Apparently female rape survivors 'need' mixed sex groups

You realise that one cannot carry certain knives in the street? That various types and sizes of knives are illegal to carry out in public without good reason, that police regularly run campaigns to remind people of this, and hold knife amnestys? There is specific legislation to try and make murder with knives less likely. Nobody says 'oh, anyone who wants to go out stabbing is going to anyway, let's not bother with knife laws'.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do

I mean, I think that either you can argue that trans women don't pose any threat to women whatsoever and are totally respectful, or you can argue that those who believe they "pass" will use women's single sex spaces anyway, even when they know they aren't supposed to, but you can't argue both those things at the same time.

They know they are male.

Are you saying we can't trust them not to do the right thing and stay out of female only spaces?

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through and glad you got to a better place 

And it is terrible that we have gone backwards in our provision for the most vulnerable in our society.

But we will overcome this reversal, because we, women, know and appreciate what's been taken away from us, in spite of insistence that we should be polite and never assume ALL survivors need these spaces and services.

We should apparently always make sure we say 'Not all survivors are like that' and some, supposedly 'need' males in their recovery spaces, otherwise we don't deserve these spaces due to our extremism. Or at least, this appears to be what @Discovereads is arguing on this thread.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do about it?

Vast majority is a good start! If we can exclude the vast majority of men from women's SS spaces, then that is vastly better than not being able to exclude any of them! As a pp said, don't let perfect br the enemy of good.

I also think you're underestimating how powerful social pressure is to obey the rules. I trust that most Transwomen are attending the groups because they genuinely think that's ok. If there's one group which is clearly defined as single sex and another group which is sign-posted as transwoman-inclusive, I don't see any reason to believe transwomen will lie.

And it's Overton window stuff for sexual predators. If Transwomen are permitted into a group according to the rules, then any man who gets off on women's trauma might think 'well, I could be trans. How would they know?'. Whereas if the rule is clear he's less likely to think he can get away with it.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do

So you think that all male people who identify as women have no regard for anybody else and would knowingly go to a group where their maleness could traumatise women rape victims. You don't have much respect for these people's moral character.

Hedgehogs thinks women with facial hair from PCOS look like men. There is no arguing with that level of stupidity.

Ooh.
Hehdehog is a real life Whatabout in the wild!

Single sex provisions for women who have suffered rape is important, necessary and needed.
TW in mixed groups or groups for transpeople.
Single sex means single sex, and if a TW then insists on invading such a group I would find that as a sure-fire sign the individual should be booted off the premises, and invited back to a mixed sex group on another day when they
had calmed the fuck down.

I would not have gone to a mixed sex refugee or to a mixed sex DV group. Because I had just been violently attacked by a man. Yes, I dealt with male police officers and male solicitors, but for the times I needed to talk it was very important that there was a single sex option.

Cheering you on, Sarah! Thank you for fighting.

Helen Joyce just did an interview with American therapist Stephanie Winn - taking this opportunity to publicise it. There she cites an example of this "value" being provided:

I will say the first time I ever had experience with a quote-unquote "transgender" person in the mental health system was back in California around 2014, when I was working in a residential setting. We were helping primarily 18- to 24-year-olds with severe and persistent mental illness, so we're talking of schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder. Most of our patients there were... Our facility was basically a step down from full hospitalisation. So it was a pretty intensive program.

And we had a young person who was male, and very large, and very male, and there was very little that was even feminine-presenting about this person, but who had some kind of psychosis. I don't know all of what was going on because I wasn't this person's primary counsellor; I was just responsible for admissions and for kind of day-to-day stuff. But I remember there being some internal debate over where to place this person, because rooms were shared by sex and because he identified as a "she" the director insisted that we place him with a female.

The female he was placed with was a young woman with complex trauma from, you know, childhood sexual abuse and she ran away. That was my first exposure to where this ideology can lead. I think that that was mishandled and also kind of tragically predictable. I mean what do you think is going to happen if you take someone who's already having a really rough go, you know, enough to need to be hospitalised, enough to need to be in an inpatient facility, and then you tell her that "we're here to help you heal - come here and get better, we're going to teach you life skills, we're going to help you get on your feet. Oh, and by the way, here's this 300-pound male who you have to go to bed in the same room as." Who will stick around for that?

What I feel is desperately (deliberately) lost in all of this is the women who have experienced male violence.

If we want to get into a pissing contest about who is the most marginalised, those women are very, very, very high on the list. I'm a survivor of childhood abuse (thanks dad) and by the age of 15, I was close to anorexic, I used to pull my own hair out, I was self-harming and I had what I now understand to have been selective mutism because I was so frightened of men. Not just him. All men. The anxiety that it caused, living with a violent bully, was indescribable. By the time my mother finally left him when I was 17, I was in a dreadful state. I dropped out of school and spent a year effectively in hiding. The one place that I could go was the gym at the local swimming pool which ran a female only session once a week, back when female only was allowed to mean female only, and they didn't even have any male staff on duty. I could walk there, I could go in the building without having a panic attack, I could use the gym, I could talk to the (older) women there, and it was such an important part of my recovery from him in that first year and I went there because I knew that I would not have to interact with any men. Because in that first year, I couldn't interact with men. I would panic and run home, or be unable to get on the bus if the driver was male, or lock myself in a public toilet and be unable to come out. I would freeze and be unable to speak. And I managed it by avoiding situations in which I'd have to have any contact with men.

I got over the fear though it's never gone completely, and I can deal with men now. But it took a long time and while I was in recovery, female only spaces were everything. I will not and cannot pretend that a mixed sex space is a female only space.

The fact that we are now facing a situation in which women like me are being told our needs are selfish and that there's something wrong with us for our response to what men have done to us makes me feel ill.

If this person is a woman, then why should she not be in the women’s space? Because she looks like how Sarah thinks a man should look? It’s not like she’s waving her penis around.

But of course, if "she" was, that would be fine too, eh? See the defences of Wi Spa and that bloke who was literally taking pictures of himself naked with an erection in a women's shelter - the shelter actually defended him.

At this stage there is nothing that will not be defended when a man does it in a woman's space.

Which is exactly why it's so much more important than ever to keep them out.

That's the thing I failed to understand when I first heard of a crackdown on "transwomen" - those US bathroom bills. Turns out women are finding themselves having to become hardline on male admission because they see they can no longer rely on any sort of support when a problem arises.

Just catching up.
Utter madness. No woman who has been raped wants a penis near them.

I'm sorry @Discovereads, I just don't see your examples from this thread as extremist.

'Itscalledmisogyny · 30/04/2022 21:23
This is just shocking misogyny. Women who have been raped do not need or want anyone with a penis in their safe spaces. Anyone claiming they do - without even bothering to ask the female rape victims, just speaking over them, is an out and out misogynist.'

Do YOU 'need or want anyone with a penis in their safe spaces', or do you merely NOT object when that is situation you find yourself in?

'IamSarah · 30/04/2022 21:35
Of course female rape survivors don’t need to be around males, the embodiment of their abusers. They need it like a hole in the head.'

Again, factual statement, not extremism. Women rape survivors categorically DO NOT NEED to be around males, although some, like yourself, are fine with it.

'777magic · 01/05/2022 06:34
At the end of the day, it is a strange male and we don't know their intentions so they should never be in any women only space.'

You may be happy with a strange male in a previously women-only place, but many women are not, and are actively harmed by these males' presence through inability to use the service anymore. Hence the existence of the legal exceptions. What in earth is extreme about this?

If someone who is obviously male tries to enter a female only space, by claiming they are a woman they should be told they cannot enter and be directed to the men's services, or trans specific services.

This. This. This.

Nothing shows the reality denial that this ideology is based on more than its need to pretend that we cannot tell what sex someone is by looking at them, even though all of our entire and daily life experiences tell us that we can. They are a tiny proportion of people whose sex is not obvious from first glance - for everyone else - its obvious. We have evolved to do be able to do this for the purposes of reproduction.

If this person is a woman, then why should she not be in the women’s space? Because she looks like how Sarah thinks a man should look? For all history woman has referred to a female's sex. For this sentence to make sense, you have to throw out that meaning and replace it with? With what? What is that person identifying as? You have to be able to define what they are identifying as, and your movement just can't do that.
That person should not be in that space as they are male, and that space is a space for women recovering from male violence, and the women there have a right to do that without males listening to their accounts, and without doubts as to the motivations of the people at that group. Sarah has explained what this meant to her very articulately. If that has no resonance or power for you, you should not be commenting on what women's sexual violence recovery services should look like. No-one who can't understand that should be.

If this person was indeed a man, trying to invade the women’s space, then I’m saying he could do that in a cis woman’s space by saying he is a cis woman.

I don't know what you mean by 'cis' but the thread is about single-sex groups, not gendered ones. No-one's asking for a 'cis woman''s group, because that assumes something about gender, which is not relevant.

I haven't had time to read this thread with the attention it requires. However, I'm confused. Discovereads seems to believe what most people here believe - that women should be able to access support in an all-female environment. Yet she seems to be trying to distance herself and place herself as some "middle way". I think people here also hold the middle way, by and large. No-one's trying to stop TW getting support.

My feelings are not hurt in the slightest by extremist arguments. I’m just pointing out they’re not factually true and represent an illogical extreme which is ultimately counter productive, which isn’t tone policing.

Its not tone policing to object to women presuming to speak for all female survivors (which include myself) and attributing to all female survivors opinions and needs (which are not opinions or needs I have). There’s nothing wrong with speaking up and saying, that may be your opinion/need but please do not presume that it applies to all of we female survivors.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do about it?

Fuck me the number of people still pretending that we literally can’t tell the difference between men & women

no foot size, or leg length in of themselves are not inductors but when combined with everything such as pelvis width, smell, size of forehead etc then yes it perfectly possible to tell which is how the human race has managed to bloody reproduce!

see for example missy franklin Abd Ryan lochte. They are the same height & wingspan but it’s blindly obvious which one is a man & which one is a woman

@Hedgehog12 Where organisations utilize legal exceptions to guarantee single-sex provision they somehow manage to screen out men, although you appear to be certain it's impossible to tell men from tall, skinny women. Perhaps they use dogs? Many rescue dogs are terrified of men, and are able to distinguish them from women, at all times? Or maybe they use their eyes, ears, brains and common sense, who knows.

I hope you're not trying to procreate Hedgehog, it'll be a long and difficult trial-and-error process for you I'm afraid.

Surely if it wasn't a man that was all they needed to say?

I have yet to meet a transperson who passed
I have yet to meet a women I mistook for male

There are so many markers - voice, attitude , body motion

Sarah’s problem is that there was someone who looked like a man in the women’s session, which made her uncomfortable.

If this person was indeed a man, trying to invade the women’s space, then I’m saying he could do that in a cis woman’s space by saying he is a cis woman.

If this person is a woman, then why should she not be in the women’s space? Because she looks like how Sarah thinks a man should look? It’s not like she’s waving her penis around.

@Discovereads You appear to be tone-policing women who are, as Currywurst points out, are outraged that their demands for a legally mandated provision is met with 'women NEED transwomen in their spaces', by the organization responsible for that provision. The Survivors Network are quite deliberately NOT utilizing the exceptions available through legislation, because the DO NOT AGREE that women need them.

Do we need to be outraged more politely, making sure we don't hurt anyone's feelings in the process, like yours? After all, you seem to be objecting to the WAY the outrage is expressed, rather than the reasons for the outrage.

Please give us an example of 'reasonable' objection to the clear untruth that women NEED transwomen in their spaces, that no one will object to?

I agree with you.

@Discovereads

Not many as a proportion do pass though. I mean, look at some of the very high profile ones who are supposedly "passing" and it is actually quite obvious. And most do not achieve anywhere close to that.