Roary the transtiger · @FeministRoar
24th Apr 2013 from TwitLonger
Brilliant breakdown of why space for women born women is important & why we should be wary of making the word 'women' meaningless.
Your question assumes (as not everyone concedes) that there is an identity of "cis woman" which is separate from the identity of "woman". This point of view is fairly recent, and not widely shared.
To make an analogy, if I suddenly started referring to people with freckles as "melanin intermittent" and classed those people as oppressed, pointed out that they are presented in stereotypical ways, excluded from the benefits society awards to people who tan, and from the opportunities provided for persons whose melanin identity was more easily categorized, it might or might not get me a political identity. But let's suppose it does.
MI people would like (when they would like) to be included in the safe spaces of POC. Having embraced their identities as people whose melanin helps define their societal limits, they class themselves with the descendants of slaves and people whose color instantly makes them a target of police profiling. They insist that invalidating their experience is oppressive... because their experience is essential to any discussion of melanin oppression. The complaints that POC who are members of more "established" melanin minority groups make, that they weren't "raised as racial minorities", that they had the opportunities given "White" people, that their culture and socialization is from the majority, and that their presence substantially alters the dynamic of these spaces... well, all those complaints are the result of bigotry.
Of course, if you add in the idea that, when we say, "freckles" we're really including anyone who thinks they have freckles, or has age spots, or often imagined themselves as freckled, or has a tattoo that's very similar to freckles, we see that the only requirement to be included is what you will. The converse of that is, of course, that persons who believe themselves to be POC should be imagining themselves as White, and all will be well. If they insist on choosing an identity that's oppressed, when the MI folks have shown their immense "mind over matter" option, well, that's on them.
I hope this explanation is helpful.