Reflections on trans presence at a Dykes Who Hike event

No, they’d be a pair of either gay or bisexual men.

Two men in a couple have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with 'lesbian' or 'women'.

Four men in a polycule, ditto.

I mean you can keep adding men who try to use the words to apply to themselves for infinity and there will still be no women or lesbians involved.

I haven't been able to follow this thread since yesterday, but it looks like the word 'apartheid' hasn't been invoked again in the context of women-only groups and spaces.

Hopefully the message has got through that drawing any similarity between trans people in the UK, who have all the same human rights as everybody else, and Black South Africans under the apartheid regime is not just trans hyperbole, it is deeply offensive.

Nooo… because they are not women. It’d be a gay couple. As in homosexual men. The only criteria to be a “transwoman” is to be a man. So no, wlw would not be appropriate.

If there were two trans women in a couple with each other, then they fall under both lgbtq and wlw - so they would be pretty firmly covered by that title.

There is always issues in drawing conclusions from research that is not supported.

I think that Just Like Us research is problematic because they have an over representation of people who have transgender identities yet it is supposed to be a general LGBT+ study. It really is not useful to draw conclusions from for any separate groups of the LGBT+ and actually even generally, it would still be overrepresenting some groups attitudes and opinions over others.

Did you read the OP? I thought it was thoughtful and reflective

the fact is that if you go to an event that is named in a way that makes you think it will be women only and find men there, it is reasonable to have a think about that

This thread hasn’t been quite the pile on to the trans woman at the group that the original poster thought it would be. 🤣

Newhaven to Brighton is my home area. And that is a long distance!! Blimey. I’m from Telscombe.

I think it’s inevitable that you’ll get TW turning up. I mean, it’s the Brighton area, after all!

130 hikers….must have been quite a sight!

Fair points to a degree, but I'd argue that a larger point may be that the EA is supposed to apply to everyone and therefore should be clear and easily understood.

It shouldnt require teams of lawyers to pontificate on everyday life matters, and a law shouldn't be so cumbersome and complex that people are at risk of falling foul of it inadvertently with incredibly minor acts.

So far, it seems to me to be failing that test very thoroughly. That probably goes for everyone on all sides.

Thanks for parsing that, Helle.

I think it is a not really accurate to conclude “Women generally are the biggest advocates of trans women and fight hard to have them included” from the two data sets you linked to. The YouGov shows more female people than male people will say they will include male people with transgender identities in female single sex provisions, however it is not a majority of female people who agree with this inclusion. It is still a minority.

The data is not specifically asking for lesbian’s support levels for male people with transgender identities being included in female single sex provisions (including female single sex groups for lesbians). Both the sets of respondents were asked about transgender ‘people’. ie: that includes the many female transgender people in the UK population as well.

Just as it would not be an accurate observation to make from this data that lesbians support male people with transgender identities accessing female single sex provisions. Because we have seen that when those specific questions are asked, the support decreases significantly.

Also the Just Like Us research is also limited to one age bracket 18-25 year olds, of which 47% (1736 / 3695) self reported being LGBT. Of those 277 were lesbians and 457 self reported as being transgender. Likely because it was not relevant, the organisation did not publish the proportion of lesbians who were also transgender. Notably, it did not publish how many lesbians were self reported male people with transgender identities.

Therefore, it would not be an accurate statement to make general statements about the wider lesbian (female people attracted exclusively to other female people) population from this data.

I wouldn’t even be confident saying data from that respondent group from the category ‘lesbian’ would map to lesbians of that age group without seeing the % of lesbians from that data who were also male. Additionally, I doubt the integrity of the data collected about sex categories was verified in any way, but could be wrong.

The research is real enough. You conclusion though, “Women generally are the biggest advocates of trans women and fight hard to have them included”, is much stronger with greater optimism than the data would support.

this is the report for Just Like Us and I could not find the data set tonight to look at the raw data.

https://justlikeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Positive-Futures-report-by-Just-Like-Us-compressed-for-mobile.pdf

The organisers should change the name to everybody welcome walking group. dyke a specific word for women who love women and it is clearly not for us/them. Fine, have a mixed group , but there will be consequences for those young women down the line. Don’t use Dyke when it it inappropriate. And men can never be women.

Yes, it's a type of intersectionality that always seems to centre men.

Not to mention the relentless racism of Lexy's "if (even) black women can be women, then men can be women, and excluding one group is just like excluding the other". They seem to be completely lacking in historical awareness, or they'd know that comparing black women to men is an old, old trope.

I've only skimmed through the last few pages to catch up, but @Lexibletheflexible is clearly on a mission to educate us. We might need therapy or help, we might not be very well. A bit like Victorian women who failed to comply with what's good for them.

Oh dear me, how very wrong can one be?

I am a lesbian and for clarity a man cannot be a woman, it is biologically impossible to change sex.

There are a myriad of words that can be used to describe a man dressing in women’s clothes but a woman is certainly not one.

Jorts

Any man who wants to trespass in women’s spaces, especially those where we are vulnerable or not fully clothed. Irrelevant whether he is pretending to be a woman or not.

That's the raw data. This is the article. The main point to note is that it doesn't distinguish between TW and TM.

https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/45983-what-do-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender-brito

and for what it's worth, the fact that a man turns up to an event that bills itself as for lesbians tells you rather a lot about that man. I think it would probably be a hiding to nothing trying to enforce them staying away, but if they had an iota of self awareness they wouldn't be there. There is a gay hiking group round here that I simply wouldn't dream of going to. it's not for me. not everything can be for everyone.

being the kind of person who foists yourself on people who don't want you there is often a punishment in and of itself (in the style of being Arnold Rimmer)

Is this the research that Lexible is referring to?

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_ViewsOnLGBT_230803.pdf

if so maybe I don't understand it very well. I think it is saying that 32% of male respondents and 45% of female respondents regarded 'trans' people positively which doesn't exactly feel like a slam dunk win to me. I'll admit I'm finding the document quite hard to read so may have got this round my neck

Not that post. The one previous to it, and so many others. Mocking and sneering. It comes across as defensive, at best.

Most people don't see twaw as women 'for relationship purposes'.

I seriously disagree - meeting others is not the purpose of the "service", the hike is. If every group where you met other people and might make friends amounted to a service then that's almost everything.

As I said above, it would be possible to justify a women only hiking group as a service if - for example - the service was the provision of trauma-informed support for women victims of DA whilst hiking. Or if a professional outfit was running a hiking holiday and felt that women were under-represented and that they would feel safer in a single sex group, then sure, that would be sufficient justification.

But I don't think that this is a "service" in the same way and the best reason for them not to provide a women only service is that they clearly don't want to. It's not mandatory!