This journalist on TEDx perfectly explains why feminists should support transgender rights

As the conversation around transgender rights heats up, so too do opinions about where that should fall, and journalist Amelia Abraham took the opportunity to outline why feminists need to do everything they can to support their trans siblings.

It is in this context Abraham took to the coveted TEDx stage to talk about it.

TLDR; You can't call yourself a feminist if you oppress another group of people, when the design of feminism is such that it is a vehicle for liberation.

Speaking to an audience at the TEDxLondonWomen, she asked people how one would police gender spaces: "How do we practically check who is and isn't trans when they enter a space?"

Would we have assigned gender checkers? Facial recognition scanning? Or required certificates on entry to toilets?

Secondly, she talked about the use of different spaces - trans people have already been using the spaces they want for many years. Finally, she broached the problem of sex crimes:

If we want to reduce sex crimes, we need to police rapists. Not trans people.

Doesn't policing gender like this go against what feminists have historically fought for? To free women from the expectation of having to look feminine? Deciding on face value who is and isn't female enough to enter a space - well that just reinforces the gender norms that oppress all of us. 

Among anti-trans activists is a particuarly hardline form of feminism. Nicknamed the trans exclusionary radical feminists - TERFs for short - these peopleopposethe inclusion of trans women in female spaces and organisations on the grounds that trans women are not women.

Australian academic Germaine Greer attracted widespread criticism after she claimed that transgender women are "not women" as "male to female transgender people [do not] look like, sound like or behave like women".

As late as last week, a former Conservative cabinet minister accused the government of "mishandling" reforms needed to improve the health and quality of life of trans people.

"Many transgender people simply don’t have access to the basic healthcare that the rest of us take for granted," Maria Miller said.

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