There is a bad faith talking point that I keep seeing in response to tweets about 'trans rights' which is to demand to know what rights, specifically, trans people don't have that everyone else does. Then there's a load of backslapping about how 'they can't ever answer this one!'

In our society, very few rights are afforded only to one type of person and not to others. The fundamental principle is that everyone has the same set of rights. But not everyone has the same needs or desires. So this equality can produce vastly different experiences.

These people who oppose trans rights are making exactly the same observation that some homophobes made when same sex marriage was argued for on the basis of equal rights: 'gay and straight people already have the same rights'. (Yet another example of this ideological overlap).

That homophobis resposne to same sex marriage is actually a helpful comparison because that superficial observation about equality is correct and it demonstrates how facile their implicit conclusions are.

Prohibiting gay marriage meant that:

Gay people were prevented from doing something that they wanted to do

and

Straight people were prevented from doing something that they didn't want to do.

Equal rights produced a manifestly discriminatory situation.

This did not mean that one group of people had a right that another group didn't have. It meant that everyone had the same rights which made one way of living easy and another way very difficult.

To dismissively say that trans people have the same rights as cis people is true, but it is the same as saying that trans people have the right to live according to a normative set of parametres based entirely around cis experience.

When people talk about 'trans rights' they are not demanding new rights that will only be available to trans people; they are saying that the set of rights we all have should be broaded to better accomodate trans life.