'To say that some men rape and sexually assault women and girls is an uncontroversial fact'

" Clymene that's the exact point I made, reading them as male is a typical, normal female response and nobody can deny a woman's feeling or experience. Suggesting trans women are dangerous on the basis of being born male is easily disproven by stats and isn't a powerful persuasion tactic to anyone not already GC."

What stats? There are no stats that prove transwomen are less dangerous than other males!

IAmNotAGirl even the conviction rate x 100 is still only 0.3% of all assaults on women, as per my post.

Clymene that's the exact point I made, reading them as male is a typical, normal female response and nobody can deny a woman's feeling or experience. Suggesting trans women are dangerous on the basis of being born male is easily disproven by stats and isn't a powerful persuasion tactic to anyone not already GC.

Nobody should have to " read" them as male , they are male and that should be enough to exclude them from female safe places.

I don't want to share my spaces or discuss my assault with a transwoman because I read them as male. Is that acceptable to you @SapphosRock or am I only allowed to read them as male when they couldn't physically assault me?

The stats for trans sexual assaults on women need to be looked at in the light of stats for the percentage of trans in the male population, don't they? Even if there are 200,000 trans people (about which statistic I have to say I have my doubts, given its source), out of a population of 34,000,000, that's not a high proportion of that population.

SapphosRock your calculations start off with such a basic error its no wonder your made up statistics are absurd.

You have assumed that 510,000 women experiencing sexual assault equates to number of convictions to get your 0.003%.

Out of that 500,000 approximately only 10% approx will report to the police. Out of the numbers reported to the police in 2019 only 1.7% resulted in a summons (note were still not talking conviction) source www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rape-prosecution-england-wales-victims-court-cps-police-a8885961.html article based on CPS data.

I’m not going to look up the % court cases that result in a conviction because that is depressingly low but it will be in the CPS data www.cps.gov.uk/publications

Your ‘calculations’ are as bogus as your made up ‘statistics’.

So the fact that some transwomen may only assault women in non female spaces means they are safe to include in female only spaces? The fact is that there are no stats which prove transwomen are less of a risk to women than other males . If males are excluded because they are sometimes dangerous to women that includes all transwomen because they too are all male.

HecatesCats I don't get me wrong, I don't think males should be able to identify into female spaces. I just don't agree with the trans women may be sexual predators angle as it does nothing to persuade people who genuinely believe TWAW. Also stats show how incredibly rare TW assaults on women in female spaces are.

I think a more compelling argument is that many women read trans women as male, particularly in female spaces. This can trigger a trauma response (20% of women have been victim to male sexual assault) and women need and deserve single sex spaces to avoid this.

You might think it is the same argument but it's not.

'I don't want to use the same toilet as a trans woman as I'm afraid I'll be assaulted' seems quite far fetched and could come across as transphobic.

'I don't want to discuss my sexual assault with a trans woman as I read them as male' is entirely reasonable. Nobody would want their mum, sister or daughter to face that situation.

This blog by Karen Ingala Smith comes from a different angle and I believe will resonate with people who are not already GC.

kareningalasmith.com/2020/07/08/trauma-informed-services-for-women-subjected-to-mens-violence-must-be-single-sex-services/

the continual suggestion that trans women are sexual predators does come across as scaremongering to me when it is men that are the problem.

How does one tell the difference?

@IAmNotAGirl let's use 2019 as an example.

According to Rape Crisis 510,000 women experienced sexual assault. See screen shot.

According to trans crime UK 15 trans women were convicted and an additional 2 charged with sexual offenses.

http://transcrimeuk.com/2019-convictions/

So 0.003% of convicted sexual offenders were trans.

Of course not all sexual crimes are reported and not all those reported lead to a conviction so let's imagine a worst possible case scenario and times those 17 convicted trans perpetrators by 100 to make 1,700.

That still only makes 0.3% of sexual offenders transgender.

As I said, I do like and admire Kathleen Stock but the continual suggestion that trans women are sexual predators does come across as scaremongering to me when it is men that are the problem.

[quote HecatesCats]'Study suggests that transwomen exhibit a male pattern of criminality'

This Swedish study found:

Transwomen are 6 times more likely to commit a crime and 18 times more likely to commit a violent crime compared to female controls. But transwomen commit crime, including violent crime, at a similar rate as any other males in the general population.

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

Ultimately the point isn't are Transwomen committing high rates of sexual assault? The point is if we undertake a huge societal shift that allows male born people to access previously female only spaces, will male born people take advantage of this? The prison system offers some answers:

'We submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Ministry of Justice.
It said that 60 of the 125 transgender inmates it counted in England and Wales were serving time for a sexual offence.'

www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629

One in 50 prisoners identifies as transgender amid concerns inmates are attempting to secure prison perks

One in 50 male offenders in prisons are self-identifying as transgenderr^, according to a survey by the official jail watchdog, amid concerns inmates may be attempting to secure extra perks.
The figure, the first by the watchdog, suggests there are up to 1,500 transgender inmates among the 90,000 prisoners in England and Wales, more than ten times previous estimates, and at least four times the number in the general population.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/09/one-50-prisoners-identify-transsexual-first-figures-show-amid/[/quote]
Thanks for collating, Hecate.

Transition doesn't alter sex, and it doesn't alter offending pattern behaviour, either. And between 80-90% of trans people have no hormone or surgical treatment at all (as is entirely their right, and given the health risks, very sensible) so why and how are we arguing that male bodies belong in female spaces? The stats are so clear.

The stats about TW in UK prisons indicate that they are more likely to be sex offenders than other males. This ties in with the FBI, who say fetishistic cross dressing is the paraphilia most often found in sex offenders.

As it happens I have a morbid fascination with serial killers and I can think of a high number who cross dressed. The most bizarre was Ed Gein, a profoundly psychotic man who inspired a number of films, including Psycho. He did a lot of incredibly disturbing things.

Cara thanks for that detail about military training, I didn't know that. Interesting especially my dear old dad in ex forces and whilst with the exception of a tour of NI he was lucky to never have seen combat. To this day (and he's been retired years) I've never seen and cannot imagine him raising his hand to another human being. Humans are amazingly complex.

I dunno, I think the mere existence of a confident woman is exactly what makes some perps interested in taking that confidence away.

“Talker” I think falls under fawn. It’s the one that isn’t mentioned enough and the one that can end up with a criminal case going wrong due to a lack of understanding. It’s about placating and trying to get out of it in a non-confrontational way. Women are conditioned into a fawn response from birth, understandably so, we are smaller and weaker than men.

Random Google turns this up
www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/the-fight-flight-freeze-fawn-trauma-responses

You can see fawning in women’s responses to pretty much anything. Always considering everyone’s perspectives, looking for reasons which would excuse someone being a total prick. Relationships and AIBU is full of it.

I suspect that simply knowing you could possibly makes a bit of a difference. It lends you an aura of confidence, or something, even if inside you are quailing: bullies on the whole tend not to choose to bully someone who will be just as nasty back, so if they see someone walking down the road in a way which says to them "lay a finger on me and I'll take it off at the elbow" they might be likely to move along and look for a different victim. Whether the confidence is a lie or not, if it looks convincing it might work.

This is of course no help in actually getting rid of male bullies, but it may be a help to an individual woman.

Totally agree with Cara about the military and training and the psychological outcomes.

Someone mentioned self-defence above. I am pretty sure I've read that knowing self-defence isn't really that helpful in most cases in terms of staving off a future attack. If you're a black (or other top level) belt in certain marshal arts and in regular training still it can be an advantage..but again, not always either (think of women in the military - maybe they'd have more chance against an unfit guy roughly their size, but against their male physical equivalents, they're not at any advantage).

Self-defence classes though can have a benefit for women who've been previously attacked, especially if they're set up as that. Basically it can be a physical way of moving through the trauma in the body, especially for someone who freezes/froze. I'm one of those people and I'd love to be able to do a self-defence class but the very idea of being "attacked" is triggering and I'd feel incredibly vulnerable..and feel that I'd freeze again. With a sensitive group and trainer, you can apparently work through that and get that feeling out of your body. The result is that you feel more confident in your own abilities and body, even though statistically you may not be at any increased advantage.

Re. training to fight - very difficult to do, I would think.

This is a bit off-topic because we're talking about women (who just are less violent than men - largely socialisation, but possibly innately so), but it's interesting to consider the fact that it's actually quite difficult to get ordinary men to be violent, as can be seen by looking at what goes on within the military. A lot of military training is down to not just teaching people (predominantly men) the techniques of fighting, but breaking down their reluctance to do so - this is actually what a lot of the brutal "hazing" in basic training, tacitly tolerated by officers and NCOs, is about.

I remember listening to a fascinating radio documentary a few years ago. Most soldiers are extremely reluctant to cause injury to another human being. Typically they'll do things like "provide covering fire" (aka deliberately fire over the heads of oncoming soldiers) or pass the amunition to the one guy in the unit they know will actually shoot people. That way they can feel useful without actually having to be violent themselves. The programme had a number of interviews with ex soldiers, trainers, military historians - and the take home seemed to be that yes, you could train people (men mainly) to suppress their natural instinct not to hurt others, but only at huge cost in terms of (a) PTSD when they left the military and (b) the risk that you'd created a highly dangerous, undirected weapon who was as likely to go on an unpredictable violent spree against his comrades/family while home on leave/random member of the public who looked at him the wrong way in the pub closest to the bases as he was to kill the people you actually wanted killing.

My own personal experience is I tend to be a talker - defuse the situation verbally, talk him down, distract him, make him mentally shift you from "potential victim" category to "my mate's sister" category. I have on occasion flipped into fight mode - as others have said upthread, it's not a choice, it's pure instinctive reaction in that situation at that moment. And I think (Gavin de Becker style) that subconsiously what we think of as instinctive reaction is actually a fairly accurate self-preservation mechanism, and our instincts read quite accurately what is likeliest to work in this situation, faster than our conscious brain could. I'm sure the freeze response is an instinctive reading of the situation as "this is one of the really nasty ones who could kill me if I don't go completely unresponsive."

@SapphosRock as you can see a couple of us have asked you the source of your statistic

Sorry I know it's a bit of a tangent but the fight/flight instinct discussion is interesting. Does anyone know if you can 'train' yourself into a fight instinct when you might naturally be a 'freeze'-er?