Passing privilege

Scott Why do you think the best places for transwomen is female spaces?
What biological needs do they have to use those female spaces?

Why don’t you “really” regard transwomen as men? What is your standard meaning of the word “men”?
Do you consider a trans woman to be “really” a woman in your standard meaning of the word “woman”? In all ways, including as a sexual partner of a straight male friend of yours?

”Let other races intoourspaces”
Just have a think about what you’ve just written.

I'm talking about it in relation to apartheid when we did have 'our spaces' and 'their spaces'.

Sorry, I am rather drunk! Maybe not explaining myself as well as I might...

Men being excluded from women's spaces is different, it's a proportionate response to a risk, it's fair because men have their own spaces and their own privacy concerns too. Most importantly men recognise the need for women to have safety and privacy - let's face it, if men everywhere suddenly decided sex segregation was unfair we'd end up with no women's facilities at all. Men know what other men are capable of.

I think this Is perhaps also the root of the difference of opinion we often see.

I don't really regard transwoman as 'men' in the standard meaning of the word, even if I'd ultimately say it's their gender. I think that the best place for transwoman would be female spaces (in an ideal world) but it's obviously not the best outcome for women who have nothing to gain (and potentially their safety to lose) from the situation.

Therein lies the contradiction. It's like there being only one spare kidney and the best outcome for each person who needs it is getting it, with that same situation being the worst outcome for the other.

”Let other races into our spaces”
Just have a think about what you’ve just written.

I suppose I could ask it differently...

Why do we feel it's right to welcome other races into our spaces, even if they commit crime at greater levels? Why are we happy to allow safe passage for refugees for example, despite many coming from misogynistic cultures and evidencing an increase in sex crimes like we've seen in Europe.

I believe it's because we generally like to give the benefit of the doubt when we feel that helping a minority would be our chosen action in an ideal world. Why don't we want to extend that sentiment to transpeople, knowing that the majority are non-violent.

Is the average British transwoman a greater threat to women than the Syrian refugee from a misogynistic culture who we happily let into our spaces?

“gender apartheid” ???

Women want sex segregation where appropriate because of biological sex differences. Gender is not the same as sex.

But then when I get the night bus and feel vulnerable I wonder why it's taboo
If you feel vulnerable then you feel vulnerable. (I'd never advise someone to talk themselves out of recognising that vulnerability because being aware of danger is so important.) The question is would you extrapolate that to mean anyone of the same demographic as the people on the night bus who made you feel vulnerable would be a threat to you. That would form a prejudice. What would you do with that "information"? You might avoid night buses. You might avoid groups of young women from Finland on night buses. You might avoid Finnish women altogether. Is that discriminatory? Or is that free choice? It doesn't affect them.
To me, being discriminatory would be to refuse to hire a Finnish woman because a group of Finnish women made you feel intimidated on the night bus, and you have assumed certain characteristics are shared by the whole group. That affects them.
We have the free will to either accept and challenge our prejudices or to use them against people by being discriminatory. Everyone has prejudices!
Men being excluded from women's spaces is different, it's a proportionate response to a risk, it's fair because men have their own spaces and their own privacy concerns too. Most importantly men recognise the need for women to have safety and privacy - let's face it, if men everywhere suddenly decided sex segregation was unfair we'd end up with no women's facilities at all. Men know what other men are capable of.
Likewise most adults aren't child abusers but we all recognise the importance of safe children's spaces and appreciate why nurseries have security features that prevent adults accessing children. That's age segregation. Like sex segregation, it's there for safeguarding. Take it to the libertarian extreme and you could argue it was discriminatory, but in effect it doesn't remove rights from adults.
Disabled parking spaces. Discriminatory? No. Provision is made for a group, there's an argument (fairly spurious) that this removes provision for other people (we have to walk a bit further to the supermarket front door) but adequate provision still exists for those who aren't disabled.
I can recognise that I am different to an elderly person, and that they have different needs to me, without being ageist. You've conflated discriminatory segregation with non-discriminatory segregation. It's the discrimination that is missing and that's why it isn't like segregating by race.
TRAs might argue that not being allowed to go where they like is discriminatory, and that argument has to be played out fairly, logically and publicly. My personal opinions as to why it isn't discriminatory are: existing provision, risk of male violence is not women's responsibility, risk of male violence is not avoided by self-id, single sex facilities are reasonable requirements and achieve what they intend to, more people would be adversely affected than would benefit and this adverse effect is measurable and tangible, whereas the benefit is subjective, and that it creates legal precedent.
That's just concerning TRAs being able to go where they please, not the cluster fuck that is changing what the word "woman" means.
Using emotive language to co-opt the racial equality struggle is manipulative. TRAs need to make their own arguments, not piggyback on others' hard work. Their arguments don't hold water which is why they use this tactic.

But one could argue that there is a power structure in place where women vastly outnumber trans people and already have the gender apartheid in place that some trans people want to abolish.

Trans people cannot be compared to victims of racism though. There is an inherent power structure in racism. Victims of racism are oppressed.

I do understand why my questioning this makes people angry as it's not something which really affects me as a man and I'm sat here pondering it like a crossword clue whilst others are genuinely concerned about their safety in the near future. However, it's something which I've seen a few people raise before, so there are obviously a fair few others pondering the same questions as me.

Gulags, that was a horrible thing to happen. I was walking down a street one night, with a group of friends, and a man punched me in the head and kept walking. I hadn’t even noticed him until then.

Women never know which unknown man is a threat to them, and that includes unknown men dressed like women.

Thanks for answering sincerely.

I'm really not trying to lead people to make a racist argument. In fact, I believe it's so obvious that racial segregation is wrong that I'm trying to understand why I (and likely most people) feel this way about it but not about other types of segregation - is it just social conditioning and being accustomed to 'the norm'.

My gut feeling is that women should have their own spaces for safety and that this is because us men are as a group more violent. But then when I get the night bus and feel vulnerable I wonder why it's taboo to have the same feelings towards certain ethnic groups who tend to congregate in gangs and have a higher rate of violent offending.

Both race and gender reassignment are protected characteristics.
And to answer this more specifically, there will always be conflict of interest between protected demographics. These specific conflicts may be dealt with through a legal framework. What we're dealing with here is the interaction of the protected characteristic groups of the Equality Act (where "gender reassignment" has been expanded past the original definition) with the legal fiction of the GRA, where GRA protections have been afforded to those both with and without a GRC. Organisations have overreached, and in doing so break the law according to the Equality Act. Gender reassignment as a protected characteristic does not specify that a male who identifies as a woman is protected as a woman and has the entitlements of a woman, but interpretation of the existing law has allowed people to believe that is already the case.
Race is irrelevant in this case and although I'm happy to interpret your questions charitably, it does look like you're trying to lead posters to a position whereby they are making a racist argument.

ScottCheggJnr
Ok, I'll play. Even if I'm more likely to be mugged by a Japanese man than an English man, for example, I can't segregate Japanese men away from me. Apart from it being racist, and racism generally being accepted as not a good thing, it's practically impossible within our current legal structure. It interferes with law - the Japanese men are adversely affected by being restricted from "my" spaces and they are prejudged, which is patronising and doesn't account for the free will of any random Japanese man to choose to not mug me. Young men are more likely to mug me than elderly men, I can't segregate them away from me. Educated men are more likely to defraud me, I can't segregate against them. Women are more likely to poison me, I can't segregate women away from me because I am one. Should I be kept away from men in case I poison them?
You could find any group more likely to do something negative to another group, the practicalities of doing something about this are far from straightforward, and the negatives of prejudging mainly outweigh the positives. And that's accepting your premise that certain demographics are (for example) more violent by virtue of their race and not because of any other contributing factor (which again is not proven to be true).
Men are not discriminated against by not being allowed to be in women's spaces, and the vast majority of men are happy with the current setup as they recognise that there are men who will do women harm. Whilst they know NAMALT, they recognise the need for sex segregation in specific situations. MRAs can argue certain female-only prizes, scholarships and facilities are unfair, those arguments are generally on a case by case basis. Maybe some are unfair, I'm not going to go into that, personally I'm not a fan of positive discrimination and prefer levelling the playing field at the earliest stage possible. But that's just me.
We had the racial argument on here before, the example was a Swedish man versus a Honduran (I think?) woman. The latter demographic commits more murders. Does that disprove the fact women commit fewer murders than men? No. Does it take into consideration the huge difference between Honduras and Sweden? Again no. Does it give Swedish men the right to enter women's spaces? No. Does it mean Honduran women should be banned from women's spaces? No. Does it tell us anything useful about men and women generally? Not really, because the other variables are not considered.
The fact there might be other variables in the Venn diagram doesn't negate the fact there is a risk to making certain areas and activities unisex, the fact that male/female segregation in those areas and activities is beneficial, and the perceived benefit to undoing that segregation is entirely subjective. A transwoman needs to pee safely. A transwoman needs to be safe from violence. Making all areas and activities unisex doesn't even achieve that aim, as unisex means the transwoman may still encounter a violent man in that space.

Here's another reason his comparison doesn't stack up: I am not more likely to be mugged by a black person than a white person. I am much more likely to be raped or sexually asaulted or sexually harassed or threatened or intimidated by a man, than by a woman.

I really feel uncomfortable using the race analogy btw, but I don't feel that should be a reason to ignore important questions.

As I said above, black people are 'over represented at every stage of the criminal justice system' according to UK government figures. In the US, where the analysis has been done, they commit 52% of homicides despite being 13% of the population.

A common argument around trans people is that they pose a threat due to continuing to offend in a male pattern (i.e. more prolifically). So why are black people not a threat for committing more violent crime?

The long answer above about a theoretical alien race doesn't really answer this. Both race and gender reassignment are protected characteristics.

Jules

I've had two kind of scary experiences, both times they happened when I wasn't expecting it. Walking through a busy underpass in London, not looking around, a man coming in the other direction punched me as hard as he could in the stomach and just kept on walking. Nobody even looked! I've thought since then that he could just as easily have had a knife in his hand. The other situation is something I'd know to expect now but at the time I had no idea that it was a 'thing' in Egyptian and North African cultures - in the main train station in Paris I left my then BF to mind our luggage and walked across to the toilets, but was surrounded half-way there by about a dozen cheerful friendly-looking men who all pawed and groped and pulled at me. I may have punched a few, hard to remember, but I had to scuttle back to my BF and we had to drag all the baggage across with us so I didn't have to brave that public space on my own.

Women have plenty of reason to fear strange men, no matter how they're dressed or how friendly they appear.

Thanks for the support everyone , It was actually quite a few years ago, sorry I didn't make that clear! I think my posting is a bit confusing sometimes, sorry.

But I have never challenged a man since when I've had street harrassment. So many women have experienced stuff like this and the women who witnessed it on the street will have been affected too. I didn't engage, then I didn't submit. I was punished.

Men control the space.

gulag What an absolutely terrible situation to be in. I hope you’re recovering from it as best you can.

What (many) men fail to realise is that women having had threatening experiences with men is the norm, not the exception, and violence does not even have to be involved.
I still remember when I was a teenager, 16 or 17, and walking home at night after work. There was a group of men coming towards me, and I automatically moved out of the way to let them pass. The stepped in my way and surrounded me, laughing and jeering as I visibly flinched and tried to pass them.
I was absolutely terrified like I’d never been in my life, and they never even laid a single finger on me. But that feeling of being completely helpless prey at the mercy of a group of individuals older, bigger and stronger than me was enough to make me fear for my life, and they knew it and thought it was funny. They enjoyed scaring the ever loving shit out of a young girl for kicks.
Most women will have been in a situation like this or much, much worse, and we shouldn’t need to give detailed accounts of trauma in order to qualify for not sharing our women-only spaces.

That is why so many male transpeople kid themselves that they pass and the "other" women in the loo/ changing room etc., haven't noticed them. Because we don't challenge them. We make them welcome and because they have no idea of how women really behave, they misinterpret it as passing.

This is so true, in general they really just don't understand things from a woman's perspective at all (I think Miranda Yardley might be the exception). And, in addition to the physical factors, it's one of the reasons why they don't pass,

You know what, I don't believe for a moment that even non passing male transpeople have a huge problem with being challenged.

I would never challenge a man in a woman's changing room if I were the only other person there. I don't know may women who would. Most women wouldn't challenge a man even if there were other people present. Because we all know what the potential consequences are, of annoying a man. They can suddenly turn violent and we don't know which ones will be violent and which ones won't, before we challenge them and so the safest thing to do, is not to challenge them; even if they're wearing a dress. I'd concentrate on getting out of there as quickly as possible or finding a cubicle to hide in until they're gone.

And tbh up until the current furore over trans encroachment of women's spaces, it wouldn't have even occurred to me to challenge someone trans. If I saw that they were making a genuine effort at passing, I'd be sympathetic and smile at them to reassure them that they're welcome.

That is why so many male transpeople kid themselves that they pass and the "other" women in the loo/ changing room etc., haven't noticed them. Because we don't challenge them. We make them welcome and because they have no idea of how women really behave, they misinterpret it as passing.

I got punched in the face for not responding to a man sexually harassing me on the street in broad daylight. I put my head down didn't look and walked on, he stared screaming at me. I shouted back to leave me alone. bam. punched in the face, went straight down on the pavement, no one came to help me. Police never got him. My face was a huge swollen mess on one side. I thought I was going to die.
This is pretty common. Bear in mind, on another day this man will be somewhere with his partner and children and seem unthreatening. Sorry it happened to you though.

Jesus Christ Gulag

Thank you TallulahWaitingInTheRain!

Gulag that is terrifying! So sorry that happened to you! Not sure how you're coping? I would have a difficult time ever leaving my house again if that happened to me.