Your body is your own. No matter what cisgender white males and TERFs are saying

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"When I was a child, I'd go to my grandmother's house and start writing. When I picked up my pencil, she'd tell me that in her day, left-handers would be forced to write with their right hands, which seemed ridiculous to me. Luckily, those days were over and although my left-handedness is still treated as a curiosity by people who expect me to have terrible script, I can write as I wish - but sometimes I imagine how absurd, not to mention vindictive, a campaign to return to this would look, and wonder if we'll ever reach a similar point where my transition is quietly accepted as a matter of bodily autonomy."

[...]

"Whereas gay and lesbian activists opposed pathologisation and the resultant aversion therapies, transsexual people understood that mental health services offered access to hormones and surgery, as long as they satisfied the gatekeeping requirements of the psychiatrists - which often demanded that transsexual women show a very traditional kind of femininity in their clothing and mannerisms before being referred for treatment. [...] Stryker (2008) posits that: 'In many ways, the transgender movement's politics towards the medical establishment were more like those of the reproductive freedom movement than those of the gay liberation movement' in that they both centred around bodily autonomy, and 'access to competent, legal, respectfully provided medical services for a non-pathological need not shared equally by every member of society.' [...] In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, deeming abortion a fundamental Constitutional right - which women have had to constantly fight to retain - but transgender medical needs were not viewed through the same rationales that won Roe, writes Stryker, in part because an emerging feminist position on their issues proved incredibly hostile. 

[...]

[Lesbians who left mainstream feminism - I find it debatable, but this how the author presents the origins of radical feminism in the US and UK] set up women-only organisations, the borders of which were swiftly and hotly contested. The eligibility of trans people to enter those spaces was debated, and not everyone argued for their exclusion - [...]. Inclusion within feminist spaces is not the most pressing issue for trans people - access to medical services, relationships with family, friends and co-workers, institutional and social violence, and housing discrimination remain more important today, as in the 1970s - but it becomes a bigger deal when debates about trans people which exclude trans people are then allowed to influence related health and social care policies.

[...]

Originally, the term [Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism] was intended to acknowledge that radical feminism accommodated differing positions on trans inclusion. The aim in using 'TERF' was to discourage rejection of all of the good political theory and work, and often great art, done in or around radical feminism [...]. [The most virulent anti-trans text to emerge was The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Modern She-Male by Janice Raymond, published in 1979.] Raymond's (1979) assertion that the relationship between clinicians and their users was frictionless may have felt plausible if you didn't encounter any trans perspectives - or just ignored them - even if the implication that transsexuality was a patriarchal plot to infiltrate the women's movement seems slightly far-fetched. The simultaneous characterisation of trans women as unthinking supporters of male-defined roles and politically aware enough to convince hardened feminists to admit them, however, is a theoretical clusterfuck, and every critical thinker who let it past them - and plenty did - should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Raymond (1979) wrote that 'the transsexual becomes an agreeable participant in a society which encouraged conformity to rigid sex-role behaviour', whilst constructing a framework which aimed to stop 'the transsexual' from participating in any politics that might challenge it, with any objection dismissed as male entitlement.

[...]

Gloria Steinem recently took the admirable step of apologising for supporting Raymond's position in the 1970s and 1980s, stating that '[Transgender] lives should be celebrated, not questioned ... their health care decisions should be theirs alone to make'."

Juliet Jacques, "On the 'dispute' between radical feminism and trans people", New Statesman, 6 August 2014: http://www.newstatesman.com/juliet-jacques/2014/08/dispute-between-radical-feminism-and-trans-people

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