And they should be recognized that way,
No they should not. Why, because it is not true. Society should not participate in the lie that they are telling themselves.
Well, I'm not going to try to change your opinion, even if I thought I could. I will say this, though: There was a time when women were expected to wear dresses. Pants were seen as men's clothes, and women who wore them were criticized, jeered, excluded, threatened, beaten, disowned, and arrested. The men who did all of these things justified themselves by saying things much like you just did: Who do they think they are, they think they're men but they're not, they're lying to themselves, and so on. They insisted that they were upholding the natural order of things, but now we know that they were being close-minded and cruel, arguing nonsense and why? What these women wore didn't affect them one bit.
You're free to think what you will, but you should know that you're on the wrong side of history, and are coming across as being close-minded and cruel.
There's one very large difference in your little analogy: those women were not, at any point in time, stating that they were men or demanding that other people confirm that they were men. They were engaging in activities that men saw as their own private preserve, but they were acknowledging fully that they were still women while doing so.
Oh, there's one other difference: you say, "It didn't affect them one bit." Hairy Tiffany demanding that he be confirmed and treated as a woman in the same way and to the same extent that I am a woman DOES hurt me, and other women. Once again, the fact that YOU don't see it and have decided that it doesn't exist and is no big deal only means that YOU are not one of the people being hurt.
Please explain to me why I am supposed to care that you have mansplained away my concerns and informed me that you're going to think I'm a mean person if I don't immediately hop to and start toeing your ideological line. Also, I'd like to know what great, psychic power you have to know the future and make definitive statements about what the "wrong side of history" is.
I do appreciate your magnanimous permission to think what we will, though. I do so worry about thinking things that the misogynists around me haven't sanctioned.
Well, first, I was responding to JoeMoma, not you, but also I wouldn't have any idea what your (or Joe's, for that matter) identity is, except for you saying it in this post.
Second, you don't HAVE to care about what I think at all. I'm not a social psychologist or expert in gender studies; I'm just imparting what I know on a message board intended for, well, messages. If my posts can help broaden your perspective on the matter, super, and if they can't, that's okay too. I trust that you're a grown, thinking person with your own life experience, and can make up your own mind.
What I am, though, is a historian, which is why I presented the subject through the lens of how other people have argued similar positions in the past. Having studied history for several decades now is also why I feel pretty confident in my abilities to see which way the trends are leading. It's not psychic, but again, you don't HAVE to acquiesce to what I say. It's a free country.
So now you. What is your background on this, aside from being a woman? Where are you coming from, that explains your stance on how the existence of trans women hurts you personally?
Well, first, re-visit the concept of "public message board.
Second, please do not try to divert down a tangent about "caring/not caring" in order to avoid the point, which is that you are attempting to bully people into keeping silent and not opposing your preferred agenda by littering your posts with judgements and condemnations about "You're close-minded and cruel". Inappropriate in the extreme to try to use, "I think my position is nicer, so that must mean it's correct." The truth does not have to be nice (and frequently isn't); it just has to be true.
Third, please spare me the self-flattery about "broadening my perspective" by parroting talking points at me as though you think I've never heard them before. Any time a man is lecturing a woman on how women think and feel and how they "should" think and feel, it's a pretty good bet he needs to stop talking and do some listening, because HIS perspectives need to be broadened.
What you are is an extremely bad selector of analogies, because you're presenting this issue "through the lens" of something not even remotely comparable, based on your complete inability - or unwillingness - to understand the operative points of the opposing argument. So no, I don't feel any confidence at all in your ability to "see which way trends are leading", because all I'm seeing is yet another tool you're trying to use to bully me into silence. History will be and say whatever it does, and I won't be around to know about it either way, so I don't care. All I can do is all any human being could ever do: state the facts on the ground as honestly as possible.
What background is it you think I need, aside from being a woman? Are you suggesting that I'm speaking to any point other than womanhood? Or are you suggesting that I need to somehow justify my right to think and feel and speak to my own identity by saying, "I have XYZ degree and training, so that allows me to say what being a woman is like, where other people who are merely female cannot"?
I am a woman. Aside from being a human being, it is the most integral, intrinsic aspect of my identity, more than any of the things the left tells me should be deeply important: more than my nationality, more than my cultural background, FAR more than my race. That is all I need to speak to the experience of being a woman, and that is all you need to know.