Can't make this add up.

I think it's pretty natural to ask why it is ok to use things like crime statistics with regards to segregating men, but not with say, segregating an ethnic group when there is a strong correlation to something like crime. We teach kids this is wrong from early on, we expect people like the police to disregard their intuition when it has been formed by being exposed to disproportionate rates of crime.

And I think in a lot of cases we dance around the reasoning, which is actually not just about raw numbers, but the nature of the risk ad why it happens.

The reason men and women have issues in some shared spaces is not like the reason a particular ethnic group may be over-represented when it comes to something like assault. It's not because of their DNA, their nature as members of a particular group.

But sexual problems between men and women, which may be crime but also may be just people feeling uncomfortable, pressured, etc, are based in the nature of sexual attraction between men and women. Which is a very close to universal human experience. It's just not uncommmon, even apart from crime, for people to make bad decisions around sexual behaviour. It's a very powerful, basic drive, and it underlies male and female relations to a significant degree, even when those relations are very good, and sometimes even when there is no real sexual interest.

So things like seperate toilets or the social expectation that we might only have same sex caregivers for intimate care if possible - these exist because there are times when that element of human sexual response is just better out of the picture. In some instances it's almost universal, no one seriously thinks men's and women's prisons should be mixed, anywhere. In some other cases there is some variation in what's culturally normal say with saunas or other places like that. But in all what underlies it is this fact about human beings that is something 99.5% of people feel in their bones.

To some extent western countries have tried to let on that either this isn't a universal experience in any way that mattered - I saw a broadcaster try to argue this, supposedly from a feminist standpoint, just recently. Or that is it is, in so far as it exists, a bad thing that needs to be extinguished. Well, good luck - no one is going to manage to accomplish that, and it's been a mistake to try and act as if we can.

@Notcreativeatall

Isn't it less about tarring all men with the notion that they are sex offenders and more about recognising that they do have a higher propensity to a degree that it is hard to ignore societally and also recognising that the average woman doesn't have the capacity to fight off the average man (and that the consequences would be really awful for her if she couldn't - risk of serious injury, rape, pregnancy etc), so it is really a sensible rule of thumb safety-wise? I mean, society can't police toilets to such a degree that you'd only let a bloke in when there was also a single woman in there if there was a woman who was a similar (or greater) weight and height but with a black belt so could definitely take him down, could you? I mean, why are women told to walk home in groups, use well lit roads etc etc if not for an additional sex based threat? Single sex spaces mean that there is a social stigma factor / informal policing that discourages people (men) who might attack women from chancing their arm - you can see this in the fact that unisex spaces are statistically less safe for women. It's not saying all men are rapists.

Same with prisons - not sensible to get prisoners into a scenario in which violence or pregnancy (even consensual) could occur.

Or sports - presumably you understand why we would segregate those for fairness and safety (if contact)?

Plus also the fact that a lot of women do actually value privacy from the opposite sex? For example, if you are me, the days in which you might have to deal with sudden flooding and come out of a cubicle with blood on your hands. In the ladies, you know that any looks will be sympathetic. Whereas, you are hyper aware of what your male colleagues might be thinking in a unisex space.

I'm not sure what your point is on the crime stats - it wasn't a directional question- more can you lump a whole class of people together and effectively taint them by the whole-
On the religious bit- i know its protected by the equality act- however we still have the right to question whether things should be. Religious discrimination etc being protected does at time conflict with other rights - or cause grey areas -

@MVDC Trans women are not welcome in female spaces, but also aren't safe in male spaces

If that is the case, why is the trans community so gungho about so-called sex work? Why aren't TRAs warning transpeople away from what is universally known as a dangerous occupation for anyone involved in it? Why would transwomen place themselves in such danger if they have no capacity to deal with violent johns. I can't see how public bathrooms pose more danger than someone servicing a john in a private location..

@JellySaurus

"We can extend trans people the same respect and compassion as we extend to all people, while still not taking responsibility for their emotions, beliefs and desires."

Nail meet hammer. Absolutely spot on.

me too but I can't take credit

Emily Bridges was on a podium with other members of the Notts Cycle Team and there was no sense of distance with the other members of the team.

I've not seen any objections to Iszac Henig competing in the women's swimming events.

Grayson Perry, Miranda Yardley and Fionne Orlander report using the Men's public loos without incident.

I'm not sure that the OP is using the correct comparator group when making some of the assertions about relative safety.

@toastfairy

I like that.

Sex is knowing who might get pregnant
gender is how you feel about your son taking ballet lessons

Thank you for you interested engagement. Confusion is reasonable, a lot of people are saying a lot of very confusing things and when you change the meaning of words it can cause a real barrier to communication.

So FWIW so far as I'm concerned this is a conversation about manners, etiquette, respect and boundaries. In a society which remains incredibly sexist.

It's the difference between respecting, even liking a person and agreeing with a belief system. I'm an atheist but it doesn't mean I hate Christians, or that I have no Christian friends or that I'm pro murder. But I might disagree with a Christian about WHY you shouldn't kill someone. A Christian might say "you shouldn't murder someone because it's a mortal sin / against the 10 commandments, and you'll go to hell if you do."

I'm prepared to respect someone's right to believe but expect them to respect my right to not believe. I can totally see how "a girl soul in a boy body" can make perfect sense to a person who believes in souls but as a person who doesn't believe in souls I'm clearly not going to believe that that is literally true.

The word woman means (for me/GC) adult human female. It is NOT a set of standards which I /we am to be judged against but a simple descriptor of the biology I'm working with as I walk through the world.

The idea of judging women's dress, deportment, what we say and the way that we say it are NOT IN ANY WAY NEW. In my youth the word used was 'ladylike' everything we did was judged and 'policed' by parents, relatives, teachers, neighbours etc. and we were constantly assessed on how 'ladylike' we were.

I, amongst many many others, fought to be able to use the word "woman" to describe ourselves and be free of the endless burden of judgement the word 'lady' carried.

So for me it was not at all progressive to see these nebulous attitudes attach themselves to the word woman. When we tried to explain that we couldn't give men control of this word as it was already in use we were told we could /should give up the word "woman" safely because if we ever needed a neutral term to describe our biology we could always use the words "female" and "male" this particular 'reasonable compromise' seemed to last about a year.

There seem to be some strong parallels between medical transitioning and lobotomies. Revolutionary treatments that seemed to solve a previously unsolvable problem and were taken up enthusiastically by some parts of the medical establishments, without sufficient assessment, testing and follow-up, and without clarity over which patients the treatments could help. And which were eventually found to cause more harm than help, and often did not truly 'cure' the original problem.

When I got interested in this I read a twitter thread by a landlady who had 2 regular trans customers. She described them as 2 lovely people who were part of the community. However what she did add was that whenever they needed the loo they would get the key for the locked toilet as they were aware that their presence could upset the women customers. They understood that on some occasions that sex was important. Their own acceptance of their differences helped them be accepted by those around them.

Also with regards to access to healthcare.

Healthcare needs to be given on the basis of good medical practice. Even before the current era when sex reassignment was carefully used for a few individuals who were very well vetted, medical transition was not a clear win in terms of medical outcomes. It is a very phusically invasive and potentially dangerous set of interventions with outcomes that aren't that great.

If we used the same approach as any other medical intervention, its not clear that it would be used, in fact some places stopped doing sex reassignemnt because it was felt that the outcomes didn't justify the risk.

Medical treatments need to be based on teh kinds of medical decision making, do no harm, that are normative in medicine. Which aren't in general about just doing what people want.

Part of the problem is that some people have set their heart on a set of considtions they think will make them happy, which aren't really possible.

People are not going to stop noticing that male people are male people, and female people female. And as a reflection of that many systems are going to be built around it. It's one of the basic, really probably the most universal and ubiquitous, divisions in human life.

Anyone who in their daily life is going to work against the average is sometimes going to have adinsistrative faff. It happens to everyone at some point in their lives, and for some it happens a lot. If you were born in another country and your citizenship is different, for example, if you have medical issues, etc.

In a lot of ways gender transition is not a great solution to dysphoria, because the fact is that there will still be plenty of reminders of one's biologocal sex in daily life. Just like other ongoing medical issues.

As for the safety thing, in most cases transwomen are perfectly safe in male spaces and those are the most appropriate for them to use. Most people are not on a regular basis in the kinds of situations where that is a risk. Where they are (prisons) they need other solutions but the lack of safety in daily life is over-egged.

Hmm, yes, it is an almost unreachable utoipan ideal. It would be like having to provide seperate toilets and facilities for disabled people, or putting baby changing facilities in men's toilets, or any other improvemements that have been made in our world to benefit disadvantaaged groups.

Much easier to make women give up their rights. 🙄

The comparison you make to hypothetical crime statistics doesn't work, because when it comes to male violence the traffic is all one way.

When you refer to having to "pander to a religious belief" you are entirely overlooking the fact that "religion or belief" is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act (which Maya Forstater's Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled covers gender critical beliefs) - as indeed is sex.

I'd say a third space is less costly than losing a significant proportion of a businesses female customers. I know I wouldn't spend a penny, of either kind, in a place with gents bogs but no ladies.

I would say a third space surely is less costly than making acceptable unisex spaces?

Is the OP coming back to define genuine trans individuals ?

Because if those are the people she wants to help it would be useful to know how she defines this ? and how the rest of us know who they are?

"But keeping women safe puts trans people at risk."

Why?

I spent time during the last ten years thinking of possible solutions to this clashing rights question (which the TRAs don't even now admit to exist), and I had some before I knew what the scope of the demands from those activists is.

As far as I can see, though, the demands are pretty much to redefine 'women' so that the biological female sex stops to be something we can even mention and to allow any man who feels like it, for whatever reason, to self-identify as a woman without perhaps changing anything in how he presents, without taking medications, without having surgery, and in some cases only identifying as a woman on some days and not at all at work (to get the higher earnings). Even without the question of how to diagnose children correctly with respect to if they are trans or not and the demands that children's self-diagnosis should be the only diagnosis, resulting in surgeries and hormones, this is not a plan I can accept.

It would wipe out the embodied identities of millions and millions of women (and men, should the project ever get round to attacking men), it would wipe out all single-sex spaces for women, it would make the very concept of 'woman' a mostly meaningless category referring to certain personality types or identification with sexist stereotypes about femininity, and, most frighteningly, it would make fighting sex-based oppression almost impossible.

I suspect there are lots of people who are more divided on the issue than you see necessarily represented on the boards here.
i don't think though that Transwomen want to be in women's toilets/single sex spaces because of safety reasons primarily though - true transwomen (ignoring the sexual perverts!) want to maintain their gender identity and going into women's spaces is necessary for that - i think its a bit disingenuous to make it a safety issue- other than for mental health.
i struggle with some of the debate (and I hate the passive aggressive response that in some way i'm conditioned to be kind to dismiss my concerns)- it is difficult to argue why for example because men are more likely to be violent etc than women it is right to segregate everyone- we wouldn't apply this more general eg if the crime stats said black people were more likely to commit crimes than white would that mean we could have racially segregated facilities, and supporting single sex on religious grounds (eg muslim women need single sex etc) concerns me as i don't see why i should pander to a religious belief any more than a gender view... BUT that is more a debate on why we have single sex facilities at all - I do think that where we have single sex facilities the division has to be on sex

Cognitive dissonance and critical thinking.
Two important things and it's good you're questioning, wherever you decide you ''lay''

The question is why do women have to sacrifice their safety for men? Take this up with men. I really really don't care about the safety of men who identify as women. They are not our burden to shoulder. And I'm tired of the essentially be kind message. It's not 'kind' to have women in Edinburgh and Brighton unable to obtain male free counselling after rape in order to prop up validating people.

'Authentic self' I assume to mean, among others, sartorially presenting in way which draws attention. I wouldn't walk down the street in a bikini - it would draw attention. Furthermore, women are told/warned not to wear/present in certain ways because on men.
It shouldn't be this way but is is. THATS LIFE