Has a man dressed as a woman ever come into a communal changing room with you or joined a specifically female group you belong to ?

[Rilkescat]

How common is it ? Not really referring to stories in the media but for everyday women on MN. FWIW I've never met a trans person that I know of, neither professionally or socially. I'm a HCP so meet alot of members of the public. None of my kids have friends that are trans nor do my friends have children that are either.
Loads of trans threads at the moment. No problem with that but just wondered if it really is that prevalent ?
Before I get flamed I'm not in favour of biological womens' safe spaces being open to biological men but equally I don't think that all trans people, especially trans women are necessarily sexually deviant or mentally ill.

Yes and yes.

Well no, it's not that prevalent is it? The 2021 census showed that around 200,000 people identify as trans, as opposed to the 600,000 claimed by Stonewall.

That makes it all the more surprising that so many people seem to think it is worth throwing women's sex based rights under a bus to please such a tiny number of individuals.

Trans men are biologically female - why shouldn't they be in a female space? That's the point of single sex spaces.

And in answer to the question yes to public toilets in a shopping centre.

Our park run is v LGBT+ oriented (small uni town, ethos of the lead volunteers). There is a very obvious transwomen who is in with the race organisers. Lots of fooling about “being a girl, jumping in puddles and shrieking etc.”. Same age as me, I am definitely not a girl anymore. Fair enough but same person also “helped” at local water sports club and walked through girls changing rooms and also tried to attend my friends’ mosque womens’ group; “thinking about converting to Islam” . They ended up shutting that down as it was too awkward. Weirdly that person didn’t volunteer for the, exclusively female, mosque cleaning rota.
Given that they either don’t recognise, or enjoy violating, boundaries I have strictly instructed my 13yo daughter to pee before every park run and only use the women’s loos with her friends. Check she feels safe and don’t worry about “being kind”.
There are lots of younger trans people and was a Tavistock train gang of mums who all made the trip down every week/fortnight? Also a few much older MtF locally. I think it must vary from place to place quite a lot.

I've known several different groups for women that ended due to one or more male people joining them and the mixed sex group no longer meeting the needs of the women who up to that point had been finding help and support in it. One was a group for a chronic illness that can only happen to females, but they were told they were being transphobic to resist male people identifying into the group. I've also known a fair number of women who have had to leave women's groups or activities that they had enjoyed or relied on because they became mixed sex through male people joining them. How the male people identified didn't really make a difference to the impact on the female people.

The male people weren't more important than the female ones. In most of those situations a mixed sex option was already fully available, or it would have been possible to separate the women's times of access to mixed sex women and female only and ensured equality of access for all. But that was apparently transphobic. So inclusion turned out to mean excluding women.

It's lovely to be a women not affected by mixed sex provision, or not to rely on the single sex facility. At the moment its rather grim to be a woman who is not so privileged. I care equally about people of both sexes, and don't think any exclusion is ok.

Dd aged 19 has two friends who are trans. They regularly use the changing rooms together, women’s toilets etc etc. No one ever bats an eyelid or says anything. To be honest they’re so convincingly feminine people just assume they’re women. My mil who is 80 and quite transphobic often sees dd along with them and will openly say things about transwomen using women’s spaces and dd and her friends just laugh (to themselves) as she doesn’t have a clue two of them are trans. I suspect this is true for a lot of the women who get worked up about these things on these and other threads.

No never. But it wouldn’t bother me anyway.

No - thankfully, and I want my lived experience to remain that way. I don’t ever want to be in a position where I am forced to share a female space with a man.

My 90-something mum in law is currently in hospital in Scotland - she has refused personal care by males and this has not been questioned. The thought that she would be denied this right is horrifying.

Well, a naked man got into my shower while I was at the gym, no idea if they were trans as without clothes they are men.

Yes. When I was a teenager, I encountered a middle aged male in the toilet at a restaurant. He was wearing a wig and a dress, and pressing up against the sinks and moaning.

At the time, being pretty young and naive, I had no idea what was going on or why he was acting to strangely. I just left, as fast as I could, without attracting any attention.

Only realised many years later what had actually been going on.

I haven't had a lot of awful things happen to me, but I can still rationalise and empathise and fight for women's rights to have safe spaces and sports and awards and toilets and changing rooms and rape centres and brownie groups and all other kinds of groups to be free from men or people with male genitals

Yes.

I was at Rocky Horror Show, lots of people dressed for the part, and men dressed as women (long sequinned gowns & big hair etc) were using the women's loos. Which had the usual interminable queues. Thanks, guys.

At a club one night, I was in the ladies loos, and a man's head appeared above the partition. I have no idea what he was wearing, it wasn't relevant. He was a man looking at me on the toilet. 😡

Yes to entering a toilet, not changing room.

However, I've also worked on a phone helpline where trans women (under the Stonewall banner, they were not gender dysphoric but we're getting sexual thrills from dressing in women's clothes..and more) would call up and run through their fantasies. There were 3 frequent callers. It was years before the "trans movement became public and to me I saw them as troubled souls who I hoped were calling us rather than acting out their fantasies (which included dressing up in their teenage daughter's underwear for one of them (daughter saw the trans woman who fathered her every second weekend apparently and left some clothes at that house to avoid carrying them back and forwards).

I saw another trans woman sexually assault a woman when I was about 8. Both were part of my parent's friendship circle and neither knew I'd been in the room at the time.

So the idea that all people who call themselves trans are some sort of asexual angels is to me entirely naive. All these incidents happened well before trans people were anything most people knew about.

I actually think it's a form of patronising bigotry to dehumanise a group of people to the extent where you say that they're all of no threat. They're people. Some people behave badly. Why would a group of people who identify as trans be stripped of this albeit horrible aspect of humanity? And that's before you start looking at stats.

It isn't trans people that are the issue.

It is men.

In the early 90s I went to a feminist meeting in central London (Covent Garden if memory serves, Neal St or nearby) and we were joined by someone who obviously was not a natal woman. One of the women leading the group had a quiet word and the person left.
I resent any suggestion that women who want single sex spaces are ignorant and/or bigoted. I've been friends with, worked with, lived with, gone on holiday with transwomen, we've been in each other's lives for many years. It's still important to me to have access to single sex spaces, to be free to say that female people and male people are different and to be able to talk about those differences.

I’ve experienced it both in a local swimming pool - the boy was an older teenager and staff came in and asked him to use the family changing room instead (it’s a large, lockable room separate to both the male and female changing). I’ve also had it in my gym a Gym Group one with a 50 odd year old bloke who hadn’t even bothered to shave and would stand around playing on his phone totally naked in the women’s changing room. Staff offered him use of the disabled change but he declined and staff said there was nothing else they could do. I, along with 2 of my friends, simply cancelled our memberships and went elsewhere. Annoying as the one I use now isn’t open as late and is more expensive. Apparently he doesn’t go there any more but I won’t be going back as it could easily start up again.

Yes, in a swimming pool changing room. He (and I use pronouns advisedly in this post) was deliberately walking around naked, making no attempt to get dressed, sitting on benches with his legs apart watching us dressing and had a visible erection.

There were 4 women there and, completely unspoken, we waited for each other and left as a group. We clearly all perceived him as a threat so instinctively stuck together. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that we mentioned the incident to the staff and were told off for transphobia and that she had the right to use the facilities that match her identity. I haven’t been back.

Yes, a girls football team. A trans girl wanted to join and her friend told DN and rest of team they were transphobic if they didn’t let her. Most stopped using the changing room, going home to shower. Then the two girls from strict religious backgrounds (Muslim & Jewish) stopped coming. There was an increase in the severity of fouls/accidents.

The team disintegrated and is no longer - it had run for 8 years.

What, no man at all? You would be happy with any man in a female space?

What if he was the one that came to do your smear? Or was in the next bed in a female ward?

Yes - one joined a women's network I was in.

Has it ever occurred to you @Xrays, that your 'transphobic' (nice) MIL may know exactly what your daughter's friends are and that is why she says what she does?

Never. I have a friend who is obsessed with this topic and thinks there’s an invasion into female spaces. I think there are areas of Twitter that are fuelling an obsession with this.

When my son was in pre-school one of his boy classmates was fulling convinced he was a girl. The teacher would say, "Boys line up on the left and girls on the right" and he would line up with girls. Every time. No matter the situation. He would say "I am a girl!"

The teachers and parents (one a physician at a Children's hospital) agreed the teachers would just let him do what he wants without questioning him or calling attention to it. My son considered him a girl as did the other children and it was a non-issue in the classroom. I have no idea what happened to him after pre-school.

I knew someone was going to pick up on this and say this.

She literally doesn’t have a clue. Really. Dd has another - more distant friend- who is also trans and that came out in conversation and ex MIL was literally shocked to the core. She genuinely thinks the two closest friends are women. Both have had hormones since teenage years. To be fair I didn’t even have a clue until dd told me and I’m usually quite good at guessing these things.

No, but felt super cautious when out recently trying on clothes, didn’t like the feeling at all, I normally like clothes shopping.

a good friend’s husbands son (who I have met a couple of times) recently left his wife and wants to fully trans to becoming a woman. The family are shocked but supportive.