"it is silly to act like somehow we are partially responsible for people's prejudice that was here before we arrived and will be here when we leave"

A number of years ago, someone with perspective on the issue told me that relations between Blacks and Whites were generally good and improving before race became the dog whistle of the American Left. It's easy to understand this. If you want to minimize an element of decision-making, the worst possible thing you can do is accentuate it. The point is to let people forget that race is a real issue, to give people time to learn on their own that race is irrelevant; and they can't do that if you're always hyping race and seeing racial issues around every corner.

We did not create the prejudice against us, but we have had a hand in making it worse. The real offender has been the political Left, which has co-opted our community in the same way it co-opted the Black community, and which will throw us under the bus the same way it is now throwing the Black community under the bus, since it can no longer control it.

"I would say I generally agree with the rest of your response, though it does seem to conflate sex and gender."

This would be ironic, since I have known for some time that this is the principal error committed by both sides of this issue. I have written about this in one of my own essays. The trans activists, followed by the trans community generally, did it first; and this was picked up by the political Right and now forms the philosophical basis of their response.

Trans activism has contributed to the escalation of prejudice against us by conflating what can be proven objectively with what cannot. Sex is objectively demonstrable; gender is not. Gender is a belief we hold because it provides meaning to our suffering. That doesn't mean it's untrue; it simply means we can't prove it. And because we can't prove it, it cannot be the basis for law, public policy or civil rights in a free society.

I expect immediate outrage in response to the preceding paragraph, because I think you'll react to the statement without understanding how it was derived. All of us have demonstrable and enforceable human rights; that is why we are winning cases against the laws prohibiting medical transitioning in every jurisdiction. But "trans rights" is something else. When you understand the difference, you'll understand how our side went wrong.