@Lovingbenidorm I’d love to join in but I haven’t a fucking clue what’s going on 🧐
I agree it’s confusing if you’re not familiar with any of the arguments.
Ian Huntley apparently says he’s a woman and wants to be transferred to a women’s prison. According to transactivists (“TRAs”) including lobby groups such as Stonewall, any male person who “identifies as a woman” actually IS a woman, so (if the story is true) Ian Huntley should be allowed to do this.
Verbeena says this is an extreme position, which I agree with.
But Verbeena also thinks that some “transwomen” are in fact women and should be accepted as women and allowed to access ALL women only spaces/facilities/services. She thinks that women who say the rule should simply be no males at all in female spaces are as extreme as the TRAs who say any male who says he identifies as a woman is one.
That’s where we disagree.
Some of us are trying to find out from Verbeena exactly what the criteria are for saying that someone born male is actually a woman, and how we as a society can police/enforce that.
She has said Ian Huntley is definitely not a woman and no amount of surgery or hormones or women’s clothing could change that. Which I wholeheartedly agree with. But she hasn’t said, and continues to choose not to say, what does make a male person an actual, literal woman.
Or how women are supposed to know the difference, when put on the spot, between a “real transwoman” and someone like Ian Huntley who just hasn’t got caught yet and thus doesn’t have his notoriety.
Seeing that the vast majority of “transwomen” don’t pass, ie are very clearly male, and keep their male genitalia, it’s a tricky one for women in changing rooms, refuges etc.
A very small number of ”transwomen” have a GRC (Gender Recognition Certificate) which makes them legally members of the opposite sex to the one they were born, the one they actually are. So you could argue that you keep the existing rules around obtaining a GRC instead of going for full self ID like the trans lobby groups want.
But it is considered transphobic and a breach of someone’s privacy to ask to see a GRC. So that leaves women no better off at all in terms of knowing who the “real transwomen” are, and who the “not real” ones are.
Some male people like Paris Green, a sadistic murderer, are pursuing “sex change” surgery while incarcerated, at the taxpayer’s expense. Whether that means he will actually have his penis removed or not is unclear, but even if he does, it wouldn’t make him a woman in my eyes, nor should he ever be in a women’s prison. When he was in one (yes, he actually was) he sexually harassed female inmates. Penis or no penis, he’s a man; a sadistic, violent man that women need to be protected from and given privacy from.
Which is why some of us say we need to be clear that female spaces should be reserved for female people only. Actually, literally, biologically female people.
Hope that makes it clearer.