history of feminism, honestly told, has been building towards all along.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the fight for recognition and equality.