Slate

Nevertheless, gender-critical trans women clearly feel like they’re struggling against an ideological tide. A 28-year-old trans woman in Ohio with a gender-critical Tumblr—she asked me not to name it, lest it draw unwelcome attention to her—says she sees parallels between contemporary trans activism and her Christian fundamentalist upbringing. “It’s just this sense that there are certain things that are unquestionable, and you can’t even talk about them,” she says. “I guess a lot of belief systems have things that operate in that way, but there are just so many for trans activism and for fundamentalist Christians.”

The mainstream trans rights movement’s answer to this feeling of dissonance is to expand the boundaries of what woman means. “You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be,” Boylan says. “But what I don’t want is to take anything away from someone else, and I don’t want anyone else to take anything away from me. If your thing is saying that a transgender woman who has been through transition is not a real woman but some other kind of woman with an asterisk, then you are taking my womanhood away from me. I’m fine with people living their truth as they see it. But don’t ask other people to see me as something less than as I see myself.”