This is why we shouldn't have to share our safe spaces !! Terrifying!

In particular black women are being used as some sort of gotcha. “If black women can be women why can’t TW be women? “

Daisies I did not mean to imply that I thought the things I was predicting happening in the future were a great idea or the way forward.

For clarity: if the calls for self id get made into law it will, in my opinion, be awful for women and children and I hope it doesn't happen. If it did happen then I think women and children (and providers of toilet facilities and change rooms) will have to try the best they can to make those places as safe as possible. It was jokingly suggested by a poster that soon the men's loo will seem like a safer bet and that really made me think about what other (more serious) strategies could be employed.

It's not a future that I hope I'll ever have to see.

So I'm probably going to annoy people with this thought experiment, but if you inserted "black" instead of TRA into this debate, you wouldn't view it as a justifiable argument.

This is such a unique insight @Tootletum and one I've never heard before

FYI;
1, TRAs and trans people are not mutually exclusive.
2, Sex and race are two entirely seperate things however it never fails to impress me how sexism and racism fit hand in glove.

My question was not intended as a gotcha at all. I'm just trying to work out what I even think. I'm quite disconcerted by friends who I thought were as centrist as me telling me I'm a terf and a bigot because I followed Transgender trend and LGB alliance. I'm not so narrow minded as to dig my heels in when challenged on my views, so I've been trying to think how my views might be wrong, or how to think about it a bit differently. I'm not trying to exchange one disadvantage for another, I'm just specifically wondering whether it's wise to set the hares running based on this psycho (or any other psycho) . I saw him on twitter too, and I've no idea how to deal with such an individual. I also don't think it should change the rights of the many totally normal teams women whose tweets I really appreciate and who make it very clear that the TRA stuff is not their bag. Have a look at Laura Riccio. She gave me a lot of perspective about the fact that most of these twitter TRA warriors don't have trans people's best interests at heart. I'm optimistic that will start to get some recognition. Even the Independent ran a piece the other day suggesting that maybe one can simultaneously disagree with JKR (which I definitely don't) and quite enjoy reading her books. They've also, along with many other outlets, moved from labelling her views as transphobic to "controversial", which seems like a start.

Datun I'm suggesting the people who decide whether a male with medically diagnosed bodily dysmorphia can have a GRC absolutely must be people who recognise that precise point.

Both the current and the previous system failed women because they were designed and overseen by men who haven't the slightest clue that what to them is entirely nonthreatening and normal behaviour by males can be highly threatening to women.

If we have to have GRCs - and I'd far rather we didn't but we've a long way to go on that one - then women with your level of understanding of the issues need to have the power of veto over who gets one.

Which would make a GRC, in practice, impossible to obtain for at least as long as patriarchy endures.

Failing that, they could at least make the bloody things revokable.

I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to use the kind of toilets that had a full time paid attendant, I expect provision would be drastically reduced. Public conveniences would be a whole lot less convenient if they were few and far between and there was a charge to use them.

Would male attendants be allowed in women’s toilets? Would they be DBS checked? How safe would a woman attendant feel in some of the less frequented toilets? Although I suppose the less frequented toilets would be closed permanently.

I am not convinced that this is the way forward for the UK

Also, there are already women and children that don't like going into public toilets alone for very good reasons, sadly. If things go badly wrong (with this nonsense) there'll be a lot more of that.

In the future I imagine there will be more toilets with a full time attendant/cleaner like they still have in some countries I've visited. You'd feel and probably be safer with such a set up.

The type of male who would purposefully over-ride women's consent and breach their boundaries in the knowledge that doing so would make them uncomfortable is precisely the sort of male who should be kept out of women's toilets.

All the decent men will be using the men's toilets.

Awful. Sometimes I have this horrible thought that I wish my daughters were sons. Not for me but I don’t want them to be vulnerable in the way women are at the moment.

After reading the OP I am beginning to wonder if a time will when I will feel safer in men’s toilets and changing rooms than in women’s.

@quixote9 "So openminded their brains fell out" totally agree. Feels like the world has gone mad.

Great post Cara.

Those people who bring this up are a bit silly I think.

Please never forget that there are newbies to the discussion visiting this board every day. Replies which show exasperation to the same old questions being asked are it a good way to welcome people into the fold. The vast majority of people who've been through discussions online have already made up their mind, mostly for the FWR side I hope.

That is very true and I am a firm believer in speaking to the lurkers and the newbies, because I was a lurker (and actually, am still a newbie!)

It's just that sometimes people bring up certain arguments as a sort of 'gotcha' - although I appreciate this was not the case here. Unfortunately, there is a concerted effort by some TRAs to paint GC feminists as racist, which is quite tiresome. I hope that provides some context for the exasperation expressed in the replies given.

Whenever the spurious "racially segregated toilets" analogy comes up, I find it useful to compare and contrast the reasons given for the segregation in both cases.

Racial segregation of toilets in the American South prior to the Civil Rights Movement - the reason came down to this: whites thought blacks were lesser, and whites held the power.

Sex segregation of toilets in pretty much every country in the world (barring a few western nations which are now trying to make a gender neutral point) - borne out of the fact that men commit 99% of sexual offences, their victims are predominantly women, and that without single sex toilets women are unsafe (see, for instance massive prevalence of rape in rural India in areas without indoor toilets where women have to go into nearby fields to relieve themselves).

So in one instance, the imposition of segregation is driven by arbitrary prejudice on the part of the dominant power grouping in a society, in the other it's driven by a desire to protect the less powerful group from a real, and well-documented danger from the more powerful group (NAMALT etc. but enough of them and not conveniently marked with the mark of Cain upon their foreheads).

So sex segregation is completely different to the Deep south "color bar."

The question then becomes whether TWAW and should be included in the social category of "people allowed to use the women's toilets" (i.e. that category should be determined by something other than sex). The existence of individuals as clearly dangerous as the person in the OP makes me think the answer is a clear no.

You nothing but it’s rules this rules that females will have no space left soon.

As someone more new to the issues being uncovered here I find it very useful to read the example of inserting black in place of transwoman, I was semi nodding along thinking 'yep, good point'.

The answers provided had me nodding along thinking 'yep, good rebuttal, that clearly explains the issue' much more wholeheartedly.

Please never forget that there are newbies to the discussion visiting this board every day. Replies which show exasperation to the same old questions being asked are it a good way to welcome people into the fold. The vast majority of people who've been through discussions online have already made up their mind, mostly for the FWR side I hope.

My views on this aren't at all fixed, so thank you for your views. I am just not really sure how to resolve it all. I had understood that the GRC process was going to remain the same. So if that's the case, what does it all mean for those who have a GRC? I started out in this debate convinced that the very existence of Karen White made any presence of any male bodied person in a female space unacceptable, but I increasingly feel sorry for those I consider hugely vulnerable trans people who just want to live their lives and who would also struggle to go into a male changing room.

.. So I'm probably going to annoy people with this thought experiment..

Not annoyed - amused would be a better word.

I think it's the concept of discrimination that gets people inserting other groups.

You are allowed to lawfully discriminate. It just means recognising and understanding a difference.

For instance the equality act protects sexual orientation, where, say, a lesbian can legitimately discriminate against all men.

I don't understand the concept of inserting another protected characteristic into the argument.

You might as well insert disabled people. 'You wouldn't exclude disabled people from women's spaces, would you?'

It's segregation by sex. Not colour, disability, sexual orientation. Because those protected characteristics are not responsible for almost all sex crimes

Sex. Because of the way sex crimes are committed and by whom.

I'm probably going to annoy people with this thought experiment, but if you inserted "black" instead of TRA into this debate, you wouldn't view it as a justifiable argument. "Because some black people are criminals, black people you meet are more likely to be criminals?"

It's a 'thought experiment' that has been discussed many, many times on here before.

Men pose a far greater safety risk to women than other women do. There is no evidence to suggest that males who identify as women pose any less of a threat to women than males who identify as men.

If you believe that segregation is wrong, the logical argument to make is that all spaces should become mixed-sex. In the deep South, desegregation happened for all people, not just a cohort who 'identified' as a different race.

The reasons for keeping males and females separate are very different from the reasons for racial segregation. Your thought experiment rests on a false equivalence.