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It's easy enough to just eat the L and start having uterus-only restrooms, which is open to anyone who has ever had a uterus. Intersex women who have never had a uterus due to developmental issues can use the non-uterus restroom. Same with uterus-only sports leagues, and uterus-only settings on dating apps.
Strategies like this won't work because the goal of trans women is to be accepted in all the same spaces that real women are, and if you give up the older definitions of "real women" and retreat to new ones, the trans movement will attack the new ones too. This is not a conflict that can be solved with clever wordplay.
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That doesn't work, because the right to discriminate based on sex to protect women is grandfathered into law, while discrimination based on anything else is not, so if you declare your restroom uterus-only, then you will be sued for illegal discrimination based on medical status.
And if you didn't get sued, there would be no way to adjudicate cases, because you can hardly inspect each person personally, and the government isn't going to put uterus-possession on government issued ids as they used to do with biological sex.
And even if you somehow managed to overcome those challenges, everyone who has any power in society would agree that only bigoted nazi scum worse than a trillion Hitlers could even conceive of such a vile concept as a uterus-only restroom, which clearly have no purpose but to oppress poor innocent transwomen who just want to pee, so that absolutely no government or corporate institution would create them, nor would any private person who likes having a job, friends, family, or just being able to walk the street without angry antifa gang members throwing tomato sauce over their head.
The upshot is that approximately 0% of restrooms in the Western world will be uterus-only, so they might as well not exist for all practical purposes. If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.
There should be no hope for preserving female-only spaces or legal protections. The west has adopted "equality of the sexes" as foundational and women should have to bear the cost of that as much as men do. They shouldn't get to simultaneously claim equality and special treatment as it suits them.
EDIT: Grammar.
There is a lot to be said for that. After all, feminists (both liberal and radical) have relentlessly attacked male-only spaces to the point where they have all but disappeared, so abolishing female-only spaces too seems only fair. I do have some other views though.
One is that if you abolish female-only spaces entirely, then they should be accessible by all males, not just the ones that happen to identify as women. Instead of allowing transwomen into women's bathrooms, make bathrooms unisex. Instead of allowing transwomen to compete against women in the olympics, abolish the women's division. Instead of allowing transwomen into women-only train compartments, abolish women-only train compartments. And so on. Currently we are not seeing any such principled attack on women's spaces. Instead, it's all about letting males in provided that they identify as women, which is not the same as abolishing female-only spaces, it's just redefining what “female” means.
The other view is that maybe feminists are just wrong. Maybe it's good for society to have both male-only and female-only spaces. I think a lot of boys would benefit from male-only spaces and not in ways that are detrimental to women. And obviously women benefit from female-only spaces too: when it comes to sexual harassment etc. the most common configuration involves a male perpetrator and a female victim. Rather than accept the naive liberal feminist frame that the sexes are indistinguishable, we could embrace the idea that the sexes are equal but different, and support sex-segregated spaces for both.
Radical feminists are particularly hypocritical on this topic, in that they defend female spaces, but attack male spaces. I don't see why I should accept their frame entirely, even though I agree with their view on sex as being defined biologically.
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Until they figure out how to clone organs, and transgender individuals start getting new reproductive systems installed....
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