This was from the Darkhorse Podcast Patreon Discord server on 2020-07-24 in response to @CJCharchuk:
Steelman practice for “calling trans women ‘trans women’ is transphobic” and saying ‘trans women can’t get pregnant’ is transphobic.“
First, Define ‘transphobic’ as, at best, the desire to downplay the trauma trans people experience and absolve society (or oneself) from having to notice the excess difficulty certain statements and beliefs create in trans peoples’ lives. At worst, ‘transphobic’ is to actively work to make-worse the life position of trans people and to ‘disppear’ them from society by way of attempting to make their identity incoherent, giving them no platform for legal or interpersonal grievence.
Calling a trans woman ‘trans woman’ rather than merely ‘woman’ is transphobic. ‘Woman’ is a non-simple term. It describes a gender identity, a receiver of a pattern of oppression, a place in society, a connection to others-who-are-women, and much more. A woman can be born with a penis and still be a woman. A woman who is born with a penis and later comes to understand her true identity is no less a woman than one who did not suffer this traumatic mis-birth experience. Caveating and qualifying ‘which type of woman’ one is (trans woman) necessarily de-equates women with varied biological histories. To require a qualifier is to draw a line between womanhoods, which is othering and marginalizing and serves to help make their identity incoherent (see defining of ‘transphobic’ above).
The statement “trans women can’t get pregnant” is transphobic.
See directly above for details on some of the following. Many different women can’t get pregnant. Very young women, very old women, women with birth defects, women who underwent surgies that went awry, maybe some religious women, women who were born with a penis. Since this statement applies to all different sorts of women, the focus on applying it over and over to this one kind of woman comes off as aggressive and agenda-carrying.