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There is nothing to the anti-choice movement or anti-LGBT bigotry beyond wanting to control women and curtail sexual expression in general, and recognizing that, most of their arguments fall down like a house of cards, revealed as banal, disingenuous, and irrelevant.
TERFs are the worst as patriarchy's edgiest handmaidens, walking arm-in-arm with the religious right, but there's nothing sincere or thoughtful about arguments from garden variety misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes either. Our lives are not a debate. They're just wrong.
Even if I were to accept that womanhood exists as a Platonic ideal to which I can only aspire but never achieve, that I am not and will never be a "real woman" by some objective standard, that wouldn't change anything about how I choose to live my life.
Incidentally, you shouldn't get to call yourself an intellectual or a radical anything if you resort to biological essentialism as a core argument. You should get laughed out of the public sphere.
Conservatives and reactionaries resort to so much flimflammery, hypocrisy, pearl-clutching, and reductive absurdity to cover up the core fact that they basically just hate women and LGBT people and wish we would go away, die, and do as we're told.
Arguments over abortion are inevitably a dead end. Most anti-choice people refuse to support contraception and sex education to reduce unwanted pregnancies, care nothing about children after they're born, and are frequently motivated by racist demographic fears anyway.
This should be abundantly obvious given a spate of abortion bans with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the child or mother, and with penalties for women and doctors infinitely harsher than for rape. It's not about babies. It's about power.
We do ourselves a disservice by engaging the same facile, dishonest arguments made over and over again by people who know they're bullshit, especially the religious ones. You either believe in equality, bodily autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness or you don't.
