Hi, I'm not quite as much of a noob as my reply might have suggested. I'm not new to trans or feminist discourse, I just hadn't heard gender framed quite that way before.
As for your question, while I can't speak for cis people in general, the issue seems to be that gender and sex are not the same thing. And the conflation of the two makes it diffuclt to provide sex-based protections for women.
As you say, in many cases, society segregates by gender (or maybe it's clearer if I say femininity/masculinity) not sex. As a trans woman who "passes", I'm sure you have no issue using the female bathroom, and I see that society hasn't collapsed. Funnily enough, just a few hours ago, I read a tweet by a butch lesbian about being challenged in a female bathroom because she was mistaken for a man.
But if we treat the concept of gender identity as if it's identical to sex, there's no way to stop me, for example, from accessing a female space.
An important point that I think gets missed in this debate, is that while trans women feel like they're being demonised (and don't get me wrong, there are clearly cases where they are being), the fundamental distrust is of cis men.
Female only spaces exist to keep people like me out of them. And while I pose no threat to women, I fully understand why many women want and need this. Any law that allows me to access those spaces, simply by saying I'm a woman, is a problem. And the increasing push towards self ID as the only standard that defines whether you're a man or a woman allows this. This is where I think the conflict lies.
Ultimately, trans women are caught in the middle of the debate about how best to protect cis women from cis men. I don't have a genius solution that satisfies everybody unfortunately. But redefining the category of woman so loosely that I can become one simply by saying so, doesn't seem to be it.
I kind of understand why you wouldn't want to take conflicting positions seriously. But I think it's a mistake to treat this as a zero sum game. I think it's a tiny minority that are aiming for your profound social exclusion or a world where you can't survive. Most people, myself included, absolutely do not want that for anybody.
But to pretend that there is no discussion to be had about how to completely redefine notions of sex and gender that have existed for millenia, and the protections built upon those notions, inevitably makes some women feel like you're indifferent to a world where they can't survive. And as I don't think this is true either, it seems like at some point, there's going to have to be an honest discussion.
