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No, like jericho says, what defines radfems is belief in the patriarchy. There are Trans-inclusionary radfems, including famous ones:
All feminists believe in patriarchy. Radical feminists, however, have derived their belief precisely from the idea of fundamental, inalterable biological differences, as far as I've understood.
I'm not really sure how MacKinnon constructs his ideology, I haven't read enough of her, but here's how I understand it to go for the (trans-exclusionary) radical feminists:
There are fundamental, inalterable biological differences between men and women, as classes. The most fundamental one of these is the difference in reproduction, ie. women do the most of the reproductive labor (carry children in their bodies, give birth, mostly feed them etc.) and men's role is a lesser one. This also gives women vastly more possibilities to decide if children are born or not, ie. through contraception, abortion etc, as well as decide whose children they wish to carry. However, men, as a rule, are larger, stronger and thus have more capabilities for violence, and can thus use violence to effectively seize the control of reproductive labor from women to ensure the continuation of their own line.
The easiest way for men to seize control and reduce women, essentially, to property, is direct violence. However, this leads to conflict between men and - since the men know they are also implicitly and explicitly supposed to love and protect women and this is contrary to violence required to uphold the male rule - this leads to mixed feelings and emotional anguish. Thus, institutions are created to regulate male-to-male violence and reduce the need for direct male-to-female violence, thus allowing the maintenance of male rule with a minimal amount of direct personal violence.
All other things in society are derived from this fundamental fact. Religion - the invention of male god(s) to say that it's a God-given thing for men to rule and women to obey. Science - the invention of the idea of nature saying the same. Philosophy - further justification for the same through sophistry. Culture - reproduction of countless scenes of male dominance and female obedience to drive home the message. Law and courts - codification of male dominance of women (through marriage law, family law etc) and regulation of male-to-male violence to maintain stability. Tribalism and nationalism - justification of violence as a general concept to claim that violence is needed to protect our tribe's women from the men of the other tribe, who are the real threat. And so on.
None of these even requires conscious decisions to establish new institutions of male dominance, just that new things are built on top of old unquestioned assumptions. The accumulation of these institutions, often so taken as a given as to not be even considered as something related to male dominance, is what is called "patriarchy".
Once modernity comes, many of these justifications lose force and women begin to claim their rights, but this just means that the processes of patriarchy become subtler. There are new male-led liberation movements that give lip service to the women's cause to attract new supporters but still just implicitly focus on male-male conflict to distribute the women in a new way - like sexual liberationist males chafing against the previous norms of marriage closing off some women to them.
The construction of norms becomes less about the justification of male rule and more about its obfuscation. Some feminists - the libfems - recognize the dominance of men over women but still fall for the obfuscatory processes, unlike the radical feminists, who strike at the root (ie. the etymology of the word radical). In the TERF view, trans rights are yet another obfuscation, and quite a serious one, since they aim to diminish precisely the root, ie the biological view of the sexes. Thus, whatever pro-trans feminists claim, they still would, according to the TERFs, work for the maintenance of patriarchy.
Of course, even if you accept all these assumptions, there exists the serious problem that there's no clear route to enact actual social change. If women are, by definition, less capable of violence than men, then that route is effectively closed - but violence has, in the end, been one of the most effective tools of social change ever, and some would argue that it lies, in some form, behind all social change. Separatism to feminist communities is a most commonly proposed answer, but it would seem this requires these communities to be powerless enough to not pose a real challenge to patriarchy, since if it did, it would quash them anyhow.
The only remaining option is working with other movements to attain some goals through reformist efforts and hope that these other movements aren't able to subvert your enough fast enough for it all to turn to naught. Some TERFs have cooperated with the conservative right, which shares the idea of biological differences through differs in many other things, but presumably other radical feminists would still consider liberal feminism the lesser threat, which would require the ability to build some bridges.
I don’t think that’s true. There’s the radfem meaning, where patriarchy is the all-powerful, primary ordering of society (you describe its supposed mechanisms in your comment), that needs to be radically overthrown, and there’s the watered down, pop culture version, where it means almost nothing, just that there’s an overrepresentation of men in boardrooms. Similar to how a communist and a neoliberal don’t mean the same thing by ‘capitalism’.
Modern feminism is usually divided in radical feminism, marxist feminism and liberal feminism.
Marxist feminists are more reluctant to talk about the patriarchy, because for them sexist oppression, although part of the system, is not the defining characteristic of it, which would be the oppression of the poor by the rich.
Liberal feminism, also called women’s rights feminism, has no need to postulate an all-powerful patriarchy to achieve its moderate demands of legal equality.
Again, biological essentialism doesn’t have much to do with the fundamental radical feminist position. Radfems can go either way. The definitional borders of womanhood are peripheral to the central claim, the oppression of women by men(‘s system).
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