It is January 2026, and my TikTok FYP and Facebook feed feel unsettlingly familiar. I scroll, and there it is again, the same debate that flooded my timeline last March during Women’s Month. The same viral posts. The same comment threads. The same arguments that spiral, almost on cue, into one question: Are trans women women?
Months have passed. Platforms have changed. Algorithms have been “improved.” But the conversation is stuck. Revisited. Reheated. Rarely resolved.
What interests me is not disagreement. Disagreement is normal. Even necessary. What troubles me is why this question keeps coming back, as if it hasn’t already been discussed, studied, and most importantly, lived by people whose lives are shaped by it every single day.
Scroll long enough and you’ll notice a pattern. Some people insist that womanhood begins and ends with biology. Others respond by talking about identity, lived experience, and social reality. The argument loops because, in the end, the two sides are talking past each other.
What many refuse to admit is that this debate collapses two different ideas into one. Sex refers to the body you are born with. Womanhood is about how you move through the world, and how the world responds to you. Trans women are not claiming a biological history they do not have. They are claiming a gendered reality they live every day. When these ideas are treated as identical, the discussion goes nowhere. Maybe that’s exactly why it keeps resurfacing: it’s constantly misunderstood.
That misunderstanding breeds fear. The fear that recognition is a zero-sum game. That dignity must be rationed. That acknowledging one group somehow diminishes another. Respect becomes something scarce, something to guard.
But if equality is a feast meant for all, why do some insist that adding a seat for trans women steals a chair from cisgender women? Women’s rights were never meant to be a cramped table. They were built on the belief that women’s voices – all women’s voices – deserve safety, dignity, and space. Inclusion isn’t an addition. It’s a return to that original promise.
When we widen the table, we don’t shrink it. We expand it.
Some say this debate is about “acknowledging reality.” But reality is messier than slogans allow. Reality includes cis women whose bodies don’t fit narrow biological expectations, women who cannot menstruate, who cannot conceive, or who choose not to bear children at all. Reality includes cultures that have long recognized gender beyond rigid binaries. And reality includes trans women who live openly as women and face harassment, violence, and exclusion simply for existing.
When womanhood is reduced to reproductive ability, women lose their complexity. Identity becomes function. Humanity becomes utility. And that framework doesn’t protect women, it confines them.
Recognizing trans women as women is not a rejection of science. It is an acknowledgment that science has never been the sole authority on human identity. Language shapes reality. It determines who is respected, who is protected, and who is quietly pushed to the margins.
Calling a trans woman a woman costs nothing. Denial, on the other hand, costs belonging. It costs mental health. It costs safety. This debate will likely resurface again, maybe on another platform, in another comment section, with the same arguments wearing slightly different disguises. But maybe it no longer has to.
Because the real question is no longer, “Are trans women women?” The real question is why we are still so afraid of letting empathy and understanding lead the conversation.
Article by Alrey Lacaba