Mace’s question seems like a non sequitur, since the topic was immigration. It’s actually part of a unified supremacist frame of domination.

The question invites us into a frame where a woman can and must be defined. It's very important to refuse the invitation by rejecting the frame.

In this frame, a woman is a thing that must have a definition. Once you accept that premise, all that's left to determine are where the boundaries are and who gets to establish and enforce those boundaries..

So, from the fascist frame, it is a border security question of sorts.

Fascists like Mace know we are wired to accept premises, and so they construct questions in such a way as to win the venue. This is true even if we disagree with the person who is offering the proposition. We accept the frame, then we argue the contrary position.

But first we accept the frame.

Even if you start to define a woman in a way that includes trans people, you’re accepting that establishing definitions of who is and who is not a woman is the correct frame of debate.

As soon as you start to answer it on its own terms, you've lost the venue.

Once we’ve accepted the fascist venue, we’re going to spend all our time in their frame, defending our more expansive definitions of women against the more constrained definition, but it is now a given that a woman can and should be defined. We’ve already lost.

What we need to do is get very good at spotting this & rejecting the premise from the outset, and then choosing a better frame.

What is a woman?

False premise. A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.

Fascists do not want to see people as "whos." That isn't their venue.

This may seem like sophistry, but it isn’t. Look at what this does.

First, it names what the supremacist is doing—trying to make a person into a thing, in order to control their definition, in order to enforce those boundaries, in order to exclude people, in order to abuse them—and rejects it.