Men’s loos are unsafe for MTF

There is another way to look at things.

Prevalence of violence/sexual assault etc… is the same in men and transwomen.

Seeing that 800% of women have been sexually assaulted, I am going to go on a limp and say that a big proportion of men have sexually assaulted women. (I doubt that a very small minority of let’s say 1% of men could have affected 80% of women).
That also means we need to assume that a big proportion of transwomen are likely to be violent/sexually assault women.

Of course, in the middle of all that you’ll find nice men and lovely transwomen. But the issue isn’t that you will find some nice men and transwomen or that one is privileged to have met a lot of them.

The issue is about protecting women as a group from predatory people, in this case men and yes transwomen (because the rate of violence is the same)
Its not a sex issue or a gender issue or a trans issue. It’s an issue about protecting one group from the violence of another.

For me, the only logical positions are either single sex, or mixed sex. Single gender is nonsensical. I disagree with mixed sex, but it's at least internally cohesive.

Sex may be complicated, most on this board have at least a basic understanding that it's down to SRY expression. However, I'm pretty certain that if you've ever ejaculated or menstruated, then it's not going to be complicated for you personally in the slightest. There's a lot of people making a pretty huge case out of a very few edge cases that have fuck all to do with being trans or not.

The law says that without a GRC, any man who claims he is not a man has to be compared with any other man in a situation that may involve discrimination. In this circumstance, such a man has the protected characteristic of "gender reassignment". That is, this means that the protected characteristic of "gender reassignment" acknowledges that this is nothing to do with the protected characteristic of sex; ie: the protected characteristic of GR means very specifically that this PC is not about the fictional concept of "sex change".

The law also says that a man with a GRC can be compared with a female only in some circumstances that may relate to sex discrimination. The exceptions written in the Equality Act 2010 limit the access of any man with a GRC to a claim of sex discrimination.

This, loud and clear

What a terribly frustrating thread! Women are not support animals for men. We are not human shields for men who may be vulnerable to violence by other men. We don't exist solely to make men happy/feel safe/validated/insert other reason. We are adult human beings with our own hopes and dreams, fears, worries and opinions, and rich internal lives.

Humans can never change sex. Men can never be women, no matter how they feel or dress or how desperately they might want it. And no men should be in women's spaces, ever.

It's always good to remember that ideally we wish to compare like with like in these kinds of studies, i.e., we should compare a transgender person to someone who is otherwise the same except for gender identity, lives the same kind of life, takes the same types of risk and so on. Only then could we be absolutely certain that the cause of the differences we find can be attributed to the difference in gender identity (or rather the performance of this vs. one's sex)

Who should the comparator be?

According to gender ideologues, the comparator for a transwoman with the PC of gender reassignment is a woman without the PC of gender reassignment.

According to gender critical people, the comparator for a Tw (ie a male with the PC of gender reassignment) is a man (ie a male without the PC of gender reassignment).

I've been trying to think things through logically.

Presumably a TW wishing to use a female toilet is doing it for simple preference, or their own comfort, privacy and safety, or for validation, or for nefarious reasons.

Putting aside nefarious reasons, anyone who supports TW in women's toilets is implicitly saying -

The preferences of TW need to be prioritized over the preferences of women.

or

The comfort, privacy and safety of TW needs to be prioritized over the comfort, privacy and safety of women.

or

The validation of TW needs to be prioritized over the preferences, comfort, privacy and safety of women, even if this invalidates women by stopping them having rights as a group.

Then, just to put the icing on the cake of my argument, we have to remember that without a clear, definable and observable way of identifying the group known as TW we are still left in a position where -

TWs preference to be in a space for women and TW cannot be guaranteed because we have no idea if some of the people claiming to be TW are men.

TWs comfort, privacy and safety away from men cannot be guaranteed because we have no idea if some of the people claiming to be TW are men.

TWs validation ain't happening because the place is a place for TW, women and men who claim to be trans women.

And that's all without arguing that TW are men anyway.

Interesting thread. I have a few thoughts on it:

a) Surveys asking people if they have experienced a particular act of violence depend only on the respondent's interpretation about what took place, and there is no external way of checking if the response is true or not.

In larger samples most of this doesn't matter, because the individual variations are washed out in the averaging process.

But it does matter if the people participating in the survey consist of different cultural communities with somewhat different language and definitions of words and different views on what constitutes violence. It might even matter when we interpret answers by men and women, at least in some more conservative communities.

Police reports don't suffer from that problem, but they obviously suffer from other problems, so a combination of data sources would ideally be needed. I'd also like to see more in-depth open-ended investigations to tease out what all kinds of people mean with such words as sexual harassment or verbal violence etc.

b) The Williams Institute link gives a summary of this study (both are linked to separately in this thread). The abstract of the study itself does not include some of the things the Williams Institute chose to report, such as this:
Transgender women and men had higher rates of violent victimization (86.1 and 107.5 per 1,000 people, respectively) than cisgender women and men (23.7 and 19.8 per 1,000 people, respectively).

That's because this particular finding is more likely to be produced by chance than the level the authors set as the cutting point in their study. So the Williams Institute shouldn't have reported that bit without also reporting about its likely statistical non-significance.

c) The statistics on violence against transgender people are different for the most extreme kind of violence than other kinds of violence: Homicide rates in countries outside South America.

A few sources:

This study (which I believe has one transgender researcher) shows that the risk of becoming a homicide victim was lower for transgender people than the rest in US between 2010 and 2014. This site reports on some UK data, and this one gives some rough calculations for the US.

So why are the reported overall violence figures against transgender people so high, yet the homicide rates are not, outside South America? This clearly needs good research.

All violence is unacceptable, and transgender people should be free of assaults and violence, just as everyone else should be free of those. But considering the possible solutions to the problem requires much better and more comparable data collection and analysis, and the likely solution really is not to demand only one other demographic to change its behaviour (women) when the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by another demographic (some men).

d) My last comment on this, I swear:

It's always good to remember that ideally we wish to compare like with like in these kinds of studies, i.e., we should compare a transgender person to someone who is otherwise the same except for gender identity, lives the same kind of life, takes the same types of risk and so on. Only then could we be absolutely certain that the cause of the differences we find can be attributed to the difference in gender identity (or rather the performance of this vs. one's sex)

One reason why men are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than women is that women take more mitigating actions (not going out alone late at night, avoiding certain places and forms of behaviour).

It's possible that some of the findings in this specific field are also partly driven by differences in other kinds of variables which correlate with being transgender. Asking more questions about where the reported violence happened (work, home, leisure activities), and who the alleged perpetrators were (strangers, sexual partners, spouses etc.) would cast further light on this.

But isn't it the case that trans women can use female bathrooms unaided as they have for decades? They do it all the time without us knowing.

When I've been in the ladies' loos and a male has entered, regardless of how the person was dressed or presented themself, I have generally quietly left as quickly as possible. Without n washing my hands. The only times that this happened and I remained in the toilets was when I'd gone in with dd. Then I would stay, facing the cubicles and avoiding eye-contact with the male. Other women present would make eye-contact with me and each other, but none of us ever said anything above a murmur. Different once outside the toilets!

So the male may have interpreted our silence to indicate that we had not clocked a male in our space or that we did not mind.

When actually the silence was unease, fear, anger.

How do we know that male's intentions? Men who do not want to deliberately distress women do not voluntarily enter the women's toilets. Why should we trust any male who chooses to enter the women's toilets?

But, no, that male observes our silence and claims it means that we're fine about it.

@HobgoblinGold I used to feel like you. I wanted also to be kind, but I'm afraid that when you're 'kind' (i.e. accommodating) it seems like it's not enough.

There are already enough MtF individuals who have caused harm to women and girls as a result of this societal need to 'be kind' and Stonewall's insistence that cross dressing AGP men who get a sexual thrill out of cuckooing women's spaces and now get classified as having the same vulnerability as those diagnosed with debilitating gender dysphoria is the point at which I refuse to 'be kind' any more.

The goal posts shifted a while ago and I'm afraid I'm one of many many women who now chooses to say 'enough'.

As I'm sure you know, "be kind" (in its incarnation as a 2020s catchphrase) always but always means 'be kind to me' or at least 'be kind to those people with whom my sympathies principally lie'. and where there are possible conflicts of interest, "be kind" means 'be kind to the above and everyone else'.

HobgoblinGold, decent, kind men know that in some situations women can be frightened by seeing a man they don’t know. So, for example, when out late after dark they don’t walk too closely behind a lone female or they cross to the other side of the road. Those men know they mean no harm but understand that someone who doesn’t know them can’t be sure of that. Don’t you think that it would be kind of trans women to accept that third spaces are a good solution to a similar situation?

I see we've had 'sex isn't binary - It's more complicated than that'.

If you want a laugh, have a look at Dr Emma Hilton replying to such comments on Twitter. It's very rare that the OP on such comments attempts to refute her extremely well explained evidence but on the very rare occasions that they come back with that risible Scientific American blog post, she is able to give even more evidence which shows very clearly the binary nature of the human species.

I've never seen them attempt it after the second time. Because there is no evidence to back up their statements.

"But isn't it the case that trans women can use female bathrooms unaided as they have for decades? They do it all the time without us knowing."

Women usually know when a man of any description is violating their single-sex space against their consent. As I said above on this thread, silence on the part of women does not mean acquiescence, it usually means women are frightened because of the potential consequence of male aggression.

She is, however, unable to refute her own finding, that even male transsexuals who are undergoing a process of medical transition, continue to criminally offend at the same level as other males.

Exactly. Note that she hasn't ever said the study was misleading, just blamed other women for what they did with it.

This is getting so old, to be honest.

Women are not service humans, provided in a never-ending stream, to validate the feelings of men.

Do you not get that?

Do you understand that it's women and girls being accessed which is the validation, here? The actual space is irrelevant. If all the women moved to another space, the focus would go to the second space. The presence of the women in that space is the crucial part.

You genuinely think that women and girls are a resource for men. It's coming across in your male centric posts.

The only solution to 'safety for all', is a third space.

Not providing women as a tool for male validation.

Then you and I are pretty much of the same opinion.

I want to protect people who are vulnerable, but my focus now has to be on protecting the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls.

Unfortunately I think that the push to open up the definition of trans to mean 'everyone is who they say they are' along with removing transgenderism as a medical (mental health / psychological) condition has actually done a huge amount of harm to those who just want to quietly live their lives in a way that feels comfortable to them. And I say this as someone with a mental health issue myself, that has required medication in the past and may well do in the future.

I wish I had the answer, but I don't.

But why do you assume that I feel this respect etc isn't awarded to me anyway?

It's not actually about just you. I know I don't feel respected.

But isn't it the case that trans women can use female bathrooms unaided as they have for decades? They do it all the time without us knowing.

No one is asking them their sex when they walk in.

So what changed and what's actually making it difficult now? Using public female toilets I just assume there are TW in there that I don't notice?

I'm making dinner.

So will be buggering off for a while ( this may be a relive for some?).

I don't profess to have all the answers. I know I got defensive a few times. Apologies for this. I do want to genuinely understand peoples views. Thbkuou for those who took the time to respond. I will be refkecting on all opinions.

Well there are men and boys who feel unsafe in men's loos. The problem is (some) men, why is it down to women to solve man problems?

"Because a man who has gone through the work to actually use a woman's space as he feels like a woman"

What work specifically? Do you mean genital surgery? How would you ever know? Or do you mean appearance? It's totally unworkable, is yet again focusing on the men, and not the women who are disturbed by them and doesn't have the slightest correlation to intent.

The 'work'? Saying I feel like a woman? That 'work'? Or are you gatekeeping 'woman'?

HobgoblinGold. To get a broader idea of what you're defending, why don't you read some experiences straight from the coal face as it were.

Transwidows Voices is easily Googlable, and there are numerous threads on here with transwidows in the title.

Or 'children of transitioners' is another one.

These are authentic, real life experiences.