@Wobblyhousehunt
Admiral Caine …. Obviously men and women can be survivors of invest and rape. Should transwomen have to go to groups for male victims of incest and rape? I also believe that trans women have the highest rate of sexual assault/ violence against them out of any group.
I sometimes think people post things like this so they can have a moan, making regular people think trans women are monsters. Is this the whole story OP or are you gasslighting?
I urge every kind woman in the fence about this stuff to know that transwomen just want to be safe. They don’t want to refer to you by your body parts or any such nonsense. They have difficult hard lives please be kind. And always remember it could be your son/ daughter/ brother/ niece/ dad who comes out as trans next.
Transwomen do not have the highest rates. Transmen and lesbians do (because they are females who anger misogynist men, so they have the biological vulnerability of their sex, coupled with the social vulnerability of transgressing gender norms), and the data conflates the groups.
99% of rapists are male. 88% of victims are female, and the majority of the 12% remaining males are young boys.
If you think about it, women are so vulnerable to rape because we lack the physical strength to defend ourselves, where most men are concerned. That's just the fact - we all know this, and it's why we are so cautious in a way men aren't. I'm bemused by the perpetual insistence that something we know to be untrue, if we pause and consider, is so constantly repeated. There is no data support for transwomen's vulnerability to sexual violence once you actually look into the stats.
Transwomen are, in fact, one of the safest demographics in the country. There has never been a transwoman murdered in Scotland, and in the worst years, transwomen have around half the standard murder victimisation risk of anyone else (currently, that rate is zero - no transwomen have been killed in the last year or two, whereas women have averaged around 3 a week in domestic violence killings alone). In fact statistically, there have been more cases of transwomen murdering people than being murdered (and those stats are really low, too, I hasten to add - transwomen are more likely to kill than women are, but no more likely to do so than anyone else male).
The narrative that trans people are subjected to terrifying rates of violence and murder - in this country, at least - is a pretty abusive one. It's going to create anxiety and fear and paranoia in a group of people whose mental health levels are notably poor, and it's divorced from statistical reality. Transwomen are at risk when they're sex workers in South America, mainly. But again, not any more so than any other South American sex worker - the work, and not the identity, is the commonality of risk. All sex workers tend to suffer horrendous levels of violence (though the reality is also that trans people face discrimination in employment terms - there is good evidence for that - so potentially are more likely to fall into sex work on that basis. That aspect I would agree is potentially linked).
There is a risk to women from allowing any group of male people, however they identify, to access women's spaces. We know that there are 13500 or so men in jail for sex offences at any given time, 120-130 or so women (which includes a few transwomen with Gender Recognition Certificates) and well over 80 transwomen. Given the relative populations are 33 million, 33 million, and 100,000-200,000 it additionally supports the existing research data finding that transwomen pose the exact same risk to women as anyone else male. And why wouldn't they? Saying some words about a belief in your own mind doesn't magically alter biological reality. Most males pose no risk to anyone, but almost all those posing a risk are male. Eliminate males from shared public spaces where women are naked, sleeping or otherwise vulnerable, and you eliminate almost all risk. And transwomen are the same risk as anyone else male.
Of course transwomen want to be safe. But so do women, and having transwomen in women's spaces very provably reduces our safety. Having any male people in our spaces does that. We need third spaces, so trans people, non-binary people, opposite-sex carers and parents of opposite sex kids also have accessible provision.
And it's just not true to say language is not under attack. It is clearly, very clearly, an utter lie to claim otherwise. A friend is a midwife and her dissertation has to have 'birthing people' all the way through. Midwives are not allowed to refer to 'mothers' now. It's not inclusive, they are told. Female erasure, to include male people, is the new notion of what is inclusive.
It's unacceptable. How can we defend women's rights, if we aren't even able to use the language to do so?
I'd suggest that any women on the fence might like to read Trans. It's by a senior editor of the Economist, who breaks the whole thing down precisely, cogently and fairly.
Of course trans people deserve the protections of the Equality Act, and to be free from prejudice, discrimination and abuse. It's wrong for anyone to suffer detriment because of their gender expression. That doesn't mean that women must meekly surrender our own protections, rights, provision and even language about who we are, just because some of those within a small group of male people demand it, though. We suffer detriment not from gender expression alone, but from our biologically sexed bodies. Why should those rights and those protections be commandeered by male people, just because they say so? And why are people so relaxed about the horrific abuse meted out to any women who try to point this out?
You talk about kindness. What about kindness to women who have been raped, and want single sex counselling, or intimate examinations? What about kindness to girls getting changed communally, who don't want to find a male penis in their spaces? What about kindness to women in prison, being housed with transwomen convicted of rape? Why is it women's job to be kind to male people seen as vulnerable, and not themselves? Why is it kind to throw your most vulnerable sisters under a bus?
My kindness means I protect women who need single sex provision. It does not extend to insisting that male rapists belong in women's prisons on their say-so, and those who insist that that demand is 'kind' take my breath away.