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The suspicion is that those facts are being weaponized, and that the same people doing the "correcting" would be soft-pedalling them or even being actively misleading if they didn't fit the narrative they wanted to push (and, in fact, have a history of doing just that). You can't (well, okay, shouldn't) make arguments for years on end that rely on conflating "trans" and "intersex" and then get all huffy and indignant when people confuse the two in a way that you don't find politically convenient.
(Generic "you", not necessarily you personally.)
Fighting the facts is just never a good look. When you start out saying something that isn't true you pretty immediately lose the persuadable audience. It's not good strategically and more importantly to me, it's not good epistemics. Keeping these things straight matters.
They weren't doing this though, or at least not the more serious people. Certainly intersex people come up in discussions of exactly where to draw lines on defining what it is to be a man or a woman because they're exactly the kind of edge case bullet people need to bite if they want to rigorously define "woman" and people arguing for expanding the definition will naturally make you bite those bullets. The claim wasn't that trans women and people who were born with a vagina and womb but have an odd genetic disorder are exactly the same thing, just that they're both category errors(or at least the trans advocate will try to claim that trans identification ought to make them a category error, I find this argument dubious).
They're obviously quite different for many reasons, most important to me because intersex is a very objective kind of thing, we can run tests and know what is going on. For this reason we're not at high risk of mistakenly giving someone, especially a kid, inappropriate life altering treatment. We have no risk of a social contagion of intersex diagnoses. Because of this I think we can and should calmly sit down and determine what should be done about these cases where nature is the only party at fault. I do still think in that calmly sitting down, if we avoid invoking the trans culture war mind killing, the natural outcome would be banning intersex cases that provide advantage from serious competition. And invoking trans people in this discussion is not helping.
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That's exactly the problem though. Recognizing the motte and Bailey doesn't lead naturally to therefore attack the motte harder. Instead you recognize and you keep the fight in the bailey, you endeavor to cut off the motte so they can't support the bailey.
Here, I fear that those concerned about trans participation in women's sport are setting themselves up for a fall. Everyone from JK to DJT have publicly attacked Khelif, who is going to leave Paris with a medal around her neck. Perfectly timed for a TV special on CBS Sunday morning, where the crew takes a look at her life growing up, her training, how she never knew about her DSD diagnosis, talking head from the IOC comes in to say it's fair, the "attacks" she suffered, and then gets some talking head with an MD to come on and say "Intersex disorders are very common and gender is really complicated!"
Conflating rare invisible intersex disorders, or just having (eurocentric) masculine features, with being trans is what the TRAs want. They want terfs to make themselves look bad attacking sympathetic targets.
It bears noting two things-
One, Imane Khelif is an extremely sympathetic target. She collected scrap metal to fund bus fair to her boxing gym she attended over the objections of her strict Islamic father in rural Algeria. She isn't trans, she probably has a rare intersex disorder that nobody in Algeria has ever heard of, and being non-gender conforming in Islamic Arab societies is not fun, especially when it isn't your fault and nobody can figure out why you aren't like the other girls.
Two, a lot of the core population of the west has their well of sympathy completely exhausted. I don't care about the oppressed Arab woman rising above the odds anymore. Trans genocide? Bring it on, and if some unfortunate intersex get caught in the crossfire that's the cost of doing business.
I'll go a bit further. At a certain point, it feels emasculating to have to give all of the caveats about how obviously it's a complicated issue and everyone deserves dignity and so on while your enemies just call you a bigot when they're strong and then putter around pettifogging about hormone classes and doing it by weight when they're weak.
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