Reconciling competing rights

Rat

It just comes down to this: why should my 13 year old daughter have to change her tampon in a toilet cubicle while a TIM is stood outside?

He needs to get his dick over to the men's urinal where it belongs!

That's a joke, btw, for anyone hard of thinking.

Let's see your chromosomes then

I haven't seen anyone accuse you of anything.

And yes I have seem TIMs in women only spaces mimicking women so they can pass better - it's like being peeped upon - it is very harmful.

It strikes me as a narcissistic perspective that other people are just props in your life. Their only function is to provide narcissistic supply. No empathy there.

Yep OP is male I intuit - Australian at that. You see I have these powers of knowing lol!

Many many women who have been abused by men don't want men in their recovery groups - they get harmed by that. So why should women trying to heal be harmed?

And yes I have seem TIMs in women only spaces mimicking women so they can pass better - it's like being peeped upon - it is very harmful.

TIMs having their own healing groups is not geographically limited - that's a phurphy - we have the internet these days and plenty of tech savvy TIMS as well as services

And how exactly where are the stats proving this mythical crowd of TIMs needing spaces - we're talking about 0.1% of population at most. Being raised as men mean most will not have been abused. So give me facts and figures for how many need refuges etc before coming up with spurious arguments that they are in any way in comparison with the deluge of women abused as children and adults - 51% of the population. And no one is denying their rights but it needs to be put in perspective.

Can you tell me, at what point did those among you who feel unsafe in toilets and other women-only spaces begin feeling unsafe there?

I don't feel unsafe. I don't see the relevance to the question of competing rights though. I wonder why you asked this. Is this what you think people like me are worried about: trans blokes coming into the ladies loos and assaulting me?

Some men want to have access to female spaces. When I say female spaces I am including the words woman, she, her, the category female in data collection, as well as physical spaces like prisons and refuges.

The men say they have the right to that access because they feel like they are women and they feel distressed when people treat them like men. Therefore it is their human right that they should be treated exactly like women.

No. Just no. There are no competing rights here.

People don't have the right to demand that others play along with a falsehood. The obvious parallel is religion. In this country we stopped telling people what they are allowed to believe hundreds of years ago. A lot of people were burned at the stake before we decided that religion is for a person's own heart only and nobody can force their beliefs on other people. This was a good decision. We should stick to it.

One one level the answer might be to have abuse survivor groups specifically for trans people, or have mixed and cis-only groups, but the latter is still asking trans women to have a 'second class' identity and I can't see that as fair somehow. Trans-only groups also mean there's no infrastructure to care for trans women outside major cities.

No one is asking them to have a "second class identity". It's just that they are male. You can't actually change sex. You're also ignoring the possibility of abuse. I wish I could find the link, but I once read an account from a woman whose rape support group was attended by a trans identified male who was mimicking the women and using it as a way of building their "story". Yes it's an anecdote, but it was a pretty compelling one. Why should traumatised women have to be made uncomfortable when they want a female only space?

It is very hard. Trans people have my total sympathy, but whereas gay rights, for example, can't be said to have any impact on the rights of heterosexuals, I can see the point that trans rights can have an impact on the rights of cis women in terms of having what they feel are women-only spaces.

Talking to friends who have survived abuse, I can see that they are not transphobes or TERFs but find it violating to expect to share what they have seen as safe spaces with people who have lived as men (whether they wanted to or not). One survivor friend commented on FB that she had spent her life worrying about whether every man she encountered was 'safe' or not, and to be told that, as she sees it, she doesn't get to decide who is a man or not is very frightening.

One one level the answer might be to have abuse survivor groups specifically for trans people, or have mixed and cis-only groups, but the latter is still asking trans women to have a 'second class' identity and I can't see that as fair somehow. Trans-only groups also mean there's no infrastructure to care for trans women outside major cities.

On the internet no one knows if you are a potato.

True! I too 'read' the OP as TIM (and why thebewilderness used the pronoun 'they') - because it would be breaking the rules around here for 'misgendering'. How on earth we are supposed to guess in many cases, is beyond imagination.

Some great comments above from RunRabbit, Barracker, Terf and others. Before the ploppy sound started up.

Also too and besides, there is no such thing as a cis female.
There is no other side to female, and we are not isomers, we are human beings.

On the internet no one knows if you are a potato.

Because it might be a hierarchy now but if it's set to change you might miss it if you were, say, overly concerned with, say,

Doesn't look like it's set to change any time soon.

You'll be calling me a man by morning.
Are you not one?

Why would a man (with no understanding of or interest in the meanings and mechanics of feminism and gender) come on to a feminist board and ask women to share their experiences of feeling unsafe in toilets?

Males defining themselves as women is a violation in itself. By redefining 'woman' they place themselves firmly within a male supremacist worldview that women are whatever men say they are, that our lives and our bodies belong to them to define and control
Absolutely.

In answer to your question, when I went to use the women's shower and changing room at work and found a man using it and it was all fine now he called himself Lucy and wore pink trainers.

Wasting women's time, how brave and clever.

They are just here to pose and posture.

"viewing gender as a hierarchy might only serve to perpetuate it as such."

So if you agree gender is a hierarchy, why did you say this? It is clearly a hierarchy. How are you supposed to view it any other way?

Thanks for clearing that up.