Zara - male bodies in female changing room

@CheeseMmmm brilliant posts.

If the "frightened transwoman" argument is genuine, then why doesn't the TR movement acknowledge the obvious loophole of allowing all men regardless of sex, presentation etc into women's spaces? Surely the "frightened TW" has as much to fear from said loophole as women and girls? Unless... it's not about TW feeling safer in the women's facilities at all... Hmmm....

Yes cheese your encapsulation of the main arguments that get used to tell women that they should STFU are spot on.

The whole ‘as if a sign is going to stop someone’ completely ignores the issue that women also now have been told that even just leaving the toilet or changing room when someone who they perceive as male enters is considered a micro aggression and therefore needs to be stopped too.

In the past, if a woman felt worried (even seeing a male enter a single sex space from outside the space) they would query, this current agenda means women cannot query, or to report to security etc. Now they are very much less inclined to do that, so who benefits?

And you are also right about reporting as well. Report it? With the current rate of conviction for sexual assault against women, who has any confidence at all in policing.

It blows my mind that so many people use this as an argument for lowering the boundaries we have established over the decades. Just report it? To whom? And what will that mean? It won’t even mean the women and girls coming after you have put yourself through the additional trauma of reporting it will be safer!

All three of those arguments are rolled out in some form. It is predictable.

Horrific to see people joking about it though.

Agreed. I really appreciate reading your posts Cheese

No one except young children should be allowed in the opposite changing room. Adults have an expectation they will not encounter an adult of the opposite sex in their room.

I went into some 'for every gender' toilets in a quite empty building. There was a man in there. I felt very unsafe. Not because he attacked me, but because I was in a small isolated space with a man. If I had walked into a women's toilets and seen a man I would have immediately left and I would have been on high alert. Clearly there is a safety issue and you'd have to be a numpty not to see what - it's not the sign on the toilet which protects us, it's the ability to spot that a man is where he should not be and to act early. Quite apart from the other issues of course as we don't make an inclusive society for women just by stopping rape. You'd have to be impressively unaware of the issues in society if your thinking is that simplistic.

The one that apparently is the argument so complete there's no way to refute it is-

Obviously it's about rape. At a stretch maybe serious sexual assault.
Any other reasons or crimes given why women and girls need single sex spaces is trivial/irrelevant so should be simply ignored.

If a girl or woman is raped by a male in a single sex space (it's always just toilets mentioned).

Then it will by definition be a cis man who did it. Males with trans identities by definition would never do anything like that. ( Fact that any old male can saunter in never addressed).

If a cis man wants to rape a woman or girl then he will. Nothing anyone can do about that. Just fact of life.

The idea that a sign on a door will stop rapists is laughable. Prepared to rape but obey toilet sign? FFS that's so stupid. Who would ever think that! Are they thick or what?
I have seen a thread on OJ twit with all the comments more or less LAUGHING!
Hilarious comments man I'm going to follow her and rape her, oh no a sign! Thwarted.

What does this last one tell you. Well everything anyone needs to know to understand the attitude of a group (seems a fairly large group) of the gender > sex people who comment on this topic on Twitter.

No Twitter isn't real life at all.

But to see a stack of people taking the time to LAUGH at rape. That's not great to see written on a public forum.

Oh and last argument.
If anything happens report it. Can't see any problem at all. Just report. Easy.

They are.

1. TW are more at risk than women and girls. TW are more vulnerable than women/ girls. TW must come first and use all female things because otherwise it's guaranteed that they will be attacked and probably severely. Women and girls just don't face anything like that.

1. TW are not the danger. Cis men are. TW just do not, cannot commit crimes against women/ girls and always take maximum consideration for the comfort and privacy of others.

So far so good! There's more though...

What is most extraordinary about that essay is that the author says "When children’s author J. K. Rowling accused the trans rights movement of ‘offering cover to [sexual] predators’ in a June 2020 article" but then in her (scholarly) footnotes gives a link to the complete article, which is so clearly not bigoted etc that anyone who bothers to read as opposed to just assuming they already know all about it must surely notice what it actually has to say.

The word she has misused in her essay is "accused". JK Rowling pointed out what could happen as a result of a particular thing; she accused nobody apart perhaps from predators. Surely the nice Quaker student doesn't approve of predators, does she? The word sexual there is her own, since JKR didn't use it in that passage; that is in itself poor scholarship even if in square brackets.

And yes, I can only manage guttural in speech, not in writing.

'Guttural' doesn't mean what that pink-haired person thinks it does. That one leapt out at me. CBA to read the whole thing, but I expect there are other misapprehensions in there.

Incidentally, as a scholar that lady needs to learn a simple fact: no written work is considered seriously without a date, and I don't mean "Jul 12"; it needs to have a year on it. I do appreciate that as a PhD scholar she is trying to get educated, but she has a way to go.

Man Friday are wonderful. More power to their elbows.

[quote Smellysocks86]aninjusticemag.com/mumsnet-how-poor-moderation-created-a-transphobic-swamp-adf391ccf9fc[/quote]
Such a shame that a Friend is so misguided. My experience of the Society has been that its members are able to think -- and that they are in general opposed to people oppressing others.

No sorry but I’m sure it’s ‘bla bla bla Transphobe bla bla bigot bla bla educate bla’

I believe it goes something like,
" these men are actually women because they say so. You are being a transphobic bigot by reacting to them differently to any other women. Educate yourself"

Fascinating isn't it?

Earlier on a poster was explaining that because they had got over their explained fear and trauma, every other female should be expected to do the same and be fine with mixed spaces as she was, fear and distress was silly, unjustifiable weakness and failure that would not be tolerated.

A frightened and distressed male though?

Oh the horrors!!!!!! No suggestion at all that they should get over anything at all. So yes, just plain unjustifiable sexism and male supremacism that sees female as a subordinate type of human. You have to be quite an interesting type of person to wish to stand behind that kind of prejudiced thinking while talking about 'inclusion'.

Ah, thanks, @KittenKong! I consider myself educated.

I think the counter argument goes: ‘Because because because, no you shut up bigot!’