I talk about how the language the gender ideology movement chose to use made it possible to gaslight marginalized groups about their own sexual boundaries.

(Because this is a language issue, I may use words I don't personally agree with using, but that help disambiguate for people familiar with woke terminology.)

People have shared characteristics and it's okay for them to have groups where they talk about their shared experiences. Home country, pet ownership, Yu-Gi-Oh fandom, whatever. There are people who identify with the concept of masculinity, the concept of femininity, neither, or both. That's fine. They can all get together and talk about identity. There are people who are born with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs, and there are people born with the organs required to produce eggs but not the organs required to produce sperm. That's also fine. They should be able to get together and talk about sexual-organ-related issues, or shared experiences, or how the perceived ability/lack of ability to gestate young has affected them, or whatever.

Sex and gender are different, sure. So we should have clear, unambiguous terminology that does not conflate the two. Instead, what happened is that the gender ideology movement took words that referred to sex and decided they now meant something else. When people say "trans women are women" or "trans women are men," what makes these statements true or false is the definition of 'man' or 'woman' the speaker is using. The first is saying "people who identify with femininity identify with femininity," the second says "people with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs are people with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs." The core disagreement is over what the words 'man' and 'woman' should mean.

What they did is like redefining 'prime number' from 'any number greater than 1 with exactly 2 positive divisors' to 'any number anyone says is prime,' insisting that all theorems involving 'prime numbers' still apply for the new definition, and vilifying anyone who not only uses the original definition of 'prime number,' but who dares to mention divisors at all. Whole fields of mathematics would vanish overnight. But what makes formerly-known-as-prime numbers significant isn't that they have a special name, but that they all share a core property of having exactly 2 positive divisors. Furthermore, this group of numbers still exists even if we aren't allowed to talk about it.

(Side note: mentioning intersex conditions in this context is like saying "but what about 1?" Okay. Even if the multiplicative identity exists, composite numbers are still not prime. I say this not to exclude intersex people from any group---not an expert in that---but rather to highlight which specific fallacy this argument uses.)

Why not let the word that meant "people born with the organs required to produce eggs but not the organs required to produce sperm" keep its original meaning and create a new word that means "people who identify with the concept of femininity"? As you all know, it's so they can retcon any previous usage of the words "woman" and "man," etc., to have been specifying groups by gender all along, when they originally specified groups by sex. And also to paint people as bigots for using the "wrong" definition of words they made ambiguous. Bottom line---that bathroom doesn't say "woman" on it because it's for people with this or that identity, it's because bathrooms are a setting where sex organs become relevant and some people don't feel comfortable exposing their sex organs, even semi-privately, in a space the opposite sex is allowed to enter. That is, the word "women" referred exclusively to AFAB people when the decision to label these spaces was made, and so should continue to specify that same group of people. And changing what words mean isn't going to change anyone's sexual orientation.

What this use of language demonstrates is that the gender ideology movement is causing harm its supporters may not have intended. Rather than creating their own words, they took them away from someone else. And this has the side effect of preventing people from setting boundaries related to biological sex. If it is not, then why is it "hateful" for AFAB people to have communities that center themselves, but "not hateful" for people who identify with femininity to do the same thing? Why not label bathrooms "AMAB" and "AFAB"? Why do they allow "feminine-identified people exclusively attracted to feminine-identified people" to have a word but not "AFAB people exclusively attracted to AFAB people"?

I then say, I don't support gender ideology because I want people to be able to express themselves independently of gender roles and I also want people to respect the personal sexual boundaries of others. I think people from outside a group shouldn't be allowed to control the language people inside that group use to talk about themselves. And we can't do that with an ideology that says it's unethical to acknowledge that humans have gonads.

(I've been successful with this, but honestly, that's mostly because I refuse to have discussions with bad-faith actors. My biggest roadblocks have been people with no understanding of formal logic and people who think it's okay to use logical fallacies to justify their beliefs. It's rough to address, and dealing with that kind of thing tires me out so hard I rarely interact with people online.)