The whole process of the GRC was a safeguarding/gatekeeping process and, as it was deemed that the numbers likely to have one were exceedingly small (around 5000, which in fact is around the number given) it was deemed an OK thing to do but those exemptions were put in place just for extra protections and giving options to refuse entry if the women involved in any service may not use it if a transexual woman was present. It allowed the decision to be made by women.
The recipients of GRCs were only ever supposed to be those transexuals who had received appropriate therapy and a gender diagnosis, and who, with interview, were deemed safe to be allowed to pass themselves off as women. It was PRECISELY put in place because they knew there were other men, cross dressing fetishists, who were definately not safe to be allowed access, and as a result their applications would be refused.
The whole GRC was set up ONLY because at the time gay marriage was not allowed, and so, for a man and a female presenting man to be allowed to marry, the legal fiction that one had changed sex was created.
That is no longer true. we have same sex civil partnerships and same sex marriage. The legal fiction of people changing sex has no place in the modern world.
People should not be descriminated against for housing/employment/harassment but we shouldnt have any law that admits it is a lie. And sex is important - for the many reasons outlined in this thread - safety, and dignity, but for health reason, for fair representation, for monitoring perposes, and to prevent discrimination over things which have a sex basis, such as maternity leave/redundancies, seeing how policy is affecting half the population, crime statistics.
At the moment things are madness. Anything to do with the word woman is being erased. Or the word Mother. Or Breast feeding. Crimes committed by males are being marked down as being committed by women - and when sexual crime is so low amongst women it doesnt take that many cases to really have an impact. And when it is shown that 'women' are just as much as risk as men, well, we wont need those single sex spaces after all
when people complain about a lack of representation of women in CEO roles, and you get men like Phillip Bunce winning awards for women, well, it only takes a few of those executigve bankers to pull out the stockings and suddenly its OK - the number of women in positions of power are fine. And when they can show that they are not ousting the women who went on maternity leave, because they have a number of non binary and female identifying staff of the same age who HAVENT been sacked, well it cant be sex discrimination can it?
and the gold silver and bronze of any womens sport is going to mediocre men. And the female college scholarships in the USA are heading their way.
Its so not about toilets and changing rooms, its only made that way to try to make women look ridiculous because 'they only want to pee'