At risk of being a bit me me me ( on a subject all about MY rights and the rights of all females no less!) I was thinking in hindsight I likely would have been fine with a tg in the girls toilets as a teen.
I was always the girl who wanted to include any outsider. I was always happy to hang out with my gay male friends doing make up or swapping clothes and so on (same for lesbian friends too, but that’s not relevant to males in female spaces). I always loved that the velvet underground sang so evocatively about the transwomen and transvestites (as they termed themselves then- Lou was one so he gets to use the term and I’ll respect his experience of that when referring to the people he was writing about). I always thought Nicky Wire in a skirt on stage was awesome.
As a teen my impulse would to have been thrilled to include trans girls in girlhood, and I would have assumed that extended to all areas of single sex spaces.
But I was also a survivor of repeated csa. And I had numerous problems from my female biology that made me deeply uncomfortable in my own skin at that age, as I grew up knowing women were shamed for women’s bodies.
As a teenager I wouldn’t have been able to tie together that male bodied people in female spaces would make me feel more unsafe and degrade my privacy and dignity even more than it had been. I would have been the first to think that men who want to assault me will follow me in anyways, self id won’t make any difference. As a teen I wouldn’t have been able to see the link with further eroding my safety by making girl = the boys who say they are too.
The reality is I would have very quickly and very damagingly woken up to this when faced with the boys who were stalking me sharing toilets with me, or being unable to opt out of pe because of extremely heavy flooding (as in I had several bts as a teen because of this, even after meds etc) by saying it was women’s troubles-because that would be exclusionary to tgs. I would have had no concept that it wasn’t bigoted to say no thanks to a tm male vagina or to a tg female penis (because despite my abuse I’m still stuck being straight). I wouldn’t have been able to recognise my boundaries were further being violated and eroded because I had such a poor concept of them in the first place.
I would have been that girl fawning around your sd saying she’s fabulous. Yet I would have been one of the most severely at risk by her being included in female spaces/language.
This is precisely why we have safe guarding rules. Children are not capable of deciding what’s safe for them and what’s not. I also thought the adult male boyfriend who I was consenting to have sex with loved me, and that this wasn’t abusive because I didn’t experience it as the same csa I grew up with. But in hindsight I was a child well under the age of consent and he was an adult a few years over it. Just because I thought it was normal and good and I was ok with it didn’t mean that was the case, it just took me a lot longer to recognise that due to the trauma I grew up with.
That’s why adults need to put safeguarding first. That’s why any claim of ‘the girls are all totally good with it’ is bs. Children are not capable of saying what’s safe for them and what’s not. Adults need to do that and adults must err on the side of caution always, because in hindsight tgs in female spaces would have further traumatised me in a way I wouldn’t have been able to indentify at those ages. The same way my being vulnerable to further grooming and abuse by men was a result of my csa, my being ok with tgs in girls spaces would have been a result of how traumatised I was then. It certainly isn’t something that points towards how ok these girls are with this by a long shot.