Poet, how do women feel about the practice of consistently including women and trangenders in the same group? It seems a bit weird to me (an unrepentent male).
From Wikipedia:
In "The Second Sex", Simone de Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by application of a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that a similar kind of oppression by hierarchy also happened in other categories of identity, such as race, class and religion, but she claimed that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.
Also note this:
The Second Sex, first published in French as Le Deuxième Sexe, turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one: “One is not born but becomes a woman.”
I think this is the original conception of the idea that you can "self-identify" as whatever you want. You are not born one thing or another. You choose to make yourself something in particular. Chromosomes say otherwise, but who cares about science?
Great question. Separate categories. Like oil and water. ;D