Rebecca Kling, who works as the community storytelling advocate for the National Center for Transgender Equality, summed up the feelings of many transgender women who spoke to Bustle. "I don’t know how I feel about the women’s equality movement," she tells Bustle, "because I don’t know how it feels about me."

"If there is one, singular movement for women’s equality — and that’s a big ‘if'," Kling says, "there is no consensus on whether or not trans people should be invited to the party." The sense of being consciously cast out by cisgender women in the fight for gender equality echoed through many transgender women's concerns about Women's Equality Day, and the movement in general. Dr. Erica Anderson, a professor of clinical psychology and chairman of the transgender female housing organization Joan's House, tells Bustle, "Some of the prejudice to which I and other trans women are subjected comes from a segment of women who purport to be liberal and open-minded, but are anything but." Young American trans woman Logan Alcosiba agrees. "I am not seen as a woman," she says. "I am seen as a transgender woman. And, although I hold this trans title with pride, that does not mean it comes without prejudice. The term "real women" is used to discredit the existence of trans women as women, to infer them as less than."

Certain types of women excluding others is, Kling points out, nothing new. "This is not the only time the women’s equality movement has refused to embrace all women," she says to Bustle. "The movement not always seen the necessity of including queer women, or immigrants, or the poor. Women’s Equality Day is observed in late August to commemorate the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women in the United States the right to vote. But suffragettes regularly excluded women of color, particularly black women. Theirs was a fight for women’s equality, but with the unspoken understanding that they were mostly fighting for a certain type of woman." According to these women, transgender women continue to be the wrong "type" of woman to be included in the fight for gender equality.

That exclusion has led to mixed reactions. Some, like Joni Dorian Wright, are hopeful. "While the trans-exclusionary feminists are becoming a minority, albeit a very vocal one, it’s important to remember it’s 'sisterhood not cisterhood,' that we have a common enemy, and we’ll achieve much more if we move together as one," she tells Bustle. Jules Larson says that she felt that "being part of a women's movement means just as much to me as the trans movement." The two, for her, could exist side-by-side, and were equally formative parts of her identity.

Kling herself is more ambivalent. "I like to think that more and more cis women (that is, women who are not trans) are coming around to the idea that women’s equality is trans equality, and vice versa," she says. "But I’m pragmatic enough (or pessimistic enough) to know that there are women out there who believe ejecting people like me from locker rooms is part of the fight for women’s equality, rather than in direct opposition to that fight." In that context, embracing Women's Equality Day as a celebration of both cisgender and transgender women's equality feels, for some transgender women, conflicted at best. "This day recognizes our achievements as well as our obstacles, and transgender women face more than imaginable," Alcosiba tells Bustle.