Have things gone too far?

Oh, and then there were the times during milk explosions trying to dry up clothes due to that, standing in line waiting for toilets to come free while milk patches are quickly growing and then finally get to a cubicle to try to hand relieve the milk and clean up afterwards.

I find it incredible that there are still those who deny there is a difference between how males and females use toilets.

Re your previous statement
Then the need for a trans person to go to a toilet where they feel safe

I have not managed to dig up any actual evidence of tw bring any less safe in the men’s toilets than any other vulnerable male group. This statement seems to be something that many people have accepted as fact without actually seeing any proof.

I have even asked the trans people who post on here for their evidence and haven’t really got anywhere.

As a starting point for numbers, an average of 150 women are murdered every year in the UK. The last trans person to be murdered in the UK was thankfully in 2018.

Newspapers tend to be quite keen to follow the reporting standards set by the activists so they will use female pronouns for any person who wishes to be identified as female at any point in a criminal process and often not mention trans status at all.

It is treated differently when trans people are the victims of crime where the reporting often highlights that the crime was due to their trans status. This should mean that it is easier to identify the number of trans people who are victims of crime. Obviously the newspapers could also report the victims anonymously if they don’t want to be ‘outed’.

Just bear in mind that we don’t invite teenage boys (at a very high risk of violence) or small thin men to join us in the ladies facilities for their safety. There is no reason to treat any other group with special privileges.

I just don't know how both can be supported? But anyway my op was about feeling like there is no room for common ground

I and an increasing number of women would suggest that if men (however they identify) claim they feel unsafe in men’s spaces, then it is up to them to campaign for, or fund/run alternative spaces.

That to me seems like a suitable and sustainable middle ground. The arguments against it seem to be spurious comparisons with racial segregation and claims that any recognition that men who claim they are women are not literally women is bigotry. The arguments are made with surprising vehemence for people who say they merely want a safe space to pee.

Millions have been spent by billionaire activists and lobby groups campaigning for men to have women’s rights and full access to all women’s spaces. Had they spent the money and effort on campaigning for third spaces, they probably would have been well on the way by now. So wanting to pee in safety does not appear to be a priority.

In public loos (when we used them in old times!) I often would end up washing blood from my hands because I'm bleeding a lot and in the changing process that happens. Its awful its embarrassing even though I know I shouldn't be embarrassed. It reminds me that I'm not getting the medical care I need for my periods. So yeah I do want a space for that grim reality of being a woman.

I, too, suffer from very heavy periods and have had to wash clothing as well as hands. You talk about being embarrassed about it. I am very embarrassed about it when it happens and the only thing that helps is knowing that I am in a women's toilet with others who may have also had that experience.

I would be much more embarrassed looking up to find a male who presents as a women their while I am washing my hands or drying a bit of clothing.

When my child was a baby, I was always out and about with them in the stroller or pram. When I needed to use the toilets, including heavy period time, I would have the pram or stroller in the door way because I couldn't leave my child unattended outside the door (sometimes, it would take a while before the flooding stopped enough just to get off the toilet). I would have been mortified to have to do this with males walking past.

Similarly, when my mum in a wheelchair needed a toilet and there was no accessible toilets available (and yes, this does happen!).

There are many reasons for single sex spaces that also relate to dignity. As well as safety. I keep getting the feeling that those people who are wanting to be kind and who calm their thoughts by thinking 'they just want to pee' are happy to ignore the needs of women in the situations above.

The solutions have been proposed. In fact, a group of transwomen are petitioning for them now as well - additional spaces where people who simply do not care about who is in the next cubicle to them can go and for those that do, maintain single sex spaces.

And for those who declare 'who is going to police the single sex spaces', surely you are not implying that males who have been told of the laws (if the laws are actually clarified and the language strengthened) and asked to respect others needs would simply just ignore everyone else's needs for their own need to 'just pee'? That they would actually need policing?

I feel trying to dictate who people have sex with is too much

You've picked up on one aspect of this, the right to be able to pick a partner based on their sex, but this is only part of a much bigger picture of the removal of women's rights. Have you heard of the cotton ceiling, the erasure of Lesbian right to choose a partner based on genitals, the erasure of Lesbian only spaces, the erasure of Lesbian only dating sites. this is part of a bigger picture of the erasure of women's rights, erasure of any women's independant enterprise, example today the defunding of the Lanarkshire Women's refuge.

I say this a lot on FWR, but most of the time, the position presented as 'moderate' is the one that requires you to put women and girls as a lower priority than someone or something else. Now, some people may think that's appropriate. But it's not feminism.

OP I too would like to see some examples of what you consider 'wild' arguments from feminists.

Would you mind clarifying what actions you see as 'wild' please?

Yes it's gone too far - it's gone from trans rights and the desire for a simplified process for legal recognition, to a socially mandated homophobic, lesbophobic and misogynistic dogma.

I think that if one accepts that TWAW, then genital preferences actually are 'transphobic'. That's the logical conclusion. It's the first premise that I have a problem with.

With regard third spaces, there is a video of a girl in tears because she can no longer get changed in privacy after her school board voted to allow students to pick which change rooms they preferred.
In that case, the trans student had been offered a third space but refused it as they wanted to get changed with girls.
www.westernjournal.com/teen-swimmer-fights-tears-school-board-votes-allow-trans-students-locker-room/
And in trying to find the link, I see now that the trans student in question won a $150k settlement despite being offered a safe space to change and despite winning their school board vote and being permitted to change with girls. In no part of this story was the student unsafe, they won settlement because they felt 'uncomfortable', even as the girl in tears' discomfort and statement that her privacy was being invaded was completely ignored and overridden.
www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-palatine-transgender-lawsuit-settlement-20200214-ldgh6vw7znfsfibwcury3bnn4a-story.html

There are multiple cases of third spaces being offered and refused. Its not about safety. It's about validation.

i think the trouble for me arises from the idea that there is a 'just be kind' soloution to everything.
The 'people just want to pee' is a great sentiment but once that idea becomes problematic you have to talk about it and define what that entails and who is affected.
Im sure ive shared the ladies at some stage with a transexual or transgender person and neither cared nor minded because the person did just want to pee and pass unnoticed.
But that does not mean that i have no objection to someone who has self ID'd being given a legal right to walk into sex protected spaces.

For me the conflating of the idea that most people just want to pee with sex based protections is highly disingenuous and designed entirely to bully and shame women into speaking up about their concerns.
If trans activists were concerned about the people who just wanted to pee the discussion would be framed as a collaborative attempt to ensure that women using ladies loos felt safe and their dignity and privacy was adequately protected. Its not.
The women most vulnerable and in need of sex protected spaces often have a history that includes bullying and abusive men therefore see the name calling and guilt tripping for the gaslighting it is.
That will obviously inform the tone of their reaction

If the trans movement moves to a point where they stop trying to remove women's boundaries and rights, I genuinely wouldn't be in the least bit interested in arguing with them.

I believe that. The vast majority opposing the trans movement, at least in the UK, are doing so in good faith, and in response to the boundary violations. It the boundary violations stopped, so would 95% of the pushback, and all that would be left is real bigotry, and it would have no traction, and women would be allies.

Glinner put this up recently: Eddie and Graham: How to be responsible male lesbians.

If transwomen would follow those guidelines, there would be no fight! I think he's fairly represented what the demands are from this side, and I don't see how they're particularly outlandish.

Indeed, they're a behaviour code that I assumed transwomen were following, prior to the mid 2010s. And I think a lot of the public still thinks they do, hence not understanding the pushback.

Op there is already a way forward in current law. We have legislation that allows people to legally change their gender and that also protects single sex spaces in certain circumstances.

The arguments began because of lobbying to change that legislation. The lobbying did not come from GC feminists.

Okbussitout

Keep working this through, you are in the same place many of the women whom you think are a bit too strident now were a little while back.

And tbh, it's not like I'm eager for you to see the reality of all this, because once you do, it's a no-going-back thing, and I wish women didn't have to face it. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.

People have the right to refuse to consider others as a sexual partner on whatever grounds they like. We all have the right to set our own boundaries. I don't see why that's even in dispute. How could it possibly be the case that compelling lesbians to consider men as sexual partners is a reasonable or progressive position?

As for extremists on both sides, there is nothing at all extreme about wanting to protect women's single-sex spaces and activities. It is not extreme for women to say that men should not be allowed in women's prisons, women's domestic abuse centres, women's sports.

It is extreme, however, to threaten a female politician with rape or death, it is extreme to hang another female politician in effigy, it is extreme to take a sword into a women's toilets and then post a photograph of yourself on social media with a threatening message, it is extreme to gather outside meetings of women and shout abuse at them and intimidate them, it is extreme to phone up venues where women gather and issue bomb threats, it is extreme to harass and threaten a female academic to the extent that she has to have security to accompany her to lectures.

There are two sexes. Women and men. Male and Female.

Women (and men) are entitled IN LAW to single-sex spaces.

I'm sort of musing, but also wonder if actually on both sides there is such adversity that there's no going back? With increasingly wild arguments on both sides. So how would there be a way forward from here?

It's not about the adversity. It's about a compromise that can never happen when the demands are so patently divorced from reality, as the scenario in your original post shows. This increasing wild arguments on both sides is disingenuous double speak used by people to imply that both sides are equally unreasonable, and both sides have equal validity to their arguments. It was most recently employed by Keir Starmer with his "Both sides tearing lumps out of each other" But both sides are not balanced in the fundamental reality of their demands and arguments.

We have seen this before. I am black. If a racist supremacist group started spouting that white people are intrinsically better than black people, and black people shouldn't exist or have the right to refer to themselves as 'people' would their argument be grounded anywhere in reality? No. Would an argument in contradiction be extreme? No. Arguing against it cannot be extreme since it would only uphold reality. Same applies here.

I'm wondering if trans people are angry because they feel their bodies don't match their gender in their head. I've had on and off mental health issues so can imagine this feels awful

Interesting that your lived experience means you try to imagine how others feel. It feels awful to have experienced domestic violence, being sexually abused, raped, or molested, unsafe or forced into a marriage you don't want. Many women feel lots of mental trauma and anger from such experiences and many don't want to see men in places where they may feel physically vulnerable and bring a return of those feelings. Interesting though, that instead of relating to this, men are insisting they be able to enter womens spaces because their 'right to pee' as you put it, transcends all that.

When you look at the sticking points from women's side, it's about trying to retain even our most basic boundaries, rights and protections.
If you look through this board and what women are angry about, it's things like refuges being defunded in the name of 'gender equality' and anti-FGM campaigners like Hibo Wardere being piled on for not prioritising trans women.
Because we're vocal about objecting to those things, we get called bigoted and we're angry about that too.
I've never seen women picketing or trying to get a trans shelter defunded for example. Its simply not a both sides situation.
If the trans movement moves to a point where they stop trying to remove women's boundaries and rights, I genuinely wouldn't be in the least bit interested in arguing with them.
I will always support gender non conformity and the right of people to express gender however they fancy. I will also fight against the removal of women's rights.
I would like trans activists to do the same and stop framing women's rights as transphobic.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

Absolutely.

It was an example of a situation whereby someone has ascribed what, in my experience, is a fringe view to an entire group, which is what I was replying to the OP about in terms of it being unhelpful and only serving to polarise and antagonise.

@NecessaryScene1

Of course I don't agree with it going on, as I've already said, I view sexual attraction as something entirely personal and at the whim of the individual, and not something that anyone else can make blanket assertions or assumptions about regarding what is right or proper.

There are a large proportion of people promoting special trans privileges who haven't thought through that their arguments have led to lesbian spaces being pushed underground because of the amount of ladycocks we are being expected to 'at least consider, and if you don't want it, don't say why, it's mean of you'.

Being told that the blissful ignorance of those trans rights people means that lesbians being cross about this state of affairs is an 'extreme position' is likely to make me a bit touchy, yes.

Is 'No' an extreme position? I mean, I know why this gets framed like this. Seen it enough to understand this.

If women say 'no, we want to keep all our spaces and our rights' this is only viewed as a reasonable position if we then promise to find a way to make those who are arguing to take our rights away happy.

Well, guess what? A lot of us were trying that a couple of years ago, but we just get told 'third spaces are like apartheid' so tbh, I think I will save my limited energy to campaigning for women. Extremist that I am, and not everyone's mum.

I also remember reading that “your love is not unconditional if the genitals aren’t those you expected” (or words to that effect) - my love for someone isn’t unconditional anyway, there are lots of things I might find out that would be a dealbreaker!

What a load of crap (the quote, not your opinion).
Love isn't unconditional for anybody (apart from those odd women who "stand behind" their cheating/paedophile/etc. husbands).
There's thousands of reasons for not fancying someone - I like skinny guys and a big, muscly dude wouldn't attract me and there are women who think vice versa. There are men who like curvy women and men who prefer slimmer.
Genital preference shouldn't be seen as a phobia any more than other preferences.

Also, if anyone expects men to sleep with women with penises, they'll be laughed out of town. I can't imagine many straight men going for that.