As Caitlyn Jenner was crowned ‘woman’ of the year this October by Glamour magazine what, to some, may have seemed a great leap forward in the liberation of transsexual, transgender or transparent people, was in fact a tumble backward for the recognition of the suffering of actual women in society.

In 2016 we can look forward to a further liturgy of media coverage for the men who believe that to be a woman is to (surgically) take control a woman’s body. The general public has become all to at ease with any goal that can be gift-wrapped as a question of ‘rights’ and sold alongside the rightful success of the lesbian and gay moment – this leads to acronyms like ‘LGBT’ which is a grouping that frankly makes no sense.

Here’s the rub – the people who believe that men who choose to alter their bodies to resemble female ones are female do so because, and only because, it is presented as a rights issue and only one half of the rights issue is presented. The majority of people do not have a clear idea of what a women is and is not and are now willing to include these men as women only due to how fabulously fashionable it now is.

But they’re not women – they’re missing an essential component of being a woman.

Being a woman is not to have a female body – this has long been agreed upon by both sides of the debate. Even those who accept these men as women will contentedly argue that long before the surgical transition the men are ‘women’ and that the surgery is not the difference. This is obviously compounded by a common-sense look at the transition operations which differ wildly in themselves and only seek to replicate the aesthetic of a female body – never the function. They only look like female bodies.

Being a woman is also not saying that you are female. Again, this should be obvious to even the most ardent of readers – it is clearly both wrong and false for a man who believes they’re a man to be allowed to stay the night at women’s domestic abuse shelter simply because they tick the ‘female’ box in the entry register.

Being a woman is also not holding an honest belief that you are a woman – this wrongheaded approach suffers from the missing – a man who has an honest belief that they are female but does not wish to colonise the paraphernalia of womenhood. Without exception these men choose to wear women’s clothes, use female bathrooms, take female pronouns and general be treated with the social signals that are used for women – they are not content to be a women by virtue of their apparently honestly held beliefs that they are women.

What every man who wishes to be a women will tell you is that to be a women is to be treated as a women. This is so obvious as to be laughable – everybody, on all sides, can agree that to be a proper women is be treated as a woman by the society you live in. Perhaps one might wish to attach certain addendum but the essential component that every transexual ‘women’ strives for is to be treated as a woman.

But us humans carry around with us two set of ways in which we are treated by society – how we treated in the present and the memories of how we were treated in the past. What these men lack, in addition to a womb, is a memory of being treated as a young girl and everything that goes with that.

Until the day comes that a surgical operation can implant in the mind of a man memories of the systematic and vicious persecution involved in being a young woman, they will not be women and we should not allow these people to extend their domination and force the cohabitation of our gender.

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