> They literally are cross-dressing, not that there is anything wrong with that by default of course.

No they are not, not unless you start from a conclusion that trans women are not women. A woman wearing a dress is not cross dressing.

Of course, you are starting from that conclusion, which.. fine, whatever. Unlike in Tanzania HN will not threaten to imprison you over your beliefs about gender. But the rest of us are not obligated to participate in your rejection of gender identity or to pretend that it is correct for the purposes of our own discussions.

> My point was that for a considerable number of trans-identifying males, the primary motivation for their claims of being women begins in sexual arousal from cross-dressing.

This is a well discussed topic for people who have the curiosity to look more into it, and it's probably not worth debating too deeply given the context of the rest of your comment. But the short version is that gender dysphoria is real and is not a fetish and is well-documented outside of sexual environments. To reduce gender dysphoria to a fetish is medical ignorance.

And of course not every single transgender person experiences gender dysphoria; but regardless of whether or not a particular trans man/woman experiences gender dysphoria, it is still not accurate to reduce their entire gender identity and expression to autogynophilia -- if that instinct is even present to for that non-dysphoric individual to begin with. The fiction you propose assumes that no transgender people exist who are attracted exclusively to the opposite sex or who are asexual, an assumption that is trivially false.

And even in the case of transgender people who are attracted to their own bodies or for whom gender is closely tied to their sexuality or for transgender people who openly identify as autogynophiles, this reduction of their entire gender experience and of the experiences of every other trans person is an inaccurate oversimplification of how gender is processed and expressed. Autogynophila does not mean that every gender expression is sexual or that every other person shares the same experiences. Remember, autogynophila exists in cisgender spaces too, but you don't consider every cisgender woman wearing a dress to be inherently engaging in sexual conduct just because a cisgender lesbian might get aroused at seeing themselves in one.

Sexuality is often used as a cudgel against transgender women in ways that would be considered wildly sexist and inappropriate in any other context. "Critics" demand extreme intimate access to a confusing and sometimes terrifying process of self-discovery, and then they abuse that access and vulnerability to form broad conclusions that they would never dare to suggest about cisgender women, even though the experiences of transgender women are neither unique nor monolithic.

> the polite fiction of 'trans women are women'

Like I said above, these kinds of comments really do distract from more productive conversations on HN; ideally we would be able to discuss topics around conference organizing, pluralism, safety, etc... without constantly being pulled down into low-effort dismissals of transgender identity. The need to debate whether or not a trans woman is a woman doesn't add much to conversations about trans rights and doesn't add much to conversations about the PSF's funding choices, since no one involved in the actual conference planning or funding process has claimed that a debate about the validity of transgender identity was ever a contributing factor in any of the decisions that were made.

Meanwhile, we on HN demand that transgender people speak for themselves or lodge their own complaints while surrounding them in an environment that is often hostile to their participation and input.

> especially when it comes to the rights of women to enjoy single-sex spaces.

Within this world you're imagining, presumably cisgender lesbians don't exist and feminine identity is completely divorced from sexuality. Presumably outside of the presence of men women revert to being completely asexual or something. It's a little silly.

A trans woman wearing a dress is not automatically aroused, and it's both disrespectful and (more importantly) just straight-up inaccurate to automatically jump to that conclusion.