Women with alopecia harassed in woman's toilets at airport

What I thought

Yes I agree, I feel really bad for her. Maybe you could be sceptical if it was an anonymous Reddit poster, but the woman who tweeted this is clearly genuine. I follow a young woman on TikTok who has alopecia, and she posted recently about how she's frequently mistaken for a man:

https://www.tiktok.com/@thebaldingdiaries/video/7418952366914800928?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7255892207587526171

It's not nice that this woman was harassed by another woman because she thought she was a man, but I fail to see why it's the fault of women on Mumsnet.

A woman absolutely can be mistaken for a man, it absolutely does happen! After seeing the picture of the woman in question I can see how she could be mistaken for one.

This woman is an athlete, strong, lean and wiry. She is as female as any other natal woman and shouldn't be expected to conform to a gender stereotype in order for her femaleness to be accepted. Total alopecia is also pretty visible - I had a colleague with it, and even with a wig, and tattooed eyebrows, and makeup her entire hairlessness was apparent. What happened in the incident described above here was wrong.

It was a one-off, terrible incident, but did not involve 'women' being harassed.

Be a load of crap. My 63 year old mum has alopecia she looks very much a woman and wouldn't be seen as a man. She is often seen as a cancer sufferer but she isn't. She wears a wig mostly but not always in the house.

Poor woman . Awful that someone was abusive to her and then when she tells her story she is called a liar.

I suspect the poster will prefer to inform me that she 'sees me', and that I'm 'not worth it'. But sometimes people pleasantly surprise you don't they? let's see

being utterly unable to understand figures of speech must make your life quite difficult.

I'm not sure I want a debate, but you do seem to be telling me that my gender critical views are harmful to women, and to be inviting me to share your views which you (I'm guessing) believe to be not harmful to women. If you want to persuade me to share your views it seems reasonable to ask you to clarify them as that would help me decide.

I'm interested that you 'see' me. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Good luck with that Bernard. It was this posters total lack of coherent argument that changed me from a lurker to a poster.

OP and chums 🙄 (you think everyone who isn't presenting a GC view on here all know each other or something, we're pals?!
Bizarre take. Is this an attempt to do the "mysterious they" again?
Despite your protestations "you just want to debate" doesn't seem like it.
What do people on here like saying?
I see you.
🙄😁
Not worth it.

Having looked at Lindsay’s twitter, she clearly gets quite a lot of unpleasant comments, which is awful!

I still don’t think they are linked in anyway to gender critical people. I think they are from nasty people who delight in mocking women who don’t fulfil societal expectations of attractiveness. I imagine they’ll be the same people who sneer at fat women, or hirsute women.

Feminists trying to keep prisons, sports and rape crisis centres single sex are not to blame for general misogyny.

I'm sorry this happened to her - genuinely, it must be very difficult to deal with some of the horrible things that people have said to her.
But I still do not accept that this is somehow the fault of all GC women or indeed that it has any bearing at all on the argument that males are attempting to take our sex based rights and weaken safeguarding.
In life, there are rude people, nasty people, mad people, and people who are angry, stressed or mistaken, irrespective of their views on male rights activism.

I think you have the wrong poster.
I have not blamed the victim.

Ah victim blaming! How unsurprising.

When the OP says 'women' do they give more examples that just the woman in the (debated) case they describe?

Obviously it should never happen to anyone, but the use of the word 'women' suggests it's happening a lot to multiple women.

yeah, I revoke my scepticism. I accept that women do get challenged. there are some odd bods out there. And as per a PP, I wonder if some of it is driven by homophobia. I'm sorry it's happened

I remember meeting a woman at a feminist event who was very tall, and she did say to me that she worried about being challenged in the loos. As she was also very slim and quite beautiful (in addition to just being very obviously female), I looked at her with frank disbelief.

I'm still puzzled about the point the scolders are making though. Is it more harmful for a woman to be challenged in the lavs than for women to be locked up with rapists? should I stop objecting to women being locked up with rapists because of the risk of it leading to women getting challenged in the lavs?

OP and chums, please advise

I don't believe this happened.

I also worry if the lighting is bad, I’m in a bad mood or do my eyebrows badly. The reality is I don’t look anything like a man. I look like someone with heavy features who has done their make up badly- and we associate that with men.

No one would actually mistake me for a man, no matter how upsetting I find my features as I age.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Depending on the area I think it’s very probably for a more masculine woman to be challenged on their use of single sex spaces. The women doing the challenging aren’t gender critical though, they’re usually homophobic extreme conservatives or, oddly enough in my experience TRA’s who seem to recognise that they’re confronting a woman but have decided the woman should be a trans man. Either way without knowing more about the woman who was doing the confronting all of this is speculation based on the eroding of women’s rights by TRA’s.

I genuinely worry about this for myself.

I'm losing my hair thanks to Graves disease and am not what anyone would class as 'pretty' or particularly feminine.

I look in the mirror and see lank, awful hair and think - you look like a man.
I put a wig or hair piece on, look in the mirror and think - you look like a man in a wig.

If this happened to me in public I'd be absolutely devastated.

People are too quick to jump on others these days.

I can absolutely tell, at a glance. I wonder if we're hard wired to?

Women's skulls are significantly different to men's. In real life the male brow and jaw line tend to indicate sex at a glance.

I think there are a lot of men with fetishes who love to pretend that women can't tell what sex people are, but in reality women very rarely get it wrong.