@ZuttZeVootEeeVro
When shown evidence that yes, a number of TW have sexually offended against women in single sex spaces: ok, but it's unfair to exclude all male people on the grounds that some of them will be sex offenders.
It's Peter Tatchell's stance, and he seems to be representing TRA a lot in recent tv interviews.
It's safe to say tatchell is unconvinced about the needs of safeguarding.
It's important to understand the particular structure of this argument.
It's because we have two competing ideas in society. In one, you can look at things like offence stats and say, this is a statistical analysis and as such doesn't apply to individuals, but we can act upon it to protect groups of people.
According to the other perspective, even if there is some sort of statistical indication that a group has something like a higher rate of offences (say, poor people) it's not ok to make any concrete differentiation. In fact, many people consider it suspect to even talk about or notice that the statistical information.
The way we decide which way of thinking to use when is often not all that well thought out by most people. It's often done intuitively. Not necessarily randomly - most people probably have a sense that the reason male sexual offences are more common that female ones is different than the reason poor people might more often commit crimes, and so they shouldn't be managed in the same way. But if you ask people to lay out very clearly and logically their thinking on these things, it's often quite non-specific.
But one powerful way to protect oneself from being seen as a member of a group where it's ok to differentiate is to have some sort of status as a protected class. Because being a member of a protected class isn't just about saying - this group has been discriminated against for no reason. It can also be that it says we can't discriminate even when there might be a reason. For example, as an employer, you can't discriminate against a woman because she might take maternity leave, or because she might be more likely to take time off to deal with childcare - even if those things are absolutely true.
This creates a huge incentive for people with some sort of commonality to treat them as identity characteristics, because they then have a kind of position from which to negotiate being treated as a group that needs to be protected in a way that is different than another group. An example of this might be the split between those who wanted to see the gay rights movement lead to a place where the distinction around sexuality became invisible, and ceased to be a significant unifying identity focus, and those who want to maintain it as a distinction with political significance and lobbying power. The ideal of the former would tend to remove much political focus around sexuality - gay people would then simply belong to various political positions, ideological positions, like other people, but they wouldn't wield any really separate political clout.
But in a political landscape that often elevates identity groupings over individual perspectives, even including the individual perspectives of those within the groupings, everyone needs to find an identity group if they want to be able to effectively engage in politics.
An it's going to be the most direct way to avoid questions about behaviours that some might feel are anti-social.