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There are obviously dissenters, but the pro-equality bureaucracy trans activists hijack is far more popular when used for its original purposes than for this stuff. I'm of the opinion that that general ethos/bureaucracy created the problem but most people are not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In countries like the US this is even more obvious than in Britain because the laws often being exploited for trans activism (Title IX) were clearly about sex and have to be turned to a new purpose by much less accountable Presidential actions compared to passing a new law.
That's why there's so much forced teaming and the constant implication that being anti-trans is in some way racist.
I have no problem with a principled attack on quotas. "Why do you care if it's only one?" is what I find meaningless.
Because:
The principle matters, especially when we're dealing with something that clearly can spread and has no strong limiting factor. People used to make these arguments in sport because no one ever saw a transwoman win. No one can guarantee it'll stay within the bounds of their proportion of the population.
People who actually dislike quotas should be the people most confident about this it seems? Presumably you think men are overrepresented in certain spaces for a reason. Letting them identify as women will just cause this overrepresentation to spill over.
On a much more basic level one wonders what the point is? Are people who were raised as men up until X year (sometimes they transition already into middle age) saddled with the same problems that prevent female advancement?
I think that the moral panic about transgenderism spreading is exaggerated. Sure, I think that telling kids "you can be whatever gender you want with no tradeoffs" is bad, but I do not expect many to transition, just as the majority of men stayed straight even as gay sex was legalized. I don't think that we will reach a world where 10% of adults opt for HRT.
While we can debate if a trans woman has a more or less difficult role to play than a cis-women until the sun implodes, I don't think it matters much as long as only a small fraction of women are trans and the quota seats are respecting that proportion.
For comparison, there are people who are born with CAIS -- XY chromosome with a body which will be assigned female at birth without chromosome analysis. Does anyone care if they can get a quota board seat? From a standpoint of principle, this would be just as valid a battlefield, but in practice, nobody gives a fuck, because they are exceedingly rare.
Now, trans-people are a lot more common than genetic disorders affecting sex, but in the grand scheme of things they are still pretty uncommon. A quota is a rough compromise in the first place, not single island of fairness in a sea of unfairness. If you lose 5% of women's seats to trans-women, and 2% of non-quota seats go to trans-men, I just don't see the great divine injustice in that.
For it to matter at scale, one of three things would have to be the case:
(1) M2F transitions on a scale where a significant fraction of women are trans-women
(2) People transitioning just so that they qualify for that sweet board seat
(3) Boards preferring trans-women
I already argued against (1). I would also argue that the average male manager is not going to change his legal gender identity to secure a board seat. (For one thing, being trans is likely to severely limit your relationship options.) And I also don't see boards preferring trans-women. If the board is an old boys club, it seems much more likely that they care about being able to make misogynistic jokes than that they care about the sex bits of the other board members. A trans woman is at least as much an outsider in these circles of men with their wives and mistresses as a cis-women. (This is the other reason why the manager bent on making his career is not going to transition: they might get the board position, but at the cost of a lot of conformity, which will likely limit their career further on.)
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