Planet Fitness cancels woman's membership after her complaints of transgender woman in locker room

[Spider Jerusalem]

201. No, what you're seeing, actually...

is that there is a vocal subset of second-wave feminists who refuse to accept that transgender people exist, at all. These people are 100% convinced that "gender" is a social construct that reinforces patriarchy, and that trans women are men who are infiltrating and subverting women's spaces while reinforcing binary gender roles and that trans men are butch lesbians who've sold out to the patriarchy. There's a name for these people; they're called "trans-exclusionary radical feminists" (TERF, for short). Some of them have been both very influential and very harmful; one Janice Raymond, for instance, consulted with the National Institute of Medical Technology and helped insure the denial of any Medicare coverage for gender transition treatment (which was reversed only last May). There is also an increasingly anachronistic school of psychological and psychiatric thought that focuses on transgender people (always, for some reason, trans women, because, I suppose, anyone who's born male and identifies as a woman must have serious mental issues? Which is just another sign of patriarchal attitudes, really), that gender dysphoria in children, especially in assigned-male-at-birth children, is the result of a "disordered family system" and "excessive mothering" and weak paternal influence; and also that trans women are "autogynephiliac homosexuals" who sexually fetishise the idea of themselves as women.

The problem with these ideas about gender identity and the roots of gender dysphoria is that there is, as I said above, a growing body of evidence that indicates that gender identity has a biological/neurological basis (probably related in some way to prenatal hormone exposure). Both the TERF view of biological essentialism and the psychiatric view of "disorder" are, it seems, wrong in different ways, and the people who keep using them as justifications for their bigotry are very similar to scientific racists who will tell you that black people are obviously inferior because of century-old and discredited theories.