@Whatiswrongwithmyknee
I have spent much of my adult life surrounded by trans, non binary, and gender diverse people as a bisexual woman who for a time identified as a lesbian. Not once have I been pressured or coerced in to sex by them.
So what? Just because something has not happened to you, does not mean it's not happened to anyone else. I've never been sex trafficked but that does not mean I'm unable to believe that it happens or don't care about those it happens to. Neither does it make me think that all males are sex traffickers.
I refuse to give in to fear and hatred. Transwomen are welcome in my space.
I think you must be posting on the wrong thread. No-one here is saying trans-women are not welcome in their space. Unless you mean public female-only spaces? In which case, so what? In a democracy we don't let one person speak for everyone.
This.
Of course most transwomen aren't agressive, scary or predatory (and Not All Men Are Like That, either). Nobody said they were. Does that make it hateful to point out that some are, and that women have a right to be heard on the subject?
Transwomen have male rates of sexual predation and violence, and not female. To understand how significant that is, you need to recognise that statistically, 99% of serious sexual offending is committed by men, and 88% of the victims are women. In excess of 13500 men are jailed at any one time for sex offending from 33 million men in the UK population, versus just 120-130 women from 33 million. And more than 80 transwomen, from a population of just 100,000 and 200,000 are in jail for sex offences. That means transwomen are as massively more likely to harm women as anyone else male - a fact statistical data from other countries also supports.
Are you aware that a significant majority of sexual assaults in changing rooms happen in mixed sex ones, despite far fewer changing rooms being mixed sex? It doesn't matter how someone identifies; someone with a penis poses thousands of times the risk to someone with a vagina than another person with a vagina. Gender identity is completely irrelevant to that risk level.
Use whatever language you want: some transwomen are bullying and gaslighting some lesbians into sexual contact, and they have social pressures - the threat of being able to label anyone saying no as transphobic, within their social circles - as a lever. There have been workshops entitled 'Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling' - that cotton ceiling being lesbian underwear. (This article on it is written by a thoroughly decent, and thoroughly appalled, transwoman.) Stonewall's response to this story is that any women dismissing a whole group of people for reasons such as race or trans status need to consider their prejudices. How can you possibly claim that that kind of toxic, male-entitled pressure has no effect?
Stonewall was founded to defend the rights of those dismissing a whole class of people from their sexual lives: the opposite sex. Now they are saying that's akin to racism. And when gay people recognise that Stonewall now deems literal homosexuality bigoted, and start a new charity to defend that right, they're called hateful for that, too. It's beyond belief.
More than 90% of transwomen have no surgery nor hormones, nothing. They're women because they say so. And lesbians are sent on blind dates, unwarned, by the Guardian, for example. Because anyone who thinks that's wrong is a hateful bigot. And a lesbian would be very, very foolish to complain about being expected to play along, because peers (such as the poster, perhaps) would clearly be very swift to ostracise her if she did. How is that not homophobic? Telling gay women to consider male sexual partners?
Again, of course most transwomen are perfectly nice, decent people. They're just human beings, and most people, thank God, are. But by the same token, they are male human beings, with statistically male rates of violence and entitlement issues. We say Me Too and Believe Women unless trans is in the frame - at which point we explicitly reverse the ordering, so that any woman complaining is abusive and/or lying. Women are being silenced and shamed out of saying, no, we shouldn't remove all our usual understanding around the dynamics between the sexes if someone asserts a gender identity at odds with their body. Male bodies aren't suddenly no more risk than female based on gender identity - why would they be? That's magical thinking. Yet women naming a statistically evidenced reality are shamed for hatred and fear. Wanting single sex spaces isn't hateful. Lesbianism isn't hateful. And while hate is certainly in the frame when women assert male predation and a ton of people instantly lose their shit, that hatred's not coming from the women telling their stories.
You don't have to have been abused as a child to believe survivors of child abuse. You don't have to have been raped to believe other women are. You just have to believe women are human, and have rights, and one of those rights is to secure single sex spaces because they are proven to be so very much safer for us, as a group, and that male predation and abuse of women matters, whatever gender the person doing it asserts.
And lesbians - female homosexuals - should have the right to spaces, groups and dating opportunities limited to one another. To claim otherwise is homophobic.
We don't exclude all men from single sex spaces and provision because we think all men are evil predators. We do it because almost all evil predators are men. If transwomen pose the same statistical threat to women as anyone else with a male body, why is it hateful to want the same safeguards applied? Why do some women want to put other women at avoidable increased risk of harm, just to please a specific group of males? How is putting male women's wishes ahead of female women's safety not fundamentally sexist?