Dug up my PT post from years ago. I still stand by it now:

I grew up in a very conservative Christian subculture. I was homeschooled and fortunately my parents were on the more liberal side of a very conservative community, but for context: of the girls involved in our community's activities, I was the only one who went to college. The rest remained home to develop their homemaking skills for a future husband.

I used to read the literature of these Christian patriarchy movements in high school and pray so hard it wasn't true. On the other hand I would also read feminist blogs and find hope. I also deeply loved math and computers and wanted to study them in college, so I was also haunted by the various corners of the web that talked about women's "innate inferiorities," (whether they were talking about Murray's Bell Curve style IQ arguments, or the testosterone junk, or even the SAT making claims along the lines of "some men rob banks at the same age that other men make their most brilliant contributions to mathematics; women aren't robbing banks at that age so they probably can't do math either right?").

Anyway, I studied math and "hard science" in college with these ideas still haunting me, but feminist discourse helped me so much during that time. To see the representation problem of women as being due to social conditioning arguments rather than hard-wiring arguments (which were espoused by both religious fundamentalists and MRAs), was so freeing. Maybe I wasn't a member of an inferior class of being after all, and I was going to fight and prove it. I also came to see how LGB orientations fought against patriarchal norms as well. I mean, your relationship/marriage just has to subvert the oppressive gender roles of a traditional marriage since the two people are both women or both men. (I'm het but I have a lot of admittedly selfish appreciation for what gay marriage has done for straight marriage.)

There wasn't as much written online about trans identities at the time, but what was written seemed to imply that trans was about being trans-sexual rather than trans-gender. It made total sense to me that a person could have a dysphoria when it came to their physical bodies, and altering their physical body has nothing to do with imposing specific gender performances on themselves. (I myself had a lot of dysphoria in puberty, and I later unpacked it as hatred for women's bodies at the time because turning into a women meant I had to be a stay-at-home mother with no career prospects of my own. Puberty for me meant I was turning into an object...one that could be raped into pregnancy.) Anyway, my dysphoria existed for terrible reasons related to societally-imposed gender roles, but I could easily imagine that some people could have bodily dysphoria for other "that's just the way it is" reasons, and I supported them getting treatment for it.

At some point though, we moved from a trans discourse that focused on a sex change to instead one that involved a gender identity affirmation. But wait...I don't have a gender identity? I thought those were societally imposed roles and I'm allowed to take them or leave them? Now I'm told if I don't have a gender identity I'm nonbinary and no longer a woman...I have to claim a gender identity to be a woman. Now there's this claim that I have to have an innately "female brain" to be a woman, and as a woman in STEM that's a serious "NOPE! NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!" That's the way of religious fundamentalism and red pill nonsense and evo-psych and all of my childhood bullies.

So suffice it to I was pretty hostile to the concept of gender identity from the start, but I figure I'll just go and spit out all the things that drive me crazy about it since this is a rant and like five years of pent-up frustration.

• There is a lot of discrimination that is solely sex-based, not gender identity-based. I grew up in a culture that subjugated women and girls because of their sex, and it's like that still in much of the world.

• By removing sex as a meaningful category, we can no longer name and speak about this oppression. You see even in the context of phrases like "pregnant people and people-with-vaginas" that there still a tacit admission that there exists a meaningful category of people oppressed for their specific anatomies, but the word "woman" has been taken away as a term to describe this category, leaving us with no word for it.

• Despite the fact that I had to deal with being socialized as a woman my whole life (and still do), and viewed as subversive for doing STEM (and other minor things like failing to shave my legs), I can't be a woman anymore apparently because I have no concept of a "gender identity." Therefore apparently I wasn't oppressed by patriarchy at all! Apparently I have no idea what it means to be a woman.

• Saying girls around the world who experience FGM and are denied educations are oppressed due to "gender identity" is offensive. Changing their sense of internal "maleness" or "femaleness" would do nothing to change how they were treated. Sex is the relevant category here.

• Seeing historical badass women (like women soldiers in the 18-19th century) being called transmen because they defied gender roles makes me feel hopeless. Apparently "woman" now means pink-and-floofy-only when the whole point of feminism was to allow freedom from that gender role.

• I guess the new paradigm is to invent infinity genders in hopes that you find one that encompasses all your behaviors and presentations? Genders come with performances and roles, as we see in practice, so I say no to any of that. I don't need a gender identity with prescribed expressions and roles, and the only way I can identify myself as a woman that makes me comfortable is by my body (NOT by any innate brain structure), and by the socialization I received growing up. Unfortunately these are exactly the things trans theory now pegs as "oppressive" ways to define a woman.

In short, feminism has been great, life-changing, and has done so much for me, but it's been letting me down more and more and that's been a major disappointment.