| Here's a well-argued critical analysis of this analogy to adoption: https://hollylawford-smith.org/the-adoption-analogy-revisite... In summary: "There are several crucial differences between biological and adoptive parents, on the one hand, and transwomen and women, on the other hand. These include: - that both biological and adoptive parents actually parent, whereas it’s not at all clear what transwomen and women have in common that is supposed to play this same role; - that there is no historical power relationship between biological and adoptive parents, whereas there is between male and female people; - that calling adoptive parents parents doesn’t undermine our understanding of what it is to be a parent because what is core to parenting — raising children — is done by both, whereas what is core to being a woman is being female, and that is not done by both; - there is no established history of adoptive parental violence against biological parents, whereas there is an established history of male violence against women; - that adoptive parents do have ‘similar enough concerns and interests’ to biological parents, but transwomen do not have these to women (especially considering the heterogeneity among transwomen); - that there is no ‘oppressive ideological agenda of parenthood’ but there is of being a woman (namely being feminine); and finally, - that there are many ways to be a bad parent, which we can probably agree on, but there are no ways to be a bad woman." |