I haven’t seen the interview, and I really don’t like India W (can’t spell her surname!). But I think India is a potential ally to the gender critical amongst us and I think finding the common ground would be helpful here. India is someone who has spoken about her experience of true gender dysphoria and the difficulties that it has brought her. She has undergone full gender reassignment surgery, which is fairly rare amongst people who identify as trans these days. And she’s not a ‘lesbian’.
I still think India has some abhorrent misogynistic views (that leg shaving incident on Woman’s Hour for instance), but then let’s be honest, so do a lot of natal women as well. It’s a product of growing up and living in an inherently misogynistic society.
India has spoken about how the current direction of transactivism is making life harder for people like her, and I completely agree. The trans people I know in real life are much more like her, they pass (mostly trans men and I think passing seems to be more common amongst trans men?) and just want to live their normal lives in their chosen gender without incident. They bear no resemblance to the TRAs I see interacting online. I don’t think it helps to alienate people like this.
And while I definitely have a problem sharing sex segregated spaces with people who have a penis, I don’t have a problem sharing those spaces with trans women like India (actually, if I ever found myself sharing a prison cell with her I suspect it would drive me to distraction but that’s because I don’t like her as a person, not because she is trans).
I do appreciate that refuges are a different situation, because traumatised women could easily ‘read’ a trans woman as male and therefore be triggered and feel unsafe. So I agree with Posie when she said get your own refuges. But maybe we can say this in a more constructive way.